When writing about Mark Brend’s excellent Undercliff a few weeks ago I made reference to a predilection for maps in crime/thriller novels and suggested there is a piece to be written about this. This isn’t it, but I should say that when it ever does get written there will be a reference to Allan Mackinninon’s 1947 novel ‘House Of Darkness’. The map in its frontispiece shows an area around the west coast of Scotland, taking in Loch Linnhe, Glen Coe and the hills of Morvern, for it is in this landscape that much of the action in the novel takes place. I believe Mackinnon wrote several thrillers set in the Highlands but this is the first I have read and it is rather fine and well worth tracking down. Early in the novel Mackinnon’s Colin Ogilvy character makes humorous reference to feeling as though he is in a story by Ambler or Buchan and of course these are entirely appropriate references for as the novel unfolds Ogilvy finds himself in an extended chase scene through the Highlands that could be straight out of The Thirty Nine Steps, and, like Ambler, Mackinnon himself spent time screenwriting for cinema.

Mackinnon conjures the misty grey dampness of the Highland landscape pretty finely, though this is never at the expense of driving the narrative onwards with a pace that, whilst never frenetic, is nevertheless speedy enough to keep us eagerly turning the pages. You might realistically argue that the denouement is pretty obviously signposted through the book and so hardly comes as a surprise, but I don’t think Mackinnon ever set out to make this a complicated fair-play mystery so its a moot point.

Interestingly, from a contemporary perspective, the underlying ‘plot’ is one which sounds remarkably familiar. It is painted deftly in a few paragraphs wherein Ogilvie and another character have a conversation in which references are made to politicians, government ministers, financial ‘players’, foreign powers manipulating National Interests, collapse of British economic prospects, nationalism and a minority plotting to make significant financial profit at the expense of drastically reduced standards of living for the majority. It’s like reading a précis of the past three years of UK politics in two pages and just goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun.

Now there may be nothing new under the sun, but in his sizeable ‘Underland‘ tome, Robert Macfarlane suggests that there is plenty new under the earth, and he goes to great lengths to share some of those peculiar landscapes and the people who inhabit and explore them with us. It’s certainly an interesting enough premise for a book, although where it falls on your personal continuum of appeal will likely fluctuate somewhat from chapter to chapter. The later chapters in which he seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on and around glaciers in Greenland, for example, leave me (ahem) cold, whereas those in which he explores points in/beneath the landscape that involve explicit human intervention carry much greater appeal.

Throughout the book there is necessarily a lot of crawling through tight underground spaces and lots of heroic walking across expansive icy wastes, and if I struggle, on a personal level, to understand and connect to those physical aspects of Macfarlane’s journeys to (literally) the ends of the earth and its subterranean depths, then I think I can at least grasp that behind these exploits sits some deeply felt need to experience some kind of blissful state. A pursuit of the Other, if you like. It strikes me too that there is a relationship between the physical activities and the act of writing, between the events/places and the reality of the book itself.

For the writing throughout Underlands is undeniably fine, the words and phrases often gorgeous, and it strikes me that the process of writing and of reading can itself be that vehicle through which we encounter the Other. Those moments where our conscious perception slips away and we fleetingly glimpse the essence of bliss. Words no longer forming thoughts and meaning but instead entering the realm of feeling and sub-conscious knowing. A deep connectivity that exists outside of everything.

Nevertheless I cannot help but wonder if some people never discover the thing through which they might encounter the Other. Do they even strive to uncover it, and is the luxury to even think about such things only open to us once our more basic needs have been met? Macfarlane, having journeyed many miles through inhospitable climes in order to witness the ancient handprints of our distant cave dwelling ancestors would doubtless point to this as evidence that this ‘luxury’ is in fact as basic a need as shelter. And if I’m almost certain he would be correct in suggesting this, I cannot shake the feeling that the unfolding movement to disconnect from the networks we have created for ourselves with technologies in order to reconnect with the networks nature weaves around us seems like a luxury of an educated middle class at best, and a hipster’s fashion accessory at worst.

If only Macfarlane had included some maps.

As we rapidly approach the half way point of the year I am reminded that I started January by enjoying Geoffrey Household’s ‘Rogue Male‘. Mark Brend’s newly published novel ‘Undercliff‘ is the vehicle for this nudge of memory and I dare say that even if I had not known Brend to be a Household fan I would still have felt an undertow of ‘Rogue Male’ reference in the pages. Certainly ‘Undercliff’ is set in much the same landscape as that in which Household’s novel reaches its conclusion, although Brend settles just on the Devon side of the Jurassic coast, with Household’s ghost hiding out in the holloways of Dorset a pebble’s throw to the east. There is a structural similarity to the two novels also, with both using the first halves of their narratives to paint scenes, set connections and introduce characters before embarking on what is essentially a ‘chase’ in the second half. In ‘Undercliff’ this chase may be more muted than it is for the ‘Rogue Male’, but it nevertheless allows for much enjoyment in exploring a landscape of crumbling cliffs and densely woven undergrowth. In ‘Undercliff’ too the ‘chase’ is less animalistic and more informed by loosely bundled threads of investigation. These threads draw from notions of religion, belief, mysticism and the cult of the personality. They draw from notions of the simultaneous appeal of and repulsion from connectivity and community, of belonging and isolation. Where Household makes quite clear distinctions between good/bad whilst suggesting too that we all of us are rooted in the earth to which we all return, Brend instead leaves question marks hovering over everything. So whilst there are certainly mysteries in ‘Undercliff’, anyone looking for a puzzle to solve will perhaps be frustrated to find nothing quite so orthodox; whilst there are hints and suggestions of Magik at work these are never more than that, so anyone looking for something akin to a landscape hewn from conflict between Christian faith and a more ancient belief system such as Merrily Watkins inhabits may also find themselves faintly bewildered. ‘Undercliff’ instead treads more subtle ground and in this it feels very much a novel of contemporary flavours, even though it is set largely in 1973. So whilst there are some sensitive touches of historical contextualising (Brend’s descriptions of folk band The Flock are particularly fine) the novel as a whole seems invested with a sense of vague uncertainty. Characters seem caught between reality and fantasy, unable to judge truth from falsehood. Darkness seems always just round the corner, light just out of reach whilst we inhabit the realm of unknowing. As a first novel it is certainly one that suggests Brend has further treats to be unearthed and I heartily recommend it.

Less easy to recommend from my recent reading are three novels by E. and M. A. Radford that have been republished by Dean Street Press. My interest was piqued by an article in issue 80 of CADS, but whilst this estimable periodical is so often a source of enormously entertaining avenues of exploration, this one turned out rather frustrating. Perhaps those who favour the puzzle-based genre of detective fiction will find more in the Radford’s novels to enjoy but they left me rather cool. There are certainly few things that frustrate me more in mystery novels than the authors interjecting to tell me that in the chapter we have just finished I will surely have spotted all the necessary clues to solve the problem. Not that I mind writers breaking the fourth wall, as it were (Edmund Crispin does this with delicious dexterity), it’s more the insufferable smugness in a writer who seems determined to remind us that they have constructed a damnably clever puzzle. There is certainly a smugness about the Radford’s main character Doctor Manson which borders on insufferable and unbelievable. The influence of Holmes on the Manson character is clearly visible (I’m sure he says something is elementary several times) and I quite quickly found myself hearing him in my head as Basil Rathbone. In the CADS article Nigel Moss suggests that the three novels published by Dean Street have “strong plots, clever detection and evocative settings” and in this he is partially correct. Personally I would temper this by suggesting that the plots are confusingly complicated, the detection irritatingly clever and the settings less elegantly painted as they might be. ‘Murder Jigsaw’ is a good example of the latter. Set on the edge of Devon and Cornwall along the Tamar river, the Radfords sketch the landscape with a few daubs of colour, yet it feels always just a little clumsy and in many ways comes across as something of a pastiche of Cyril Hare’s marvellous ‘Death Is No Sportsman’ (written in 1938 – six years before ‘Murder Jigsaw’). Certainly Hare’s book is more adept at capturing the intricacies of fly-fishing without them ever feeling like insufferably detailed explanations of a favourite hobby, whilst his dry wit and more fully fleshed characters are immeasurably more convincing that the almost wreath-like presences conjured by the Radfords. Hare too is much more adept at painting convincing landscapes, and he does a grand job of showing off Exmoor in his final novel ‘He Should Have Died Hereafter’. With its traditional detective-novel mixture of real and imagined place names, the novel traverses the edges of Exmoor, up to what I read as being Dunkery beacon and down again to what is surely the hidden gem of Culbone church near Porlock. Sadly neither ‘He Should Have Died Hereafter’ nor E.C.R. Lorac’s ‘Murder In The Mill Race’ (just published in the British Library Crime Classics series and next up on my ‘to-be-read’ pile) subscribe to the less-well adhered to tradition of including hand drawn maps of the territory in their frontispieces. These little maps are always a delight and it please me enormously to say that there is one included in ‘Undercliff’; the more so because it unashamedly blends the real and the unreal together in just the way that Hare does in his Exmoor.

