Drinking deep at the well

I finished Neil M Gunn's 'The Drinking Well': stepping out of its world with the reluctance of leave taking.

It is a beautiful novel of one young man's awkward awakening and precisely captures the slow, stop-go, forward-back nature of growing awareness.

There are wonderful set pieces - herding the hoggs (yearling sheep) back through a late winter storm in which every detail is well-wrought: the effect of cold on the body of man, dog and sheep; how snow falls in deceptive blankets that yet with time and experience can be read; and, how close stalks death in such elemental encounters and how it can either spur or sap will.

As with all Gunn's work there is both a political edge, explicit here, about ownership of land and the depredations of landlords; and, a metaphysical subtlety that, as it developed, rather bewildered his readership, used to his earlier social realism.

Here it is partly carried by Mad Mairag - the local eccentric who speaks as easily with the dead as the living and who owns a well of crystalline water whose attraction acts as a 'metaphor' of Iain's (the main character's) desire for the land - that the land be a place that could be worked fruitfully rather than fled but more deeply can be loved.

It also lovingly evokes 'community' not as some sentimental ideal but as the necessary place of work to build and maintain values, always balanced between what is received from tradition and what might be new learnt. There is nothing romantic about Gunn's depictions of real people attempting to make this so (and failing to do so) - his are communities of diverse folk, light and shadows.

Last night I dreamt long and involved - but part of what I took away was my own longing for 'fixity' an address - a place to be my own. It runs counter to an equally vivid 'wanderlust'!

I am also intrigued at how I have come by a cluster of Scottish writers of whom I am so deeply fond - Edwin Muir principally but also his one time student, George Mackay Brown and now Neil Gunn.

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...

The Beckoning Land that is within

In spite of the fact that all three of Rowena Farre's books were in a certain measure autobiographical, she remains a mystery. The place of her birth, her real name, and ancestry, whether her first book was an autobiography, in fact, or fiction? It is, on reading her last book, a matter on which, beyond a certain notional interest, I find myself wholly and happily agnostic. Whoever she was, she was a person out of sorts with the world she was born into and on, an ever more consciously realized, spiritual quest. In this way, the book leads on from her earlier one about her life with Roma and Traveller communities. There she was following a nomadic impulse that ran in parallel to 'ordinary life' whilst here she is following a nomadic life that enfolds and transforms 'ordinary' life. https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/07/on-hopes-realities-and-shadows-of-being.html In this her third book, she returns to places associated with her childhood, Hong Kong, Ceylon, a...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog