![]() One visitor, a young student, David Holbrook, reminisced, 'I wanted to talk to him about life, about politics, Spain and that sort of thing, but he was wheezing away about an Arctic tern.' What resulted were some tense ménages with assorted friends and relatives, which Avril was left to deal with when Orwell retreated to his room with his typewriter. But he wanted his friends to visit and gave detailed instructions for the forty-eight-hour journey from London, with train and ferry times. His recurrent fear of assassination since his time in Barcelona in 1936-7 abated, although he still kept a gun at hand. He had fled the telephone, the requests for journalism and the busy chatter of London life, he explained in letters. Orwell was delighted: the place was 'extremely unget-at-able' he declared. The nearest shop was a twenty-five mile round trip, the nearest doctor was on Islay. "there was no daily postal service, no telephone and no electricity at Barnhill. In her chapter on the Isle of Jura, example, she visits Barnhill, the ramshackle farmhouse where George Orwell retreated to write his dystopian classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like Marsden and Grange, Bunting writes about the western islands from an outsider's perspective, following the footsteps of authors who've been drawn to these wild shores for generations. If her book has more of a travelogue quality, it's nonethess informative, perceptive, and engaging, providing a good overview of an archipelago rich in history and story. Bunting's book is lighter in tone and scope than those previously discussed (Philip Marsden's The Summer Isles and David Grange's The Frayed Atlantic Edge), but I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. Three years ago when Howard and I travelled up to the west coast of Scotland and the Isle of Skye, I took Madeleine Bunting's Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey to read on the long train ride north, and found it to be a perfect introduction to the landscape and culture I would soon be immersed in. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |