Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Immeasurable World
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
From LOC Authorities:
| LC control no.: | no2014072913 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2014072913 |
| HEADING: | Atkins, William (Editor) |
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| 040 | __ |a UkOxU |b eng |e rda |c UkOxU |d IEN |
| 046 | __ |s 20 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Atkins, William |c (Editor) |
| 370 | __ |c Great Britain |e London (England) |f Hampshire (England) |2 naf |
| 372 | __ |a Editing |a Landscapes — Great Britain |2 lcsh |
| 374 | __ |a Editors |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a male |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a The moor, 2014: |b title page (William Atkins) jacket (grew up in Hampshire ; after studying art history, he went to work in publishing, where he edited prize-winning fiction ; now works as a freelance editor, and studies and writes about Britain’s marginal landscapes ; lives in north London) |
PERSONAL
Born 1976.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Pan Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, former editorial director.
AWARDS:Eccles Prize, British Library, 2016.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Granta and the Guardian.
SIDELIGHTS
William Atkins has been described as part travel writer, part nature writer, and part historian. He thinks of himself as a reporter, though he acknowledged to Granta interviewer Luke Neima that he does often find himself exploring the “wild places” of the world. He writes of the topography and geology, the wildlife, and the indigenous people whose lives are impacted, sometimes dramatically, by the intrusions of explorers and adventurers.
The Moor
Atkins was raised in the medieval market town of Bishop’s Waltham, located near the southern coastline of England. The town abuts the national Site of Special Scientific Interest at the headwaters of the River Hamble, a spot known simply as “The Moors.” That is where Atkins’s journey began, when he was just a fourteen-year-old boy working on a school assignment. The Moors seemed like a soggy, inhospitable patch of fenland back then, untouched by the hands of time or the footprints of humankind. The moorland remains little changed since those early days, but the author’s perspective has expanded greatly.
During several independent trips from one season to the next, Atkins writes in The Moor: Lives, Landscape, Literature, he walked the moors and fens from Bodmin in the far southwest to the Otterburn Training Area near the Scottish border. He reveals that the very composition of the wilderness protects it from the dreams of developers. Boggy wetlands fed by subterranean springs, fen meadows drenched by abundant rainfall, soil alternately acidic or alkaline, and tough plant life that defies cultivation all deter attempts to tame the windswept landscape.
Yet Atkins also demonstrates that the moors reverberate with life. The frogs underfoot and the birds that fill the air with song share their hegemony with centuries of humans who have wrenched a hard living from the land. The author dips into history, weaving a biographical vignette of Emily Brontë in the unforgiving Haworth Moors, where she created Wuthering Heights, with stories of prisoners of the Napoleonic wars who froze to death in the prison they were forced to build at Dartmoor, to the beekeeping, winemaking monks of Buckfast Abbey, who live at the edge of Dartmoor to this day.
Readers were touched by Atkins’s multidisciplinary debut. Philip Hoare reported in the New Statesman that many years had passed since an author “evoked the uncanny spirit of the moors so powerfully.” “The lasting impression is that our moors remain moody and wild,” observed Roger Butler in the Geographical. At the same time, the volume “is on the whole quite cheerful,” Charlotte Mitchell noted in her Spectator review. “It is a series of affectionate local history sketches,” she added, which render The Moor “deeply enjoyable, a book worth reading and re-reading, sun or shower, indoors or out.”
The Immeasurable World
During a visit with the monks of Dartmoor, Atkins inadvertently discovered the destination of his next journey. The abbey library introduced him to accounts of the travelers who answered the call of the wild, not in the wetlands of the moors, but in the driest places on earth. After a romantic breakup, he set out for the solitude of the desert and recorded his odyssey in The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places.