Thinking about Phil Rickman’s Historical Paranormal Pagan Police Procedural Exorcism Thrillers starring fictional Deliverance Minister Merrily Watkins (as we were) I started tangentially pondering some of the artist Marcus Coates’ work from the turn of the millennium. I’d come across his work courtesy of Megan Calver, whose own ‘Throw Only To Alert Catcher’ we celebrated in the 50/50 series back in 2016. Part of Megan and her group’s work at that time involved lying on the sand at Dawlish Warren mimicking seals (because of course you would), itself an intervention with the landscape that would surely have been informed by some of Coates’, in particular his ‘Red Fox’ work of 1998 and the ‘Indigenous British Mammals’ of 2000. It’s Coates’ ‘Crucifixes for Various Amphibians’ work from 2000 however that most strongly resonates with some threads pulling through from the Rickman novels, specifically in the way in which these small sculptures made from lolly sticks, elastic bands and paperclips resemble strange pagan symbols that one might (but rather hopes wouldn’t) stumble upon within the depths of borderland forests.

Coates’ accompanying childhood recollections that contextualise these crucifix sculptures are certainly the kind of thing Merrily Watkins might stumble into as part of one of her ‘investigations’. The descriptions of 1972 summer days spent building dams on a stream and capturing toads on the banks and in the woods begin in almost idyllic tone, with Coates’ words certainly conjuring memories of my own times spent during what would have been the same years building dams on the Collennan burn that ran behind our house and alongside the golf course in order to catch eels. However, there the similarities end, for if we did to the eels what Coates and his friends apparently did to their captured toads then I have either long since forgotten or blanked events from my memory. Certainly the descent into darkness that Coates goes on to describe in his recollections is something I could not claim to have ever really experienced other than vicariously through other forms, in other words through books, poetry, songs and perhaps film. Film is certainly only a perhaps because the truth is that I have always found these kinds of ‘horror’ themes to be much more accessible through written rather than visual text, horror films not being high on my list of pleasures (guilty or otherwise). Coates’ macabre recollections however are certainly something I could imagine underpinning a ’troubled’ character’s backstory in a Merrily Watkins novel. Jane would probably fall in love with them.

Elsewhere in Coates’ work we see characters standing in shaded glades shouting colourful football terrace chants at the trees. These works are informed by studies of birdsong and they challenge our interpretations of birdsong as something ‘pretty’ and decorative. Indeed in much of Coates work there is an almost gleeful perversity in challenging perception of landscape and nature. Nature, Coates reminds us, is bloody and ugly and brutal and wholly unsentimental. There is an implicit acknowledgement too that the countryside we see around us, certainly in the UK, is barely ’natural’ at all but is rather the ongoing product of human intervention. We impose ourselves on the landscape. We bend it to our desire and portray it in ways which make us feel better about doing so.

