PD Smith

I’ve been review­ing Owl Sense, by Miri­am Dar­ling­ton. It’s a won­der­ful account of the author’s fas­ci­na­tion with owls and an attempt to re-wild our imag­i­na­tions with some pri­mal owlish­ness. This bird has fea­tured in our myths and reli­gions from the begin­ning: the Chau­vet cave paint­ings dat­ing back to 36,000 BC, include the old­est depic­tion of an owl, an almost life-size ver­sion of a Long-eared Owl, whose pen­e­trat­ing gaze meets those enter­ing the cave: “the artists under­stood some­thing of the Janus nature of the owl, its trou­bling lim­i­nal sta­tus on the bound­aries of light and dark”.

I loved Wim Wen­ders’ exhi­bi­tion of polaroids, Instant Sto­ries, which I saw recent­ly at the Pho­tog­ra­phers’ Gallery. There was a beau­ti­ful line in the exhi­bi­tion by Wen­ders about polaroids:

“You could­n’t help feel­ing
that you had stolen this image-object from the world.
You had trans­ferred a piece of the past into the present.”

Der Him­mel über Berlin (Wings of Desire — the Ger­man title is so much bet­ter) has always been one of my favourite films ever since I saw it at uni­ver­si­ty as a stu­dent of Ger­man.

So for all sorts of rea­sons I was delight­ed to be able to review his col­lec­tion of essays, The Pix­els of Paul Cézanne.

It did­n’t dis­ap­point! Here’s the first para­graph of the review:

Just like the cam­era in Wim Wen­ders’ films, his writ­ing demands the “free­dom to move”: “I need to be able to ‘circle’ an idea”. For this rea­son he choos­es to write in free verse – or what he mod­est­ly refers to as “my odd verse” – for many of the essays in this illu­mi­nat­ing col­lec­tion. In his hands it becomes a play­ful and won­der­ful­ly mal­leable lit­er­ary form that allows him to cre­ate a flow of images and ideas, a kind of rhyth­mic think­ing: “vis­i­ble blocks of thought”. Each line becomes a sep­a­rate track­ing shot as the writer-direc­tor moves rest­less­ly around his sub­ject, words crys­tallis­ing into ideas in the same way as a nar­ra­tive emerges dur­ing the edit­ing of a film.

Read the full review at the Guardian.

I’ve just reviewed Tim­o­thy Mor­ton’s Being Eco­log­i­cal for the Guardian. It’s the first of a reg­u­lar series of non-fic­tion reviews I’ll be doing for the new-look Review sec­tion. I’ll also be review­ing paper­backs as usu­al, so there will be plen­ty of fas­ci­nat­ing non-fic­tion titles to choose from in 2018. Hap­py read­ing!

Mor­ton’s book is full of remark­able insights and ideas — it’s a bril­liant and only occa­sion­al­ly Del­ph­ic dis­play of intel­lec­tu­al pyrotech­nics. He doesn’t offer a plan to make soci­ety more envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly: “the idea of sus­tain­abil­i­ty implies that the sys­tem we now have is worth sus­tain­ing”.

Instead, in what is an inspir­ing­ly ide­al­is­tic book, he wants a par­a­digm shift in our rela­tion­ship to the world and for us all to live the idea that we are “a sym­bi­ot­ic being entan­gled with oth­er sym­bi­ot­ic beings”.

Read the full review here.

I’ve writ­ten a piece for the Guardian about Win­ches­ter to mark the anniver­sary of Jane Austen’s death in the city two hun­dred years ago today. As well as being a very his­toric city, it has links to many oth­er authors, includ­ing John Keats and Thomas Hardy. Even the great detec­tive Sher­lock Holmes trav­elled down by train from the Big Smoke to solve a mys­tery…

You can read my piece here.

I’ve reviewed a won­der­ful book on the green belt for the Guardian. Out­skirts: Liv­ing Life on the Edge of the Green Belt is by John Grindrod, author of Con­cre­topia, a cel­e­bra­tion of post­war British archi­tec­ture (“I do love a bit of con­crete”).

Part his­to­ry and part mem­oir, Grindrod’s evoca­tive and intel­li­gent book explores the green belt and its place in our nation­al con­scious­ness. As well as explain­ing the his­to­ry of the green belt, one of the great strengths of the book is that Grindrod tells his own sto­ry of grow­ing up on a coun­cil estate in New Adding­ton, devel­oped dur­ing the 1930s on an exposed Sur­rey hill­top. Grindrod’s fam­i­ly moved from a flat in Bat­tersea to New Adding­ton in 1969: “a mod­ern phe­nom­e­non: the once urban poor trans­plant­ed back to the edge of the city, to the coun­try”. Their home was on “the out­skirts of the out­skirts” and oppo­site the green belt. His broth­er said it was “like every­thing a child could want! There were trees, fields of wheat … It just blew me away.”

Grindrod’s won­der­ful book struck a chord with me. I also grew up on the fringes of Lon­don in the 1970s, near the green belt. My par­ents lived in a rather unlove­ly 1930s semi on the out­skirts of Rom­ford, not far from the rather more desir­able gar­den sub­urb of Gidea Park, which was inspired by Ebenez­er Howard’s ide­al­is­tic vision of a decen­tralised urban future. “Town and coun­try must be mar­ried,” Howard had gushed, “and out of this joy­ous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civil­i­sa­tion.”

As Grindrod shows, it was large­ly Howard’s vision of gar­den cities that inspired the green belt, an urban plan­ning com­pro­mise designed to lim­it the growth of big cities such as Lon­don, a bar­ri­er to save the coun­try­side from an all-con­sum­ing tide of subtopia. I was nev­er par­tic­u­lar­ly keen on Rom­ford (although its rau­cous, colour­ful mar­ket was mem­o­rable) but I loved the sense that green spaces were nev­er too far away.

Today 13% of Eng­land is des­ig­nat­ed as green belt – a strik­ing fig­ure when you con­sid­er that only slight­ly more than 2% of land is actu­al­ly built on. But Grindrod shows that we need a new approach to the green belt to deal with the cur­rent hous­ing cri­sis: “To city dwellers, the green belt is tight­en­ing around our throats. To coun­try folk we are igno­rant bar­bar­ians, intent on its destruc­tion.”

Read my review here and do buy Grindrod’s book. You won’t be dis­ap­point­ed…