Atkins began his junket in the so-called Empty Quarter of Oman. The vast sand desert that stretches across the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula played host to a number of colorful British adventurers over the years, including T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia. Atkins does not share their concept of the natural world as a hostile enemy to conquer by virtue of brute strength and tenacity, and then to love. “He is far more interested in the desert as a concept, its history and culture,” Justin Marozzi explained in the Spectator. The author moved on to the Great Victorian Desert of Australia, once home to Aboriginal people who looked for enlightenment not to the heavens but to the earth beneath their feet. Sadly, they were forced to abandon their ancestral homeland when that earth was contaminated by British nuclear tests in the 1950s.
In China, Atkins visited the Gobi Desert, preceded a century earlier by Christian missionary Mildred Cable and two female companions. He continued westward to the desert of shifting sands known as Taklamakan, a place of extreme temperatures and very little water. In Kazakhstan, Atkins observed the aftermath of willful destruction. The Soviet government had intentionally drained the vast Aral Sea in the 1960s in order to irrigate an ill-conceived cotton industry. By 2014 one of the largest inland waters of the world had disappeared into the sands to be known forever after as the heavily polluted Aralkum Desert.
Not all of his stories are infused with despair. Atkins arrived at the Black Rock Desert in Nevada during the annual Burning Man festival, which enabled him to include “an account of the nostalgic wackiness,” as a Kirkus Reviews commentator described it. That sojourn was followed, however, by a trip to the Sonoran Desert at the border where Arizona and California meet Mexico. The desert has claimed the lives of thousands of Latin American migrants desperate for a new start in a safe place.
After the decadence of Burning Man and sorrow over the fate of homeless migrants, Atkins craved a change of pace. He ended his journey in the quietude of the Coptic Orthodox Monastery of St. Antony in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. The emptiness of the desert nourished the spirit of monasticism as early as 270, when St. Antony is thought to have arrived there. His followers established the oldest monastery in the world soon after his death, and it remains today a destination for reflection upon “an idea of the infinite,” as Atkins described it to Neima.
“Atkins infuses his travel writing with poetic prose … to describe the beauty of what many consider to be wastelands,” wrote a contributor to Publishers Weekly. Some of the content leans toward “weighty material,” Dennis Drabelle mentioned in the Washington Post, “but Atkins is usually prepared to buoy it up with a joke.” Marozzi called Atkins “a gifted and interesting writer, with a deft turn of phrase and an original mind.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Geographical, September, 2014, Roger Butler, review of The Moor: Lives, Landscape, Literature, p. 63.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2018, review of The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places.
New Statesman, May 16, 2014, Philip Hoare, review of The Moor, p. 47.
Publishers Weekly, May 14, 2018, review of The Immeasurable World, p. 49.
Spectator, June 14, 2014, Charlotte Mitchell, review of The Moor, p. 41; June 2, 2018, Justin Marozzi, review of The Immeasurable World, p. 30.
Washington Post, August 21, 2018, Dennis Drabelle, review of The Immeasurable World.
ONLINE
Faber & Faber website, https://www.faber.co/uk/ (October 6, 2018), author profile.
Granta Online, https://granta.com/ (October 6, 2018), Luke Neima, author interview.
William Atkins
William Atkins’s first book, The Moor, was shortlisted for the Thwaites Wainwright Prize. He works as an editor and his journalism has appeared in the Guardian and Granta. In 2016 he was a recipient of the British Library Eccles Prize. He lives in London.
WILLIAM ATKINS IN CONVERSATION
William Atkins & Luke Neima
Granta’s online editor Luke Neima talks to William Atkins about his new book, The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places.
Luke Neima
The Immeasurable World falls between the two great traditions of travel writing and nature writing. Can you tell me a little about the influences that went into the writing of this book?
William Atkins
I suspect it’s closer to something like reportage, though I often am writing about <
Neima
You strike a balance in the book between telling the stories of early Western explorers and those of local peoples. As a writer and as a traveller, how do you bridge those two very different understandings of place?
Atkins
The chasm between the two is often the subject, the indigenous understanding of place serving to highlight the feebleness of Western interpretations, mine included. Those places that to explorers have been howling voids, literal blanks on maps, have often been realms of infinite complexity and value to indigenous populations. In Australia it can seem that the one remaining, but immeasurable, power Aboriginal people have is their knowledge.
