When photographer David Bailey and his art critic friend each decided to take a photograph of the same view in Cornwall, there’s no surprise whose turned out the best.
“I achieve this without being able to explain why,” says Bailey, before acknowledging that his mind must work in a way that makes him see things differently from other people.
Bailey is one of 23 contributors to the book Creative, Successful, Dyslexic by Stoke Newington author Margaret Rooke, in which well known figures from the arts, sport and business worlds describe their experiences of dyslexia.
Dyslexic celebrities such as Richard Branson, Eddie Izzard and Darcey Bussell reveal the difficulties they faced in childhood, and how, ultimately, they think dyslexia actually helped them reach the top of their professions.
For Bailey, who only became aware of the word ‘dyslexia’ when he was 30, curiosity and spark, and not the ability to spell, are the main factors for a successful life. He talks about his “uncommon sense” and how making mistakes can be the basis for a lot of art.
Margaret Rooke had the idea for the book after her own daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia, aged 13.
“It was just such a shock to us, and it took a long time for it to sink in,” Rooke says. “But I really did want her to know that she could still do what she wanted in life. I didn’t want this to be something that weighed heavily on her shoulders.”
Rooke quotes the story of a friend whose son was diagnosed with dyslexia. When the friend spotted an article about how Richard Branson was dyslexic, she cut it out and stuck it to the son’s bed, and it turned out to be a turning point for the son.
“I thought it’d be great to get a whole book together with lots of different examples,” Rooke says.
With the help of charity Dyslexia Action, who put forward some of their ambassadors, Rooke was able to put the book together. One thing common to all of the stories is the importance of a positive outlook.
“When we found out that my daughter was dyslexic I didn’t have a positive response,” Rooke admits.
“But the attitude from the experts in the book and a lot of the people I interviewed was to be positive. The attributes that come with dyslexia might not help with school qualifications but they can still help your child in the world of work.”
Rooke recognises that teachers do an “incredible job” and that schools are much more “on it” when it comes to dyslexia these days. But when the educational establishment places attainment and results above everything else, including creativity, how can those who learn in different ways thrive?
“I’ve found just in the playground there’s a lot of competitiveness and kids always know who is top of the class,” says Rooke. “Even if we’re not in an age where teachers call out the results, kids do know and I would say step away from all of that because there are other ways to shine.”
Poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who holds 17 honorary doctorate degrees yet still finds the word ‘knot’ difficult to spell, ends the collection with a powerful call to arms.
“If someone can’t understand dyslexia it’s their problem, not yours,” he tells the reader directly. “In the same way, if someone oppresses me because of my race I don’t sit
down and think ‘How can I become white?’
“It’s not my problem, it’s theirs and they have to come to terms with it. So if you’re dyslexic, don’t be heavy on yourself.”
Creative, Successful, Dyslexic: 23 High Achievers Share Their Stories is published by Jessica Kingsley. RRP: £16.99. ISBN: 9781849056533
Butterfly Fish, the debut novel of East London writer Irenosen Okojie, has been a labour of love. The novel follows Joy who, after the death of her mother, inherits a diary and a unique brass head. It is a novel that sees every family history as a puzzle.
Written over the course of six years, it began as a short story and developed into what Okojie sees as an epic novel.
The transition from short story to novel was strange for Okojie. “I love writing short stories because there’s an ending to them,” she says. “You can realise an idea and move on. I feel my writing got better this way. When I was writing the novel, I could see that growth. It was a weird leap. Writing a novel is like being left at sea on a little boat and being left to your own devices.”
Butterfly Fish is a story about love, loss and inheritance that departs from traditional African narratives – something Okojie’s friends found disconcerting at first.
“People have particular perceptions,” says Okojie. “There is the idea of the African story – about families going through strife, struggling, travelling around. There are middle-class Africans. That’s my background, my story. This is an epic story that transcends race and class. It’s an African story, yes – but it’s also an English one too.”
Okojie’s influences are not limited to English and African culture. The novel’s strength is its ability to make the abstract concrete. She sees Ben Okri, Gabriel Garcia Marquez as influences too.
These influences are evident when one of the characters imagines themselves being “cut into eight slices [and] served on a different platter” for each of his wives to swallow. Memories literally leak through the ceilings and intrude on the characters’ daily lives.