Elsewhere I have seen Coates refer to himself as an ornithologist and I assume this is true if only because his birdsong interventions appear (to the lay-person like myself) to be informed from study. It is not a study I have ever been able to get enthralled by, despite trying in more recent years to spark an interest. David Callahan’s ‘History of Birdwatching in 100 Objects’ and Matt Sewell’s little bird illustrations sparked an idle wandering down this path (the temptation is strong to tell you I loved Sewell’s little illustrations and wooden sculptures years before his first book was published, but that would be my Indie-hipper-than-thou tendencies coming through and I have been trying so hard to fight those learnings) but the truth is that I quickly came to realise that I liked these mediated artefacts much more than the birds themselves. Callahan’s delicious plotting of ornithological history remains fascinating to me primarily because of the objects and their meanings rather than any connection to wildlife itself. Similarly Sewell’s illustrations are those of characters rather than scientific studies and I think this remove from the creatures themselves is what I connect with. Edwyn Colins’ studies of Some British Birds lean much less towards caricature than Sewell’s but still retain a certain distance from being informational studies. Then again, maybe I just like Edwyn’s drawings because he is Edwyn Colins, and maybe I just like Callahan’s book because he is the guy in Wolfhounds and Moonshake.

Thinking of music then, let’s remember that last time out we also thought about Nick Drake, and in my meanderings I told you about how I first heard Nick Drake in a house on the Bristol Downs in the late 1980s. Coincidentally (or barely coincidence at all when you think about it) this was also the first time I knowingly heard Bert Jansch. The ‘knowingly’ modifier is used because it is just possible I had previously heard some Pentangle songs, most likely the glorious ‘Light Flight’ which sounded so like a blueprint for the sound of Hurrah! And speaking of coincidences that are not really coincidences at all, later that same day we walked across the Bristol Downs to The Garden Flat (made famous by ‘Are You Scared To Get Happy’, Sha-La-La and Sarah records) and had tea with Clare and Matt. My friend Stuart was with us but I do not believe that on this occasion he indulged in treading biscuits into the carpet (this anecdote presented – very much tongue in cheek, honest – as another of those ‘Indier than thou’ references).

Bert Jansch did not immediately grab me at that time in the way that Nick Drake did, but in some ways I prefer listening to his records now. Perhaps this is down to a lack of other cultural baggage. In other words perhaps it is just that Jansch never quite became such a recognisable name in the ‘mainstream’ monoculture. In other words still, he never provided the soundtrack to a motor car advertisement (not that I’m aware of at least).

Getting back to birds (as we were a couple of paragraphs previously, sort of, kind of) then let us note that Jansch released a record in 1979 called ‘Avocet’ and it is really rather lovely whilst occasionally being a little peculiar and unexpected as many of Bert Jansch records are. The title song (the entirety of side one on the vinyl artefact) is eighteen minutes of elliptical guitar refrains, in places beefed out with mandocello, violins and flute courtesy of Martin Jenkins. I believe fellow Pentangler Danny Thomas provides bass on the record. Other wading and water birds on the record are captured in sparser lines. A few minutes of sonic sketching and then they are off. Quite delightful.

The 2016 reissue of ‘Avocet’ came in a deluxe art vinyl package (it would be odd if any vinyl reissue in these times did not have some kind of limited edition deluxe package) that included six illustrations/prints (one for each of the birds on the record) by Hannah Alice. I admit that the idea of switching these prints around so that a different one appears through the diecut frame in the sleeve troubles me somewhat, mostly because the title ‘Avocet’ would always appear above the illustration. Perhaps it could be read in a vaguely ‘Ceci nest pas one pipe’ Treachery of Images manner. This is not a lapwing; this is not a kingfisher; this is not an avocet. I’m not sure.

More convincing are the illustrations themselves. Like Matt Sewell’s drawings, Alice’s images concern themselves in finding the base identifying features of each bird type. Unlike Sewell’s little caricatures however Alice presents the birds less as individuals and more as diagrammatic idealisations. Flat planes of colour shaped just so. Not yet abstract but barely a few steps away. This appeals very much and feels more in tune with Jansch’s music than the slightly kitschy watercolour that graced the original record sleeve. For Jansch’s music here (and elsewhere) treads the line between naturalistic and abstraction with a fine sense of balance and poise.