Neima
One of the recurring figures in this book is St Antony, famous for the time he spent alone in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and for being one of the early advocates of monasticism. When did you become interested in him? Does his story have a particular resonance with the world today?
Atkins
St Antony is the book’s archetype, the original of the so-called Desert Fathers who founded monasticism in the deserts of third-century Egypt, and thus, in effect, Christian monasticism as a whole. Egypt’s present-day Coptic monks, whom I stayed with, aspire to a state of apatheia, a kind of holy detachment, disinterest and indifference. The desert is the physical counterpart of this state. The fourth-century theologian Evagrius of Pontus wrote: ‘Desert apatheia has a daughter whose name is love’. My book is partly an attempt to understand what he meant by that.
Neima
One of the accounts I was struck most by in your book is that of the man-made desertification you saw in Kazakhstan. What lessons did you take from your time there?
Atkins
Not a lesson exactly, but a reminder that environmental catastrophe is not usually an outcome of ignorance or improvidence or even inaction. The Aral Sea, which lies in a region of desert steppe, was once the fourth largest inland body of water in the world. In the 1960s the Soviet Union started drawing water from its feeder rivers in an effort to make the union self-sufficient in cotton (a very thirsty crop). The Aral Sea was regarded as a ‘mistake of nature’, and it was expected that it would be destroyed, along with its fish stocks and the communities those stocks supported. The desert that now covers its former bed is known as the Aralkum, the ‘Aral Sands’.
Neima
You write about how geography can become a ‘cordon and executioner’, as you put it in your account of the Sonoran desert, which acts as a natural border between Mexico and the United States. (An excerpt of that chapter appeared in our issue on Journeys). After your experiences there, how does Trump’s ongoing promises to build a border wall strike you?
Atkins
A friend of mine in Arizona, who died not long ago, told me about a particular dry wash she knew of, deep in the Sonoran Desert near the Mexico border. A little shade, no water closer than a stagnant stock-tank five miles away. This was where she wanted to leave the current president and an ally of his, Ann Coulter, for a week, with just enough water to keep them alive. The desert of course is the ancient place of revelation, and the idea was that it would prompt a more compassionate policy towards migrants, when the pair were finally picked up – perhaps even saved by passing Guatemalan or Mexican migrants – parched and grateful. Of course, since my friend died, it’s become apparent that some people are immune to transformation.
Neima
There’s an obsessive quality to many of the early explorers you write about, and there’s a kind of parallel obsession in the hermits and monks who spend their lives in deserts. What is it about the extremity of arid spaces that evokes obsession? And have you felt that obsession yourself?
Atkins
The Desert Fathers spoke of the paneremos, the deepest and most isolated part of the desert. French travelers in the Sahara had a corresponding term: le désert absolu. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in The Little Prince: ‘One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs and gleams.’ I suppose we’ve all been preoccupied with seeking this throbbing and gleaming something, which is really just<< an idea of the infinite.>>
Image © Oday Hazeem
The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places is available from Faber & Faber in the UK, and from Penguin Random House in the US.
Book World: Burning Man is just one of the many strange wonders of desert life
Dennis Drabelle
The Washington Post. (Aug. 21, 2018): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Dennis Drabelle
The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places
By William Atkins
Doubleday. 353 pp. $28.95
---
The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization
By Vince Beiser
Riverhead. 304 pp. $28
---
Each summer, Burning Man - a weeklong farrago of do-it-yourself spectacle and impromptu whoop-up - springs to life in the Nevada outback like a debauched Brigadoon. At a recent festival, William Atkins became the one thing that Burning Man discourages: a spectator.
In "The Immeasurable World," his perceptive and witty account of his desert travels, Atkins gives the reader an entertaining tour of the tent city's zones and attractions, including the Barbie Deathcamp, the Camel Toe Fashion Show and the Hug Bank, which "offered a 'menu' ranging from 'businesslike' to 'awkward.'" He also zeroes in on certain little-known properties of the extravaganza - its whiteness, for example. "The portapotties," he writes, "were suctioned out each morning by Mexican labor, almost the only dark faces you saw."
