Footnotes

    Peter Fiennes is a most congenial, engaging guide in Footnotes: A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers. As he travels the country in the footsteps of writers from Charles Dickens and Celia Fiennes to Beryl Bainbridge and JB Priestley he is self-effacing, honest, mixing his subjects' past and his present in a nicely balanced way - personal but without unduly putting himself centre-stage.

    His pen portraits of the authors whose journeys he recreates round out as he examines their connections to places across the country - in some cases transient, in others long-lasting - while locations are shown in broad-brush as influences on their work or as revealing and reflecting facets of their character, or both. To take a few examples, he's in Dorset with Enid Blyton, Devon and Cornwall with Wilkie Collins, Snowdonia with Somerville & Ross, and the wilds of Scotland with Boswell and Dr. Johnson*, looking back in time to see the present day in a new light, to discover who we modern Britons are, what we want, how far we've come.

    The penultimate chapter describes a fantasy dinner party. Fiennes has imagined the perfect setting and devised a careful seating plan for his twelve guests with a menu to cater to all tastes. There will be post-prandial entertainment, though ultimately "Boswell [...] will take Dickens to one side and suggest they see if there's any action to be had outside on the street." Unsurprisingly, there's no place reserved at the table for Fiennes himself for no doubt he would be happier as fly on the wall, albeit a very well-read, perceptive fly.

    I'll end with another nice passage, and a return to Enid Blyton who gets a pretty fair appraisal here ("More often than not, [she] writes with addictive verve and JOY - and she knew exactly how to grip her audience."), and whose influence on so many of us is, at one level or another, still discernible:

    "And here comes Enid again, spreading out her tartan rug for tired limbs in the flower-filled meadow. There is ginger pop, and strawberries. Skylarks are calling and hovering in the cloudless sky. There's honeysuckle and dog roses in the hedgerows. Harvesters at rest in a field of mown hay. A ruined castle on a green hill. Hot dusty lanes. A distant sparkle on the blue sea. The village shop and the beaming bobby. 'You young scamps run along.' Sunlight ..."

    

 

*though to my slight disappointment my home city gets (by way of back-handed compliment) the merest mention as Dr. Johnson records 'On the eighteenth of August we left Edinburgh, a city too well known to admit description.'

Comments

[Mr Cornflower]

It was Johnson who defined "cat" in his Dictionary as a "Domestick animal which catches mice..." which isn't much more informative.

[Claire]

That sounds like a good one to listen to whilst walking. Thank you.

[callmemadam]

Shame about Edinburgh, but the rest of Boswell's book is very amusing.

[Fran H-B]

Waiting for this from the library. Heard Peter Fiennes speak at a literary festival; a very interesting man, who has such a way with words.

[Mystica]

I was so upset that the book is archived on Netgalley though publication date is 24th January.