Butterfly Fish is a work of contrasts: abstract and concrete; love and loss; African and English; epic and intimate. It is a novel that Okojie hopes everybody will be able to relate to, regardless of where they come from.
Butterfly Fish is published by
Jacaranda Books. RRP: £12.99 (hardback)
ISBN: 9781909762060
Inventions aren’t born fully fledged, nor are they the work of a lone genius. In his latest foray into the past, Hackney-based historian and former journalist Gavin Weightman explores the nuances and collaboration that lead inevitably to the all-important ‘eureka!’ moment in the story of invention.
From his own school days as an amateur radio maker, Weightman has always been fascinated by how the impossible becomes possible. It is this fascination that is woven throughout Eureka: How Invention Happens, working backwards from the final product to the initial stages of exploration, the first breakthrough and the moment when it all becomes possible. “My book isn’t prescriptive,” he says. “It doesn’t tell you how to be an inventor, but rather takes a closer look at the pre-histories of inventions that involve all sorts of people.”
Social histories have dominated the genre of late. Weightman’s book may sound industrially focused, yet one of its underlying threads is the impact, even as an afterthought, of great inventions on our society. It’s as much a book about people as it is about products; not just those who dreamed up the things we take for granted today, but those who use them.
“Obviously inventions influence the human condition to some degree,” says Weightman. “Just look at social media as a result of a combination of the personal computer and the mobile phone, for example – but are we better or worse off because of them? Progress improves people’s lives and makes them easier, but I don’t think it fundamentally alters the balance of good and evil.”
This is a question that crops up more and more as we live in an increasingly digital world. There’s no doubt that, in this book, these inventions are thought of as a good thing. Weightman doesn’t subscribe to the idea that necessity is the mother of invention, instead presenting an entertaining and compelling snapshot of everyday innovators who went beyond the bounds of possibility.
“In researching my book, one of the most significant things I discovered is that those who have produced something practical have been largely outside the mainstream of science. It’s not that we don’t need scientists and engineers, it’s just that they don’t seem to think about who might need, or want, the item in question.”
Weightman’s book emphasises the importance of the amateur in the creation of some of the most ubiquitous technologies that surround us today – the aeroplane, the television, the bar code, the personal computer and the mobile phone. Their very status as unknowns meant they had very little to lose, were able to experiment and test without the pressure of commitment to existing techniques and technologies. By focusing on the everyman behind the eureka moment, Weightman is redefining a historical narrative, taking an original approach to the ingenuity of invention that’s at once scientifically revealing and socially intriguing.
It’s often a process of elimination, a hobby that turns into something far more serious as the boundaries are pushed. “There’s definitely an element of chance, of stumbling across things when it comes to invention,” says Weightman. “While some of the people I explore in my book, like the Wright brothers, had an idea of who might be interested in their creation, they usually hadn’t thought too far ahead, and just didn’t know how it would go.”
This pattern emerges throughout this narrative, as time and again industry leaders declared the telephone unlikely to take off in Britain, or dismissed the television as a load of rubbish.
Often, existing technology is what halts progress and creates resistance. Eureka: How Invention Happens explores how innovators have circumvented what seemed like insurmountable obstacles in their pursuit of the limits of reality. So when it comes to the creation of what still seems unimaginable to us today, like the flying car, what’s stopping us?
“Sometimes it’s the failure of imagination, and sometimes it’s the resistance of the very industry who you’d think would produce it. Amateurs will give it a go first, before bigger industry moves in; I believe the working robot will be created by someone totally unexpected. Industries should go on perfecting their products, and leave the inventing to amateurs and outsiders.”
Eureka: How Invention Happens
is published by Yale University Press.
ISBN: 9780300192087 RRP: £20.
Iain Sinclair is no stranger to vast, impossible circuits. At the turn of the century, he conducted a series of walks along the M25 that amounted to its entire length, and drew from the experience an unprecedented document of poetic psychogeographical prose. It was a celebration of pilgrimage, a postmodernist jaunt through time and territory – to nowhere. Now, 15 years on, he’s turned his attention to the tracks of the ‘Ginger Line’ in London Overground.