And he puts his finger on the underlying Burning Man dilemma: how to achieve maximum spontaneity while living cheeks-to-cheeks (nudity is commonplace) with 60,000 or so other burners. To help everyone make connections, a homegrown institution known as the Department of Public Works puts up road signs. The signs never last long, though; anarchists paint over them or take them down, leaving festivalgoers disoriented. "Those responsible for the vandalism were not admired," Atkins writes, "but their lawlessness was truer to Burning Man's founding spirit."
The Burning Man chapter comes toward the end of the book, which starts with a nod to the explorers - many of them Atkins' fellow Englishmen - who did not share the majority view of deserts as hellish regions to be avoided at all costs. With a local guide, Atkins, also the author of a travel book on the English moors, samples the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, where the likes of Wilfred Thesiger and Bertram Thomas performed impressive feats of "discovery" - that is, reaching sites previously known only to nomadic Bedouin. Citing Thesiger's preferred state of celibacy and T.E. Lawrence's praise of "abnegation, renunciation, self-restraint," Atkins sums up the allure to which they succumbed. "For those sweating, leaking, reeking, dreaming travelers in the hyper-arid Middle East, the desert promised asylum - both from garden England and from their own body and its cursed fecundity and importuning, its (BEGIN ITAL)un(END ITAL)cleanness."
This is<< weighty material, but Atkins is usually prepared to buoy it up with a joke.>> I especially like his description of the gizmo he bought in advance of his visit to the Empty Quarter, where "the average annual rainfall is five millimeters." He would self-hydrate with "a CamelBak - a blue plastic bladder that slips inside your backpack and has a spigoted rubber catheter that snakes over the shoulder for on-the-go suckling."
Atkins' itinerary also includes the Great Victoria Desert of Australia, the Taklamakan Desert of China, the Aralkum Desert of Kazakhstan, the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and the Eastern Desert of Egypt. In that last region, he hangs out with Coptic Christian monks who undermine the prejudice that the desert is strictly for loners. The life of a cenobitic monk, he writes, is "shriveled, perhaps, but not joyless. What I am most aware of, in fact, is love; each man touches the hand of every other he meets, to bless him or take his blessing."
Blessings are hard to come by in "The World in a Grain," American journalist Vince Beiser's impassioned and alarming report on sand. The only good news in the book is that Atkins' deserts - indeed, deserts in general - are likely to survive because their sand has no utilitarian value. Sand's predominant commercial use is as a constituent of concrete, a purpose for which desert sand won't do because, "shaped by wind rather than water, [the] grains are too round to bond together well."
So much construction is going on worldwide as rural people migrate to cities en masse that the right kind of sand - typically found on river bottoms or ocean floors - is coveted by builders and made off with by pirates who aren't above murdering those who stand in their way. Dredging up that sand causes great harm to the environment, including to floodplains where sand normally serves as a buffer against storms. Sand-enabled construction has given rise to ever bigger houses, in suburbs ever more distant from the urban job sites to which the house owners drive, burning ever more fossil fuel, enhancing the greenhouse effect and exacerbating global warming - so that in Beiser's artful telling, the planet is caught up in a vicious, sand-fueled cycle.
Beiser is particularly informative on China, where the aforementioned mass migration is most acute. Calling China "the world's largest consumer of concrete and the most voracious consumer of sand in human history," he notes that, ironically, the country also has too much of the wrong kind of sand - the desert variety - which is being added to by surging development. As people colonize new territory in Inner Mongolia, Beiser points out, they "cut trees for firewood and draw groundwater to irrigate farmland and run heavy industries. ... As underground aquifers get depleted, the land dries up. Without plant roots to anchor it and moisture to weight it, topsoil blows away, leaving behind only pebbles and sand. Which means that at the same time that we're running out of the sand we need, we're generating more of the kind we don't."