And since we are still (just about) talking of our feathered friends let’s not forget Daniel Williams and his lovely exploration of birds in song on his Nightingales blog of a few years back, within which there are three Jansch songs included (‘Kittiwake’ and ‘Lapwing’ from the ‘Avocet’ set and ‘The Black Swan’, which perhaps is a song about Dawlish and perhaps is not). Dan’s blog is also very likely where I first heard (of) Rozi Plain, but that’s a story for another time (but don’t hold me to that).

Phil Rickman’s novels featuring Herefordshire’s ‘Deliverance Minister’ (aka exorcist) Merrily Watkins were first recommended to me by a work friend and colleague back in January 2013 when the series was already eleven books old. She thought I might like them because they were vaguely in the ‘crime’ genre I was (and remain) firmly entrenched within but also because she said they were excellent evocations of place. Over the year that followed our commuting conversations would often dwell on Rickman’s books as I became drawn into the landscapes he was so clearly attuned to and in which my friend had herself grown up. Those discussion occasionally touched on the characters: how frustrating and annoying we found Merrily’s pagan-leaning daughter Jane (I’m willing to admit that Rickman paints her so irritatingly on purpose); how much we liked the way the light always glints on Gomer Parry’s glasses; whether you could hear Huw Owen’s utterances in anything other than a Geoffrey Boycott accent; how we wanted to give Lol Robinson a good shaking by the shoulders and tell him to Get A Grip.

Mostly though we talked about the landscape. The blurred borderlands where England becomes Wales and vice versa. No-man’s lands. Literally. Inhabited by ghosts of prehistoric landscapes and memories of not so distant histories (one of the finest, most harrowing of the Watkins series roots itself in the darkness of the history of Fred and Rosemary West’s murderous habits).

I did not know at the time how accurate those landscape evocations were (and, despite a short trip to Leintwardine at the tail end of the summer of 2014 – I have the leaflet from the St Mary Magdalene church as a reminder – I still don’t) but in reality it does not matter much. I’m sure too that my friend would attest that whilst a personal knowledge/memory of place can help with connections to fictional narratives, it is the skill of the writer in visualising a landscape that overrides geographical accuracy. As such Rickman’s geography may be filled with reference to real place names that you can (and I have) trace on maps, but more than this it is conjured by a deftness of touch that goes beyond descriptive prose and instead roots itself in atmosphere that is driven by thrilling narrative and fed by tendrils reaching out into folkloric mythology.

This thread of pagan folklore is rich in the Merrily Watkins novels and I admit that pull surprises me because I’ve always thought of those kinds of references as hippy nonsense. And whilst I can admit that yes, they intrigue me more and more as I get older, instinct (or habit) still throws up barriers to exploring things in more depth for fear of ending my days as a tragic raggedy beardy old man combing the streets of Totnes for magic crystals. But that’s my personal terror and I will address it as necessary. And much as I love Julian Cope and am intrigued by his mystical meanderings, I still can’t quite surrender my senses to the notions of Ley lines, dowsing and Earth Powers. My scientist brother would no doubt be proud of this restraint. Then again, with the mainstream reality of the world being so genuinely grim and gruesome these days there is certainly appeal in disappearing further into the realms of mythologies and strange alternative histories.

Rickman’s 2017 novel ‘Friends Of The Dusk’ certainly offers an alternative history for the foundations of vampire mythology, neatly shifting focus from the Gothic axis of Whitby and Transylvania to a much earlier and perhaps more ‘authentic’ interpretation rooted in the Welsh borderlands. Rickman amusingly uses this narrative arc to comment gently on the nature of more knowingly fabricated and exploitative fiction (the self-awareness is never far from the surface in this) and also on the nature of social media technologies. Through all this there is a developing sense of Rickman as Grumpy Old Man and I admit I find this rather appealing.

