Simon Varwell's Blog
Planet North
I’ve just finished Stuart Maconie‘s Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North. Billed as a love letter to the north of England, Maconie attempts to find out what it means to be (in English terms) a northerner, what the north is, and how it defines itself.
It’s an enlightening, hilarious and thought-provoking travelogue taking him from London, through the Midlands, and into the counties and cities that the English vaguely call “the north”. Through impeccable research and deft observation, he explores the industries, cultures, music, architecture and people who have defined those areas. The anecdotes had me laughing, I learned many astonishing facts about the places of the north, and the more than occasional rants he gives about how the south of England’s people and media misrepresent (or simply ignore) the north had me cheering on in places.
I cheered because there is much that someone from the north of Scotland would recognise in Maconie’s polemic: the way that the lands north of about Perth are ignored, patronised, or treated as playground or bandit country by Central Belt parochialists, can be immensely saddening. As a preface to the book, Maconie quotes from Doctor Who:
“If you’re an alien, how come you sound like you come from the north?
“Lots of planets have a north.”
Typing away from the north of this particular planet, Scotland, I really related to his book and the points it made.
Strange, then, that Maconie chose to write the book in a way that seems at times to be a letter to the south, as much as about the north. He begins his journey in London, for instance, starting out by looking at the north from the outside, as if London were a point of reference. Why can’t the north of England just be the north? Why does it have to assert itself to, against and from the south?
I suppose it’s an understandable approach, in terms of making the book accessible (not to mention marketable). But some of the best books I’ve read about places beyond the capital cities haven’t bothered starting in the south (geographical or metaphorical) before reaching the far away north: they’ve just started in the north (whatever and wherever it is), told their story as is, and let readers from a south-centred universe simply catch up if they can.
One is Popular Music, by Swedish author Mikael Niemi. It’s a delightful and refreshing novel about a boy growing up in the Finnish-speaking population of the far north of Sweden in the 1960s, against a backdrop of the rise of rock and roll. Beautifully-crafted and often self-contained chapters each capture a stage in the central character’s life as he begins to explore music, girls and his culture. The big southern cities of Sweden are remote, distant and only occasionally relevant to the narrative. The windswept, snowswept Arctic tundra is Niemi’s metropolis.
Another is The Stornoway Way by Kevin MacNeil, a stunning novel about one Lewis man’s drink-fuelled descent into oblivion, written with uncompromising style and biting humour. It is one of the few books about the Western Isles not to feature an inch of cliche or romanticism, and perhaps the only book brilliant enough to allow just a little justification of Lewis’s bemusing sense of its own importance. Again, Edinburgh is remote and distant, and it is only by focusing on Stornoway, Lewis and the main character as the centre of its particular universe does the book do what it does so well.
As an aside, I recall discussing The Stornoway Way with a Lewis friend of mine, who told me what he’d heard from a venerable old Leodhasach more aligned to the traditional, religious culture of the island that outsiders would be more familiar with: “I don’t recognise the Stornoway portrayed in this book,” the old guy had said, “but if it exists, then we ignore this book at its peril.” If a book teaches people a thing or two about the place in which they’ve lived their whole, long life, then that’s no unremarkable thing.
If these books manage to allow areas furth of the major cities to stand on their own two feet without being viewed through a capital city prism, why are they such rarities?
I wonder whether mine does - now that a copy has dropped through the letterbox, fresh off the printing press, perhaps I ought to find out by reading it with a new perspective. Up The Creek Without A Mullet was never meant to be a book - it was just a “what if…” moment that I pursued beyond what was reasonable (not to mention affordable), and which people told me would make a good story. But if I can retrospectively pin an intention to it, it would be that it maybe aims to demonstrate that silly ideas are not the exclusive domain of creative media types in London who have such epiphanies with suspicious regularity. People in “the north”, any north, sometimes have ideas too. And write books about them. Hopefully quite good ones.
Now, to say that books should stand up for themselves if written from the north of whatever planet, and not feel anchored to the south like a straining hot air balloon, is certainly not provincial or narrow-minded - after all, you’d never justifiably write off a book as parochial or of no national importance purely because it was set in Edinburgh or London.
Those writing from the north of their planet, or who even see themselves as sitting on a distinct “Planet North”, may wish to remember that the physical or figurative journey from north to south is no shorter than from south to north.