The Hackney-based writer took inspiration for the project from a group of eccentric students he came across at New Cross Gate, on one of his regular suburban treks. He was headed, like Chaucer’s convoy, in the direction of Canterbury. The friends – “kids from Goldsmiths in fancy dress”, he assumes – had taken to gathering at random locations on the line to party at a moment’s notice.
In conversation with this “boho rabble”, garbed in gypsy skirts and goat masks, Sinclair finds his subject. “When they spilled out into Shoreditch,” he writes, “I realised that I had blundered once again into a version of London about which I knew nothing. And I would have to find some way to investigate. As he passed my window, the goat held up a finger to his lips. A warning I was foolish enough to ignore.”
His investigation takes the form of a day’s tramp around the railway: 35 miles and 33 stops in the company of filmmaker and close friend Andrew Kötting, whose presence is rich with a complex comic energy akin to his unique brand of documentary. Starting at dawn in Haggerston, the pair’s circumnavigation cuts through Wapping, Peckham Rye, Clapham Junction, Imperial Wharf, West Brompton and so on, before arriving back in the dead of night to Hackney.
Along the way, Sinclair interrogates the lay of the land and excavates meaning from forgotten and never-before-told narratives, inspecting the city’s detritus with wry humour and irresistible poetry. His grumbling observations of how the Overground has altered London are barbed and brilliant: “The railway smoothes history into heritage, neutralising the venom. Every Halt absorbs the last, until the necklace achieves a uniform, dull sheen. Faked pearls on a ginger string.”
Beyond the signature politics of development, regeneration and gentrification – climaxing in a fluke meeting with Boris Johnson “in full cry… barking like a seal” at Old Street Roundabout – the journey is an act of cultural archaeology. Sinclair dedicates swathes of razor-sharp prose to the likes of J.G. Ballard, W.G. Sebald and Leon Kossoff, riffing on Chelsea Harbour, manipulated histories and the railway as muse, respectively.
The most impressive of these diversions is given to Angela Carter, whom the author met on numerous occasions prior to her death in 1992. Sinclair’s moving trudge through Clapham inspires an overwhelming urge to read Wise Children and Nights at the Circus. In the same vein, his time in Hampstead impels a trip to the brief London residence of Sigmund Freud, who is described as a fabled force akin to Sherlock Holmes.
Of the house, which is now a ghostly and meticulously-preserved museum, the traveller writes: “Although it existed, and glowed a fiery red in our evening reverie, this blue-plaque address – 20 Maresfield Gardens – was as mythical in the psychogeography of London as the rooms associated with Sherlock Holmes at 22b Baker Street.”
For anyone unfamiliar with Sinclair’s work, London Overground is an ideal place at which to start. It’s shorter and somewhat lighter than previous publications, but is still crammed with nourishment. It’s another fine addition to the literature of our city.
London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line is published by Hamish Hamilton ISBN: 978-0241146958. RRP: £16.99
There’s a buzz around Korean food in London today. Although the hub of Korean life is still in New Malden, a long way to the south west, we can spare ourselves the somewhat arduous journey, and explore local sources of this delicious food, influenced in some ways by China and Japan, but with a joyful identity of its own. Oriental stores stock the basic ingredients, and a visit to Yu Xiao in Kingsland Road, or the Longdan supermarket in Hackney will yield freshly made kimchi, some take-away items, and many of the strange and wonderful fish and plants that you need in order to try Korean food at home.
But since the cuisine depends so much on an assortment of different dishes that take quite a time to put together, it is a good idea to eat out to experience the delights of the full range. Hackney has a small, busy and friendly place in Shoreditch, On the Bab, and up the road in Finsbury Park is the legendary Dotori, a crowded little Japanese-Korean restaurant with a huge following, a contrast to the wide open spaces of Bibigo at the Angel, while Hurwundeki on Cambridge Heath Road offers a haircut as well.
Potted history
In spite of a long history of friendly and unfriendly contact with some of its neighbours (and the recent, unhappy division of the country), Korea has a strong sense of its individuality, with history, geography and various religious influences all shaping a vibrant and varied gastronomy.
