Book Report: To the River

33. Olivia Laing, To the River: A Journey beneath the Surface (2011) (12/28/18)

To the River is the account of a midsummer week spent following a 42-mile-long river, the Ouse in Suffolk, southern England, by foot, from muddy source to a shingle beach near Newhaven, where the ferry from France docks. The Ouse "is not a major waterway," Laing explains. "It has intersected with the wider currents of history only once or twice: when Virginia Woolf drowned there in 1941 and again, centuries earlier [in 1264], when the Battle of Lewes was fought upon its banks." But in less dramatic moments over time, the river or its surrounding lands have shaped our stories, our occupations, our desires, and our memories.

Much of this book is about time and memory, about change both wished for and not, about how we construct meaning. Laing's own walk is precipitated by a breakup and her desire for solace in a place she knows and loves. As she follows the Ouse Way, her mind strays far and wide: from the immediate—the wildflowers, bird songs, and landscape surrounding her—to the more philosophical. Along the way she tells stories of Gideon Mantell, discoverer of the iguanodon, the first dinosaur known to humans; of Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows; of the thirteenth-century royal usurper Simon de Monfort; of Charles Dawson, the amateur geologist behind the hoax of the Piltdown man; of John Bayley and his beloved Iris Murdoch—and of course of Virginia and Leonard Woolf. She dips into poetry, mythology, natural history, etymology, prehistory. Her attention is equally caught by a jeweled dragonfly as by the ways humans have (always) transformed the surface of the land.

The writing is remarkable: lyrical, sometimes funny, often melancholy, always full of curiosity and intelligence. Here are a couple of the passages I flagged, which show Laing's ability to transcend the mundane even while embracing it. The first ends her chapter on Mantell and his great discovery:

As I rose I saw a deer drinking. She didn't see me as she climbed the bank; then all of a sudden she did. Her hindquarters bunched the way a horse's will, a motion I knew with my own muscles as the prelude to a buck, and then she sprang away. She moved in an oddly rigid, rocking-horse gait, bounding on stiffened legs across the track and into the darkness of the wood. She was neither rare nor extraordinary, that deer. There were thousands like her, as there were millions like me. But there she was, attending to her own path, which, for a moment, intersected mine. She was as unlikely as the iguanodon, and as imprisoned in time. It was a weave we were all caught up in. Beside me the stream was clicking east, relentless as a needle. A stitch in time, a stitch in time. Was there really more to the world than this? The details of the day—the cool still air, the sharp stink of garlic—were for a moment so precise that the great and hidden age of the earth seemed as unlikely as a dream. I ducked my head, bewildered, and followed the deer into the trees.

This next comes in a chapter, "Going Under," in which, among other things, she considers the nature of hell, and then observes a long cloud of yellow pollen, "rolling toward waiting flowers":

Meanwhile, the swallows were screaming the sky into tatters. I sat on a bench and watched them drop, wings akimbo, shrieking as they fell. How strangely we spend our lives: mapping the architecture of Hades or the ornamentation of a pollen grain. No one ever forgets anything. It's all piled up here somewhere, on the surface or under the ground. It never stops, that's the trouble. It keeps on coming, like that golden wind, breeding from out of its own ruin.

She often seems to come back to Leonard Woolf's motto: Nothing matters. Which he later in his life amended to Nothing matters, and everything matters. She quotes the Venerable Bede (672–735), who speaks of the sparrow, "passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all." She speaks of

a whole town of people driving cars or walking the streets, their faces only partially betraying the magic lantern show that flares in utter privacy within the confines of each skull. . . . It seems astonishing to me how alone man is, though he can touch and talk and gaze on others of his kind. But that picture theatre within his head: no one but he will ever see it played, and there is no medium on earth that can accurately catch its luminosity or speed. 

Yet partnered with such sober thoughts are others more uplifting. At the very end of the book, as she leaves a beach where she's had a swim, heading to the station for the train to take her home, she finds herself in a gulley, perhaps a former riverbed of the Ouse itself:

I crunched an apple as I strolled along. There wasn't a soul in sight, though I knew there were hordes of people beyond each ridge. I didn't want to go home, it was true, but I was nonetheless as purely happy as I've ever been right then, in that open passageway beneath the blue vault of sky, walking the measure allotted me, with winter on each side. . . . I walked as if in a dream, among the larks and the valerian. I felt unfettered, almost weightless. . . . I had the sense I'd fallen into some other world, adjacent to our own, and though I would at any moment be pitched back, I thought I might have grasped the knack of slipping to and fro. It struck me as funny then that I was walking at the grassy bottom of the old Ouse, and since no one could see me there's no one to say that I didn't turn at the last a few gay steps of a waltz.

I felt in very good company on this journey, with a wise, witty, attentive, knowledgeable, questioning companion, and am definitely enriched for the effort.