Tower and Town, June 2022

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A Good Read

One of the advantages of growing older is that you can be excused physical intrepidity (yes, it’s a word, I checked). Though I like to imagine myself the kind of stern character who strides up mountains and hacks her way through jungles, the fact is I’m simply not. So I enjoy books about tougher types than me, like Alice Morrison. A few years ago I watched (twice) a BBC documentary in which she walked through the desert from Morocco to Timbuktu. Her new book Walking with Nomads describes three further journeys through Morocco. With three Amazigh (Berber) men and their camels the author trekked through desert and dried river beds. She describes and explains the effects of climate change and politics on the lives of the local people. As a woman, she also has access to women and the domestic area that a male traveller would not, learning about the challenges of the nomadic life. But what I enjoyed was the humour, generosity and friendship she enjoyed with her travelling companions. Initially, she writes, she was concerned that she would be lonely, as a Western, Christian woman with three Muslim men from traditional backgrounds, but they immediately develop a matey, teasing relationship – and she introduces them to Father Christmas!

From rolling down the golden sand, to Greenland’s icy mountains, so to speak – I didn’t think I was particularly interested in glaciers, other than knowing that their melting is a Bad Thing.  Ice Rivers, by Jemma Wadham (short-listed for the Richard Jefferies Prize) taught me more than I remember from long-ago Geography O-level , yet manages to be entirely accessible and readable. The author is a glacial biogeochemist, and describes a series of field trips, over a number of years, and is another forceful message about climate change – an alarming, disturbing description of these ice -rivers retreating, and perhaps being lost forever. It’s ‘proper science’, but with personal and psychological depth, from an author who describes how it’s possible for even a scientist to recognise that our interaction with the natural world can have a real emotional and even spiritual aspect. A book that was an unexpected pleasure for me.

 To finish, a novel. The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn took me by surprise. It’s immersive, playful and sharp, a story of interwoven lives in the inter-war years, comic and heart-breaking, thoroughly satisfying. The scenes set during the liberation of Paris in 1945 are as good as any I’ve read, the characters are both realistic and fantastical, and this is a book I’m going to re-read for years.

Debby Guest