Following the review of Jim Perrin's West on Footless Crow earlier this month,The Guardian this weekend publishes its own review by Sir Andrew Motion,UK poet laureate 1999-2008 no less ! Interestingly, Dylan Thomas's mythical Welsh village of Llarregub is alluded to in both reviews.
Motion is obviously not a fan of Jim's more high flown prose describing it at times as 'toe curling' but ends up describing the book as achieving 'a kind of granduer'...read on.....
West remembers a double tragedy. A few years back, Jim Perrin's son Will – the child of a woman from whom Perrin had long since separated – committed suicide; he was in his 20s. A fortnight after his death, Perrin's partner Jacquetta was diagnosed with cancer, and died two years later. Perrin, whose reputation as a writer about the countryside stands very high, not surprisingly turned to landscape and words as sources of possible healing. The result is – inevitably - a very moving memoir of lives shared and lost. It is also nearly embarrassing – in ways which are initially squirm-making, but gradually work to deepen the pathos of the story.
This embarrassment has nothing to do with Perrin's expectations of landscape. His invocations of his native Wales in general, and of his familiar haunts in particular, are made to carry a familiar burden – in times of sickness and grief, beloved places are discovered to have a healing power, because their memories, as well as their intrinsic beauties, are a kind of benediction. It's a Romantic premise, on which every subsequent "nature writer" has built their own monument – Richard Mabey, in Nature Cure, being a notable recent example.
Perrin's writing is another matter. For one thing, the structure of West, while seeking to capture the circlings of a sorrowing mind, and to match these with the need (even in so personal a story) to create suspense for the reader, occasionally ties itself in knots. There is too much repetition (of facts as well as responses) and too much over-elaboration of themes in the pursuit of an appropriate subtlety. At one point Perrin acknowledges this, and makes an attempt at self-validation which is more convincing as argument than fact. "Grief is a strange and wandering journey," he says, "continually returning to the same points in its maze of memory and loss. If this narrative at times confuses with its backtrackings and leaps forward, it does so in an attempt to represent the bewilderments of the time."
Then there's the language. Perrin is at his best when concentrating most devotedly on things-in-themselves, and paying least attention to himself-as-writer. When describing climbing and mountaineering, for instance, his style is tamed by the demands of the activity and its motivations. "No one is omnipotent," he says with commendable simplicity, "and on rock we all strive to be so. The ego and the will are the driving forces in climbing, the philosophy behind it is one of despair."
This kind of austerity is rare in West. Perrin is much more interested in devising a language which marries richness of expression to richness of experience – as though his inheritance and context still compel him to follow the example of Dylan Thomas. To be fair, there's nothing to rival the bard at his fruitiest. But there are, on almost every page, examples of language which has been heated to an exceptional degree, whether it be in single phrases ("I'd cared for my woman in her time of dying"), or in longer purple patches: "In May-time before the bracken was long and the blossomy blackthorn trees confettied every hillside, we . . . marvelled at the water efflorescing across dark strata before . . . seeking out a bed in the heather from which to watch the stars come out and the moon sail from behind the bounding, low hedges."
The problem is not just that this sort of thing sounds old-fashioned, or even (in its dilutions of the adjectival Thomas mode) that the gravity it seeks to establish often feels as weightless as William Boot's nature notes. The greater danger is that it sounds evasive – style standing in for substance – which is especially disappointing in the (very frequent) descriptions of canoodling with Jacquetta. These are meant to set the seal on their relationship, and on the semi-mystical connection between their own selves and the world around them. The risk is always that they will sound like something from a blush-making Llareggub sex-tape ("studying in awed fascination the labiate coral beauty of her vulva"), or leave readers feeling they've eavesdropped on a language that might have worked well for the characters involved, but doesn't readily include others.
This over-heating is much more prevalent in those parts of West that relate to Jacquetta than in the passages that deal with Will. Perrin's relationship with his son was pretty distanced for long periods, and his grief for him, though bitter, also has a degree of stunned incomprehension, perhaps because Perrin blames himself as a father, in ways he (understandably) cannot easily confide; more certainly because the reasons for Will's suicide remain puzzling to him. In any event, the plangency of Will's story derives in an important respect from its restraint.
The full power of the Jacquetta story comes, finally, from an almost opposite kind of writing – which is where the point about embarrassment comes in. The more we learn about her, the more forgiving we become of the stylistic overload with which she is associated. We are made to think it is not so much a proof of self-regard, but of self-doubt – a tacit admission that memories cannot be entirely recovered, no matter how much we strain to recreate them. Lavishness, in other words, itself becomes a kind of grieving – an affirmation which implies its opposite.
These differences, meeting on a single point, make West a more complicated book than it appears. Not just because it depends as much on hesitation as on letting go, but because these things, as they mingle, and separate, and mix again, give us as powerful a portrait of the author as they do of his subjects. This is all the more arresting for seeming to emerge by incidental means. Although there are frequent assertions of principle (he hates "pompous certainty") and belief (in the mind-expanding power of LSD when taken in appropriate circumstances), as well as affection for loved ones and landscapes, there is no determined attempt at self-portraiture.
Not until the end of the book, anyway, when Perrin more obviously becomes his own subject: because he too is diagnosed with cancer, and given a short time to live. Although – he would say because – he has refused conventional medicine, that short time has turned out to be long enough to complete this book. As we discover this, we understand that everything we've been reading has been recalled with one more layer of deathliness cast over it than we thought. This makes the modesty of its rememberings seem even more remarkable, and the sadness of its losses all the more touching. It also alerts us to an element of bravery in the writing. The book may be too long, and sometimes over-the-top, and sometimes frankly a bit toe-curling – but what the hell; these are the prices it pays to achieve a kind of grandeur.
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