You can see this all summed up in the pottery: not the (boring) elitist collectors’ pieces of greeny grey celadon or ghostly white porcelain or even the less posh buncheong stone-ware, but in the glorious range of everyday black-brown glazed onggi storage jars. They contain the country’s past and maybe its future – literally, for within these beautifully crafted forms lurk the essential elements of Korean cuisine. The jars and pots come in all sizes and various shapes, and until a few decades ago every household, in what was then a mainly rural society, would have an array of them clustered outside on terraces or rooftops. They held grains, especially rice, and water, wine, oil, vinegar and the defining condiments that enhance Korean food: soy sauce, brown soybean paste (denjang), fermented red chilli paste (gochu jang), and above all different kinds of kimchi: (salted and fermented vegetables with various flavourings, especially garlic and chilli). The beauty of these pastes is in their sweet, rich, dense flavour, not the amount of chilli in them. Never forget that chillies are enjoyed for flavour and not the macho impact of heat.
Kimchi
Kimchi evolved because things did not grow during the harsh winters, so preserving vegetables and fish was an essential domestic skill. This unique process, salting and fermenting, produces over 200 different kinds of kimchi, free of the harsh acidity of most European pickles. Every family had its own version. The fermentation process did not just make the stuff keep, it actually produced added nutrients, vitamins and minerals that make Korean food some of the healthiest on the planet. Kimchi has a clean, fresh-tasting zing and crunchiness. Different kinds can be served as side dishes, or it can be added to soups and stews.
The craftsmen who made the kimchi containers were socially inferior, their skills taken for granted, but every Korean family owned a range of their pots that survived generations of use, and the sensitivity and talent that went into their manufacture can perhaps now be seen in the cutting edge skills of modern Korean technology in other fields. The pots are now collected and treasured in museums, but also used for their original purposes. The Korean soul and genius is in these unique artefacts, the pots and what they contain, and eating the food is to enter into a world of innovation and tradition, of past history and a new future.
Korean meals
Another magic ingredient is Korean sesame oil. It works best as a condiment, sprinkled over a finished dish just before serving, or dribbled onto a salad, along with a few drops of Vietnamese fish sauce, transforming a banal mixture of lettuce, avocado and spring onions into an exotic treat. I don’t know what they do to make it so delicious, but there is no substitute. Seaweed gives flavour and texture, from slithery to crisp, and a big blast of umami. And tofu adds extra goodness.
A Korean meal might consist of rice, soup, stews, dumplings, pancakes and a lot of differently flavoured side dishes, something to eat out. But you can give your home cooking a Korean tinge by using the two densely flavoured pastes in fish and meat dishes, in soups and stews, and mixed with soy sauce, sugar and fish sauce to make dipping sauces and relishes.
Here are a few Korean-inspired recipes to try out at home:
Bibimbap
The endearingly named bibimbab or pibim bap has become an iconic Korean speciality. It began as a peasant dish, when a frugal bowl of rice had to be eked out with any raw or cooked vegetables and herbs that could be got hold of for free. Now it has become restaurant performance art, with the cooked rice brought to table in an almost red-hot iron bowl (together with the necessary health warning) sizzling and hissing as the other ingredients are stirred in, while the rice sticks to the bottom, forming a delicious crust. Ingredients can be luxurious (thin slices of beef, seafood) or simply sautéed vegetables, chopped kimchi, mushrooms, a sprinkling of dried seaweed, sometimes topped with a raw or fried egg, and of course the red chilli paste. It gets its name from bab or bap, a word meaning a dish of cooked rice. And that is exactly what this is: a recipe to do at home, using cooked rice and plenty of fresh and preserved stuff to give contrasting texture and flavour.
1 bowl of cooked rice per person
An assortment of things such as: sautéed shitake mushrooms, thinly sliced rump steak, an egg, raw or fried, thinly sliced crisp lettuce, Korean radish kimchi, raw bean sprouts, rinsed and dried, matchstick courgettes, raw or stir fried, chopped herbs (basil, coriander, mint).
Marinated Chicken
Chicken breasts and thighs
cut into pieces
Marinade: finely chopped ginger, garlic, spring onion, fresh green chilli,
soy sauce, sesame oil, a teaspoon of red chilli paste, a pinch of sugar,
all mixed together.
Rub the marinade into the chicken pieces and leave for an hour. Then put everything in a shallow pan with a little water and cook slowly until done, about 45 minutes, when the liquid should have evaporated. Taste for seasoning and add more chilli paste if you think it needs it. Serve sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds and a few drops of sesame oil and some rice and kimchi on the side.
