Review: Granta 102

Resubscribing to Granta earlier this year turned out to be a good idea. I had forgotten what a good read it can be, and the new series under editor Jason Cowley continues the high standards I find in old copies on my book shelves. 

I think the reason I stopped subscribing to Granta in the past was the lack of time to read it.  Each edition is quite a substantial read, and the pieces contained in it are not the sort of thing you can flick through while eating lunch.  You need to settle down with Granta, and perhaps I found the most perfect situation for reading it with the last edition when I was on a cross-Channel ferry to Le Havre, a journey time of five hours.  It seemed to fit the mood perfectly, allowing me to complete an article then wander on deck for a while and mull over what I had read, then go back and read another.  By the way, in writing this review, I find myself struggling again with what words to use to describe Granta (magazine? journal?  book?), and the "pieces" it contains (articles? items?). 

Granta 102, The New Nature Writing contains a wide selection of items including several from very well known writers, such as Jonathan Raban, Richard Mabey and Roger Deakin.  The edition is far from being exclusively filled with articles about "nature", although the Mabey and Deakin pieces fit the bill perfectly.  I rather enjoyed extracts from Roger Deakin's notebook, such as

I can't bear to mow my lawn because it would mean mowing the blueness out of it, the vanishing blues of self-heal, bugle and germander speedwell.

As I work, all the robins in the neighbourhood gather on the cut grass and begin feeding and hunting for flies.  The both cats come out and sit in the new-mown hay, observing robins with feigned indifference. All of them are following deep instincts, attracted by the smell of hay, the sounds of me working, and the smell of fresh-cut herbs.

Second Nature - the de-landscaping of the American West by Jonathan Raban is the strongest item in the whole volume as far as I'm concerned.  I've enjoyed Raban's writing for a long time, with Badland, about the disasters which came from "homesteading", being one of my favorite books.  In Second Nature, Raban describes a radical environmentalism at work in America which seeks to return large tracts of land to their original wild condion. In Britain we hear so much about George Bush's government's refusal to bow to environmental pressures that we forget that at state level the story is sometimes very different.  A string of court victories has greatly restricted logging, mining and livestock grazing on public lands and near Seattle for example, 200 square miles of land is being added to existing wilderness areas.  In his 30 or so pages, Raban travels around north west America looking at the consequences of these policies and it is heartening to read of their successes. 

I enjoyed the short story Phantom Pain by Lydia Peelle, about an elderly taxidermist who recently suffered a leg amputation and his response to stories of a mountain lion at large in the neighbourhood.  The writer manages to get across the frustrations of ill-health and the tiresomeness of chronic pain.  I will look out for her debut short-story collection when it is published next year.

Some things don't work so well.  I've never liked transcripts of interviews and even in Netherley - Returning to Liverpool, I feel Paul Farley and Niall Griffiths would have benefited from editing and conflation. On the other hand, the somewhat repetitive photographs in Donovan Wylie's photo essay Demolishing the Maze work well, even though some are almost identical at first glance (incidentally, uUsers of photo-editing software or cameras with advanced manual functions will appreciate the effective use of colour accenting, where only one colour is allowed to emerge from a black and white photograph - see my attempt to the right).  

I won't describe any of the other 18 items in this edition of Granta, but will just mention Sean O'Brien's lovely poem, Elegy.  So often I find published poems little short of incomprehensible (you seem to need the skills of an expert cryptic crossword solver in order to understand them), but in Elegy, O'Brien economically and movingly captures the qualities of his father in ways which will speak to all his readers.  

For those who would like a taste of Granta, the website provides a good starting point, containing selected articles from back issues.  Robert MacFarlane's Blitzed Beijing from the previous edition might be a good place to start.