Appealing too in ‘Friends Of The Dusk’ are the references to castles in these borderlands. Literal points of power and control within the landscape, Rickman notes that most are entirely disappeared, recognisable only to those adept at reading earthworks and contours. There is something appealing in this idea of a secret language, of senses tuned to the shadow and texture of the visible as a key to unlocking the buried and invisible. For those of us of a certain age in the UK I am sure that this reference to castles will conjure memories of the short films produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Public Announcement Film Unit and screened irregularly on the BBC when there were a few minutes to fill between scheduled programmes. There seems to be surprisingly little detail about these online, although the BFI does have one on Caerphilly castle available in its archives.

Elsewhere in the Merrily Watkins’ series there are references drawn in and out to all kinds of historical pointers. My favourites in these are the excavations of an Elgar narrative in ‘The Remains Of An Altar’; the aforementioned Fred West darkness that weaves through ‘The Lamp of The Wicked’; the secretive SAS in ‘The Secrets of Pain’; the transformation of Hay-on-Wye into a bookselling enclave and Eric Gill’s somewhat unorthodox activities at Capel-y-ffin in ‘The Magus Of Hay’; the nods out to MR James (yet another inhabitant of these particular borderlands) in ‘The Fabric Of Sin’.

Then of course there are the Nick Drake references. Whilst they are perhaps most explicitly explored in ‘The Fabric Of Sin’ they are all over the Merrily Watkins books, due in no small part to the character of aforementioned singer-songwriter Lol Robinson. Now many of the fictional songs and records referenced in the novels have been given physical form in a series of CDs by Allan Watson and Rickman, and whilst I’m quite certain that Merrily Watkins completists will have these on their shelves I really cannot encourage much more than a cursory investigation. Not my particular bag at all. Much more interesting, in terms of tangential artefacts, is the ‘Merrily’s Border’ book in which Rickman takes us on a tour around the landscapes of the novels. This book unpacks more of the historical and geographical references to the novels and is certainly worth tracking down. The photographs in the book may do little more than document place and certainly never get remotely close to capturing the same sense of claustrophobic pressure of the landscape that ooze from the novels (despite, or perhaps because of, some extreme solarisation effects thrown at some of the shots of churches and trees) but that’s a minor quibble as I am sure that the book was certainly envisaged as more of a guide book than an art form in its own right.

There is a short piece in ‘Merrily’s Borders’ about Nick Drake in which Rickman points out out that it was not until the mid to late 1990’s that interest in Drake really took off. I just about remember this time, for suddenly it seemed that everyone and their cat had a story about how important Nick Drake was to their sound and blah blah blah. There was even a commercial for a motor car that used ‘Pink Moon’ as the soundtrack wasn’t there? Rickman has amusingly trickled this reference into ‘Friends Of The Dusk’ when Lol Robinson has a track plucked for use on a banking advert. In the acknowledgements Rickman actually credits the great Tony Hazzard as being instrumental in sparking this story thread, but the synchronicity with the Drake narrative is certainly there. Oddly enough too in the most recent Watkins novel ‘All Of A Winter’s Night’ there is a neat personal synchronicity with my own awakening to the work of Nick Drake. In the opening to part two of the novel there is a quote from Rob Young’s tremendous ‘Electric Eden’ (the quote is about Cecil Sharp’s first experiences of Morris dancing), and it was in Rob’s parents’ home on the Bristol Downs back in the summer of 1987 or 88 when I first heard the ‘Bryter Later’ set and was blown away. What strikes me now thinking about this is that it would have been only 14 years or so after Drake’s early death: a timeframe that to a barely twenty-something seemed like a lifetime but now feels like the blink of an eye. I recall also being somewhat confused at the time because I had come across Young as a member of the group The Poppyheads, an act firmly categorised (perhaps unfairly) within the nascent ‘cutie’ realm. Indeed, earlier that same day we had indulged in a classic Revolt Into Innocence ritual by dropping into an afternoon cinema screening of ‘The Jungle Book’. What’s clear in hindsight however is that what made groups like The Poppyheads and, say, Razorcuts stand out was the way in which they were blending influences from the Punk canon (Razorcuts in particular initially drew heavily from Buzzcocks of course) with an interest in the psychedelic folk music from pre-Year Zero. Razorcuts would make these connections more explicit on their exquisite ‘Storyteller’ and ‘The World Keeps Turning’ albums and let’s not forget too that Gregory Webster had teamed up with Elizabeth Price to record as The Carousel, whose ‘Strawberry Fayre’ single was released on the English Cosmic Music label in 1988… The Poppyheads on the other hand never had opportunity to explore those realms in much more depth other than through the ‘Postcard For Flossie’ flexi on Sha-la-la and the three tracks of their ‘Cremation Town’ single for Sarah. It’s clear though that for Young the seeds (ahem) of ‘Electric Eden’ were already there in his record collection of the late 1980s and I would be lying if I did not admit to a degree of envy at the sheer depth and breadth of the intellectual thread pulling involved in making ‘Electric Eden’ such a formidable, informative and hugely enjoyable tome.

Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins novels are equally adept at balancing all of those qualities and in similarly pulling on intriguing threads within the realm of what I suppose you could call the Historical Paranormal Pagan Police Procedural Exorcism Thriller genre he has made his own. Rickman himself suggests that whilst there are threads that develop through the series (one of these is certainly the introduction of the Police procedural element via the excellent Frannie Bliss character) they can be read out of order without a significant loss of knowledge of the unfolding narratives. That said, I personally find it difficult to approach any series at any point but Book One (muddied ever so slightly in this case as the first novel ‘The Wine Of Angels’ sees Merrily Watkins yet to enter the Deliverance Ministry). The next instalment in the series is due in October this year. I heartily recommend you delve in.

Once upon a time I was fortunate enough to curate the Tangents website (1996-2006) where one of the unwritten rules that no-one particularly much adhered to was the notion of jumping off at tangents in our reading, listening, viewing, writing, lives, whatever. It is entirely possible that an element of ADHD is involved in this kind of tangential approach to cultural consumption but that is perhaps something for someone else to consider.

On the note of tangential connections however, I’ve been finding some between our (no longer particularly) recent considerations of Dorset (via Rogue Male), Somerset (The Levels of Peter Benson and Amanda Harman; the rose bushes of Sarah Jones shown at Hestercombe) and Devon (aka Home) in Colin Sackett’s intriguing ‘River Axe Crossings‘ book which documents crossings of the river Axe from mouth (in Devon) to source (in Somerset) all along its various meanders (through Dorset). It’s not a new book (in fact I am already eleven years late to this particular party) but it is one that his certainly worth picking up from Sackett’s terrific Uniform Books site, from where you can also find numerous examples of Sackett’s work alongside others that explore similar themes and threads connecting into landscape and geography with a small ‘g’. The ‘Uniform Annual’ of 2017 is a great starting point.

Now it would be easy to think of the photographs in ‘River Axe Crossings’ as being somewhat underwhelming, being as they are tonally flat and printed on what feels like a silk finish paper that neither reduces the images to an earthy ‘authenticity’ as would a recycled or matt stock, nor elevates the photography to an ‘art’ status via a more glossy finish. This kind of detail is important, particularly when you bear in mind that Sackett, as a book designer by trade, would certainly have given very careful consideration to the choice of paper stock used in the book. The neutral tonality and printing of the images then lends the photographs something of the feel of shots taken on a GCSE Geography (capital ‘g’ this time) field trip, which is an idea you may choose to interpret in any number of ways, perhaps hingeing most pertinently upon our individual opinions of Geography education at high school level.