Seaweed and Shellfish Soup
This is traditionally made with miyeok seaweed and oysters, and given as a restorative to women who have just given birth, three times a day for seven weeks! You do not have to suffer though to enjoy a version of this, and the iron, calcium and vitamins in the seaweed will do you lots of good. There is a legend that the Samsin Grandmother, a folk goddess, caused the blue marks on the buttocks of Korean babies by hastening them into this world with a good slap, and so is offered this nourishing brew in gratitude.
1 cup of dried miyeok (wakame) seaweed, soaked in cold water for half an hour
½ kilo each of mussels, clams, uncooked jumbo prawns
2 cloves of garlic roughly chopped
Vietnamese fish sauce
Sesame oil
Cook the shellfish separately, covered, with the garlic and strain off the liquid, filtering it through muslin to keep out any sand or shell. Take the flesh out of the shells and put to one side. Tear the soaked seaweed into pieces and cook in water until soft and a nice dark green. Then add the shellfish, their juices, and season with sesame oil and fish sauce. Serve hot.
The Old Man of Artimino by Giovanna Garzoni, 1650. Courtesy of Galleria Palatina, Florence
If it wasn’t so inconvenient to bring a chunky hardback art book on an Easyjet flight, I’d suggest Gillian Riley’s Food in Art: From Prehistory to the Renaissance as a ‘top holiday read of 2015’.
A museum gift-shop buy with an academic styling, it doesn’t look or feel the part.
But what better than to read up on the origins of pesto while lazing on the Italian coasts, or peek inside the tomb of the wealthy ancient Egyptian scribe Nebamun (the real thing is on show at the British Museum), from the banks of the Nile?
Authoritative as it ought to be – Riley is a leading food writer and historian – this is a book about the mystery as much as the certainties of art’s centuries-old relationship with food.
With her guidance we discover what’s missing from our collective knowledge and the question marks over the meaning of the preparation, preservation and consumption of food in an array of artworks.
Few would be better placed than Riley to fill in the gaps using her expansive imagination.
Riley answers questions I never knew I had about the great larder of art history; such as why the men of ancient Mesopotamia drank their beer with a straw, or why the Renaissance botanist Ulisse Aldrovandi commissioned a portrait of his pet monkey clutching an artichoke.
And there are lessons aplenty to be learned, starting with the wisdom of Paleolithic cave painters; hunters for whom meat was never blindly taken for granted, but the subject of awe and intricate study in a time when “animals ruled the earth, and man was a puny creature”.
The Emperor Rudolph II, c.1590, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Courtesy of Skoklosters Slott, Stockholm
Riley’s sixth book examines the countless layers of symbolism in the many meals of art history, as depicted in all forms from ancient wall paintings, fine art, mosaics, and frescoes to illuminated manuscripts and stained glass.
For those familiar with the author’s food columns in the Hackney Citizen, documenting intrepid culinary adventures in her Stoke Newington kitchen, expect the same hunger-inducing, poetic prose, and even more to learn here.
It’s a handy volume for those of us who need a narrow lens with which to recall forgotten history lessons, organised into snippets that can be dipped in and out of with ease.
Perhaps unwittingly, Riley’s descriptions of the micro-breweries of Mesopotamia offer much-needed perspective on contemporary foodie culture, reminding us that making your own beer is neither a laughable hipster fad nor a unique cultural advancement of our generation – it’s just something humans have done for thousands of years.
And as for the humble cabbage, its varied role as artistic muse deserves a chapter all of its own, as we discover its long lost identity as a celebrated preventer of hangovers. And, then, ridiculously, as temporary placeholders for the heads of the sick in 15th century psychological experiments – not to be tried at home.
Filtered through Riley’s irreverent, witty and ever-imaginative style, Food in Art is a guide through the sprawling past of art’s many interpretations of food, from the divine to the profound, and crucially the dark, humorous and absurd.
From the practicality of Ancient Egyptian illustrated breadmaking techniques, to the strange vanity of Roman mosaic floors designed to look covered in the remnants of a lavish banquet, mice and all, Food in Art calls for some self-reflection.
It’s a good opportunity to take a good long look at our ‘selfies with Spiralizer’, or the meaning behind Instagrammed kale salads of the 21st century. Rewriting Riley’s book in a thousand years’ time, what will the food historians make of us?
