Waterstones Ridge and Furrow

Author: Neil Hallows

Rating: 5

Review: It starts with a fire. Not a dramatic one, it appears. An old man, Frank, wearing a cardigan and tie in his tidy garden, stoking a small bonfire on a winter’s day. But then you find out what he’s burning – his letters, birthday cards, old shopping lists. In a sense he is burning himself. And in this opening chapter, which captures the hopes and regrets of Frank’s life so beautifully, there are things you learn about Neil Sentance’s writing. The first is never to assume that the generally very stoic, working-class people, most of whom are his ancestors, who occupy his Lincolnshire landscapes, are not capable of extraordinary thoughts and experiences. They never wrote them down, they never emoted about them; they are the absolute rebuke to our confessional age. But they were shaped by them. You think of them as solid and tough, and they were – perhaps the toughest of all being the widow who helped slaughter a pig for her husband’s wake - but life hammered them into a particular shape. The second is that the bonfire is a kind of reverse metaphor for what the author does. He takes the ashes long blown, and miraculously reconstructs what was there. Not just the anecdotes passed to him by relatives, but what his forebears would have seen, smelt and felt. From tiny domestic details to the landscape ‘flat as an empty diary page, long gridded fields looking like a sodden electrical diagram’. Most of all, it’s stories that he resurrects from the ashes. Not, or not only, the kind of stories that families tell as polished parables to illustrate each other’s strengths and idiosyncrasies. But the stories that come from really listening, over time. The wintery bleakness of Frank’s life is followed by his mum as a teenager, eating toast and dripping, in front of the gas fire and watching Wagon Train on TV. Dozens of little domestic details, woven into something fine, and then embroidered and embossed with a kind of super-reality – a ‘yellow sky tinted with long contours of relic white’, mornings ‘curdled with a fog like gun smoke’, a ‘snow sagging village’. These are phrases of the quality that a good writer can summon every once in a while for something profound and affecting. Here we have a writer who summons all three of the above in a single paragraph to describe a bus journey. He’s a lot better than good. This is a book which can slow down the action to the ticking of a clock or the striking of a spade on cold ground, and yet, like the title sequence of the film ‘Up’, can beautifully and movingly sum up in a life within a page. Poor Rowland Joseph, a favourite with the ladies, disdainful of authority, but destined for mental illness and death alone in his 50s. I use ‘destined’ in the lazy sense of ‘what happened next’ but whether characters had a destiny, in a land where education and employment were limited, is a question on which you have to muse as you track their lives. While the descriptions are unflinching – and never forget that’s not always easy in describing one’s own family – the author never makes judgements. There are scenes in Thomas Hardy of the characters coming home with a skinful of beer on market day, and however much they reel or shout, the underlying message is that you’d do the same, if you had a life as tough as they did. Rowland Joseph’s brother Harold finds solace at the pub, ‘the carnival of upset domino tiles and arrowing darts’. During the day he digs graves. Let him have his fun. As with WG Sebald (who, at his best, is as good as Neil Sentance), we have characters suddenly speaking to us directly. Frank’s brother-in-law tells us about the war he spent fire-watching and ambulance-driving, having failed the medical. And as with Sebald, there are times when hyper-realism might be being mischievously substituted for magical realism. There are pictures of relatives in military uniform, outside a pub, inside a shop where one of them worked… and then a Danish séance. It’s not there by accident, and the description of it is short and tantalising. The author is so good at capturing the voices and the mentality of his forebears that it’s almost like he has had a séance or two of his own. You might think this a land largely untouched by the outside world. The historian AJP Taylor wrote that, prior to 1918, the closest most of England came to the presence of the ‘state’ was the post office and the village policeman. But the outside world comes to find the characters. One character says ‘too many folks still bang on’ about the war, but it’s a constant theme. Frank’s regiment had liberated Bergen-Belsen, another place where memories were burned. A prisoner-of-war paints Frank and captures his anguished eyes. A former prisoner-of-war, who would definitely have a cameo role if this book is ever filmed, can shave a goose with a cut-throat razor. If this is an internationalism forced upon the characters by conflict, it’s a very willing embrace of Europe which comes from the author himself as he gives a touching and lyrical account of a university exchange year in the Netherlands. The intensity of human feelings, you expect him still to have after 30 years – the memories of the ‘shouts of excited laughter, the earnest discussions of a generation, the feathery traces of sex’. But here, as with the descriptions of Lincolnshire, there is a beautiful evocation of the rather similar landscape the other side of the North Sea. A ‘small flock of oystercatchers forage for bivalves, stealing in between the swash and backwash of breaking waves’. Everything is formative – not just the familiar rites of passage of snogs and boozing with fellow students but what to some people would just be a fuzzy walk on a cold day to clear the head. You can look at this book as a kind of social history, with the author having the education and breadth of experience denied to previous generations. But actually he gives himself the same treatment as his forebears. His own story, like the others, is that of an ‘ordinary’ person, doing what was natural within their environment, but captured in such a way that it is extraordinary. Utterly specific and yet resonant at the same time. The book ends with the author finding what topographically evades the other characters, for he lives in the ‘sunny uplands’ of Dorset. The rest of his book describes a world which is flat. But there is absolutely nothing flat about this extraordinary, beautiful and deeply affecting book.

Author: "paulm1977"

Rating: 5

Review: This writer is a marvel, and to me this book bears comparison with Sebald, John Williams' Stoner, Philip Larkin and J.L. Carr's A Month In The Country. That good. From the first page, the emotional tone and tempo is set at adagio, and you must slow your reading speed to take in all the wonders that are set out in each exquisitely honed sentence. He is truly a writer's writer. Neil Sentance has, I believe, invented a new genre with his two books – essentially fictionalised family history. (I'm not going to try and coin a term for this. Certainly not anything like 'fam fiction'. Oops.) This is a book for the long winter nights, and a nourishing reminder of the value of remembering.