Regardless of our perceptions of Geography education though, thinking the photographs in the context of Sackett’s book as underwhelming would be a mistake, for the photographs are simultaneously not really not the point of work and the point entirely. In one sense the photographs are a tool for documenting the process of the work: A means of visually representing the/a moment within the work, where the work is perhaps more about the experience, the journey, the concept being carried through. The work is not particularly about the art of photography yet it is inevitably a critique of the art of photography, for it challenges our notions of what landscape photography should look like. Indeed the work challenges our notions of what our connections to landscapes are at all. In this Sackett’s work is very much in the same sphere as Richard Long’s and in one of those idle thoughts of tangential connection I wonder whether Sackett might have been in the same audience at Exeter’s Phoenix arts centre all those years ago when Bill Drummond delighted us all by slicing up his Richard Long photograph/art work with a scalpel. Does Sackett have one or two of those tiny rectangles bought for a pound stashed somewhere in a box as I do? And thinking all this makes me want to revisit Drummond’s wonderful ‘How To Be An Artist’ book; makes me wonder as another aside too if Sackett might one day write ‘How to be a geographer’.

I’m only lightly touching my tongue to the inside of my cheek when I write that last sentence because Sackett’s work shows quite clearly that he is (as Jim Mays suggests in his terrific little pamphlet that accompanied a display of Sackett’s books on Haldon back in 2009) “not interested in the comforts of pastoralism or the indulgences of the picturesque” but is rather concerned with notions of geographical truth. This removal of emotional attachment to landscape is something I’m intrigued by, partly because it’s something I feel (or perhaps don’t feel) myself and partly because those notions of some kind of scientific geographical ‘truth’ do not interest me in the slightest.

Bringing in our notions of tangents again, this relationship between landscape eliciting an intellectual response as opposed to an emotional one puts me in mind also of the visual and musical work of James Brooks and his Land Observations. Brooks has always been primarily interested in notions of process in his work and the threads of landscape (and of moving through landscape) filter through his earlier musical work with the group Appliance (‘Land, Sea and Air’, ‘‘Mountains, pt 1’, ‘Map Of The Territory’, ‘This Is The Place’, ‘We Are Not Stationary’) but it is with his Land Observations work that the connections to the landscape, and in particular the human interventions with that landscape really mature. The ‘Roman Roads’ body of work (collected in EP and album forms in 2011 and 2013) quite explicitly reference the lines imposed on nature by humans navigating the space through which they must move, whilst 2014’s beautiful ‘The Grand Tour’ develops this into broader notions of movement across, through and between landscapes (urban and rural). In all of this music Brooks has continued to explore the realms of repetition and cyclical patterns earthed in the work of Appliance, pulling these threads further into minimal, liminal spaces between the abstract and the real. Brooks’ visual work over the same period and beyond has followed parallel lines, and if in more recent years that work has been almost exclusively concerned with drawing inspiration from (and reference to) the constructed landscape it is always primarily concerned with removing emotional attachment to the spaces and their visual representation whilst simultaneously (and I would say with a cool humour) recognising instinctive emotional responses through colour and compositional arrangement of shape and form.

These notions resonate strongly in Sackett’s work too, particularly in the way in which he constructs work (much of it collected in the excellent ‘Englshpublshing’ book) by using the graphical quality of text and typography to challenge our perceptions of what language means, what (printed) words are for. Sackett softly but deftly makes us ask questions about the purpose of printed diagrams too, specifically in his terrific 2006 work/book ‘The True Line’ in which he collects a number of landscape diagrams made by Geoffrey Hutchings (there are connections here too between Hutchings’ diagrammatic use of marks out to those used by Brooks in his drawings – check the artwork for the ‘Roman Roads IV: XI’ album). Sackett’s book/work repurposes Hutchings’ diagrams by removing them from original contexts and presenting elements of them within new graphical relationships. With reference carefully made to the original contexts in a list of “published sources” accompanied by a “biographical commentary” of Hutchings’ work the work/book suggests itself in on breath as an academic record of Hutchings’ diagrams whilst in another proclaiming itself as no such thing.

Sackett’s work then seems to insist that we question what we are looking at, that we recognise the possibility of multiple reinterpretations of the same texts. And like Brooks’ work it is cool whilst not being cold, intellectually stimulating whilst never being academically impenetrable. Delicate balancing acts.