Surely, as ever, we’ll be seen as we are; very vain, a bit clever and somewhat ridiculous.
Food in Art: From Prehistory to the Renaissance is published by Reaktion Books. RRP: £30. ISBN: 9781780233628
Birth-day snapper Jenny Lewis. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
“Can you stop talking to strangers?” ask six-year-old Herb and eight-year-old Ruby, as their mum Jenny Lewis chats to women at playgroups and playgrounds, reassuring them about their pregnancies. “Don’t worry about it, you’re going to be fine,” she can be heard saying. What struck me when I met Lewis was her positive and contagious energy.
Giving birth is both one of life’s marvels as well as it’s most fundamental experience. Lewis captured this by photographing 150 Hackney women at home with their one-day-young babies within the course of the past five years.
There is something deeply emotive about the 40 portraits published under the title of One Day Young. Each picture is strong individually but it takes the series to realise the similarities between them all. Only then do you notice how Lewis has systematically managed to capture the domestic surroundings of one of the most intimate moments of a woman’s life with true honesty and real intensity.
All of the photographed women seem grounded with a similar inner strength, confidence and selflessness. There is a combination of tenderness and raw intimacy in the relationship photographed. But there is also a much less tangible relationship that filters through: the one the photographer had with her subjects.
In each of the portraits, you can detect the sincerity of a photographer who cares about the women she photographed who are essentially all her “next door neighbours”, living in the same borough and who, in her own words, she finds “fascinating and inspiring”.
The captions that pace the book hint on the depth of the open-hearted discussions Jenny might have had with some of those women, evoking life and death, anxieties and hopes for the future.
One Day Young is published by Hoxton Mini Press. ISBN: 9780957699885 RRP: £12.95
Meredith and Lina, taken from One Day Young. Photograph: Jenny LewisJen and Nora, taken from One Day Young. Photograph: Jenny Lewis
“I’ve grown up always going for walks,” says Alice Stevenson. Having grown up in West London, Stevenson has walked the city for years and is now an East End resident.
Ways to Walk in London is her first book, and it came as a surprise to Stevenson, who primarily identified herself as an illustrator. It’s a collection of personal journeys across the capital, with the text complemented by her distinctive illustrations.
Stevenson sees London not just for its historical importance but for its unique atmosphere too.
Stevenson says: “Woolwich felt so remote and industrial, with these brutal, abstract structures and when I reached Greenwich it felt different, like a seaside town – maybe it’s because of its maritime history. It was such a contrast.”
Ways to Walk in London takes us to places such as the Isle of Dogs, Shadwell Basin and Hackney, and to the reflective surfaces of Canary Wharf. “I like how you can have all these different experiences in the same city,” says Stevenson.
The book doesn’t just focus on the physical side of the city though. Stevenson sees the process of walking as a vital source of artistic inspiration: “Walking makes really good memories,” she says. “When you’re on public transport and it’s busy, you don’t have time to sit back and observe things or think about how something feels. I think walking your life slows down. You start noticing things you wouldn’t physically have time to do otherwise. I find it very inspiring, visually.”
Stevenson sees a crucial difference between walking alone and walking with friends: “I feel when I walk by myself I become really fixated with details and notice things a lot more, whereas with a friend, you can talk to that person about the walk, which made it easier to work out. When I did walks on my own, it was tough to find out what the walk was about.”
Part of the book’s success is that the text is filled with keen observations and only the necessary historical details. Stevenson didn’t want the book to be a list of places and historical facts, but a document of her personal wanderings.
The text is stripped back, and Stevenson says she enjoyed the challenge of working to these limitations: “It forced me to physically edit it and stop it from rambling. I could’ve written hundreds of pages about these walks. For me, I’ve always admired minimal writers, which I think has something to do with being an illustrator, working with limitations.”
Stevenson’s book is a fetching tribute to walking, and to London. The book shows the city in all its beauty and contradictions and in all its details – the bare oaks of London Fields taking on a new “spectre-like dignity” in the fog. Stevenson’s passion for the city is infectious and the book is a good place to start for anybody thinking of exploring London further on foot.
Ways to Walk in London: Hidden Places and New Perspectives is published by September Publishing. ISBN: 9781910463024 RRP: £12.99
Jonathan Kemp’s second novel, Ghosting – the follow up to 2010’s much-lauded London Triptych – is a sharp and pacy read exploring grief, memory and transformation.
Grace Wellbeck is a frustrated 64-year-old still mourning the deaths of her daughter, Hannah, and her hypnotic but violent first husband, Pete. Dreading a second nervous breakdown and plodding along with Gordon – Pete’s solid but lifeless replacement – on their London houseboat, her future is mapped out and bleak, until she meets Luke.
A 20-something performance artist caught up in a complex love triangle with his two best friends, Luke is a dead ringer for Pete, so much so that Grace fears she might be “losing it again”. Having tracked this strange apparition to a boat nearby, she finds herself on the receiving end of a warm welcome and stumbles further into a world far removed from anything she’s ever known.
Her unlikely collision with a misfit art scene gives Grace a vantage from which to consider her own existence; the journey that follows is impossible to put down.
Filling in the gaps of her current ‘crisis’ with digressions into the past – revisiting his main character as she falls in love at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, grieves in a mosquito-ridden room in Malaysia and at various other key moments over the years – Kemp gradually pieces together a life that rings quietly true.
It’s a moving depiction of how we interact with our personal histories and the way we might respond to serious trauma, always treading a fine line between the real and delusional.
While Kemp’s style is generally neat and succinct, it’s not short of the odd flourish, too: “Back on the boat she sits down in front of her make-up mirror, wishing she could claw her skin off; dig deep into her flesh and excavate the young woman buried there,” he writes. “The evening gapes empty ahead of her, a nest of hours like open mouths waiting to be fed.”
His execution is, at times, stunning – particularly when painting a distinctly lucid image of a squat party in Hackney Wick.
It’s no surprise that Kerry Hudson, author of the excellent Thirst, has described the novel as “a rare combination of insight, compassion and brilliant craft”.
She and Kemp share concern for literature’s underexplored people and both display a real knack for gripping the reader by the scruff off the neck.
With characters expertly drawn and real to a tee, Ghosting is an emotional ride through the decades to a present where direction and certainty are rare. It’s tight and, in a sense, as streamlined as the longboats moored up on the banks of the city – and that’s no bad thing. It’s about one unseen woman’s struggle, and you’ll be hard-pressed not to relate to it in some way; it’s a definite success.
Ghosting is published by Myriad Editions. RRP £8.99. ISBN: 9780956251565
Bookish: A Little Free Library in Clissold Park, Stoke Newington
Perched atop a post outside a house on Victoria Park Road lies a small hut that, from a distance, could be an ornately decorated birdhouse or, less likely, a microwave. But while there’s no food inside, those with an appetite for reading won’t be disappointed, as it holds books, which members of the public can borrow and return without charge.
The Little Free Library project is a nationwide initiative though strongly concentrated in East London. Victoria Park Road and Clissold Park are the two Hackney outposts, then there’s Leyton, Leytonstone, Stratford and 12 in Walthamstow, the erstwhile home of the charity’s manager, Nick Cheshire.
“We’re looking to promote reading, literacy and art, and a sense of community engagement,” says Cheshire, who founded Little Free Libraries UK with his wife, Rebecca, last year.
The libraries are ‘hosted’ by volunteers, who promote them locally and keep an eye on stocks, and they are decorated by local artists wherever possible. One is emblazoned with a handsome red fox, others are inspired by William Morris and Jackson Pollock.
Children and families may be the primary focus of the libraries, though Cheshire insists anyone can make use of them.
“It’s a simple process of take a book, return a book, donate a book and if you want to take a book that’s absolutely fine. If you want to donate or return it that’s fine but you don’t have to. Some people will use them as a book exchange, other people might not be able to afford books and find that it’s nice to have free access to them.”
Little Free Libraries originate in the United States, where Cheshire discovered them and was inspired to bring the concept to the UK.
Given our increasing reliance on technology, the idea of a Little Free Library seems something more suited to a bygone time. But Cheshire says that the tangibility of books sets them apart from their digital counterparts.
“We’re not against the technology of Ipads or Kindles but I think the idea that it’s your copy of a book and you can inscribe something in the cover is really special. We’re trying to promote real books as much as reading in general as well.”