China purports to be solving this problem by planting trees, millions upon millions of them, creating the "Great Green Wall." Beiser, however, is skeptical. Many of the newly planted trees die young, and while alive they siphon up groundwater. Whether the Great Green Wall is "hurting or helping," he writes, is "hard to know." What's easy to know is that the fate of sand exemplifies humans' increasing overconsumption of natural resources. "Sand," Beiser reminds us, "is perhaps the most abundant substance on the planet's surface. If we're running out of that, we really need to rethink how we're using everything."
---
Drabelle, a former contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World, writes frequently on the environment.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Drabelle, Dennis. "Book World: Burning Man is just one of the many strange wonders of desert life." Washington Post, 21 Aug. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A551070956/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e5bf9aba. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
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Print Marked Items
Atkins, William: THE IMMEASURABLE
WORLD
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Atkins, William THE IMMEASURABLE WORLD Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 7, 24 ISBN: 978-0-385-
53988-3
A wide-ranging travelogue, covering eight deserts, interspersed with historical accounts of desert geography and travel.
Making up one-sixth of our planet's land, deserts have fascinated writers since the dawn of Christianity, a group that
includes Atkins (The Moor: A Journey into the English Wilderness, 2014), the former editorial director of Pan
Macmillan UK. A lucid observer, the author chronicles his travels through the world's most arid lands, ruminating on
their history, natural history, ongoing conditions, and mostly discouraging future. Viewing the world through British
eyes, he makes a beeline for the first of his eight deserts, the great Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia and Oman, a
destination of the author's most flamboyant countrymen, from T.E. Lawrence to Harry St. John Philby, whose paths he
has tried to follow. Next up is Australia's Great Victorian Desert, still partly off-limits as a result of 1950s British
nuclear tests and home to a large Indigenous population ejected from their lands to accommodate the tests. No one was
ejected from the Kyzylkum Desert in central Asia, but the population was impoverished as Soviet irrigation emptied the
Aral Sea. American readers will enjoy the absence of depressing news from Nevada's Black Rock Desert, and they will
also find<< an account of the nostalgic wackiness>> of the Burning Man festival. In the Great Sonoran Desert to the
southwest, thousands of migrants have died trying to reach the United States. Atkins describes activists who set out
water and provisions deep in the desert and the vigilantes and Border Patrol agents who destroy them. Each section
begins with a detailed map to help situate readers in the region.
The book doesn't contain an underlying theme, and Atkins learns most of his history and science from books, but he has
an acute eye and delivers unrelated but satisfying journalistic accounts of the world's hottest, driest regions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Atkins, William: THE IMMEASURABLE WORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723179/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2746a0bc. Accessed 30 Sept.
2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723179
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The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert
Places
Publishers Weekly.
265.20 (May 14, 2018): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places
William Atkins. Doubleday, $28.95 (384p) ISBN 978-0-385-53988-3
British author Atkins takes readers on a thoroughly enjoyable tour of the world's deserts. After a breakup with his
girlfriend of four years and a week spent with Cistercian monks in southwest England, Atkins (The Moor) became
obsessed with deserts. His fascination began when he read, in the monastery's well-stocked library, accounts of desert
explorers and he soon became consumed with the desire to "stand in the desert ... and imagine what it might to do to a
person who abandoned himself to it." And so began an odyssey that took Atkins to eight deserts across the globe: the
Empty Quarter in Oman, the Gobi and Taklamakan in China, Australia's Great Victoria, the Aral Sea area in
Kazakhstan, the Black Rock and Sonoran in the U.S., and Egypt's Eastern Desert. Interspersed with his own adventures
are tales of those who have gone before him, such as Christian missionary Mildred Cable, who traveled the Gobi desert
at the turn of the 20th century. Atkins also takes a contemporary look at deserts, describing, for example, the setting of
the Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert<< Atkins infuses his travel writing with poetic prose>> (he
describes the Great Australian Bight as "a callused web of skin between two digits") <
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places." Publishers Weekly, 14 May 2018, p. 49. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539387452/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c38c7e14. Accessed 30 Sept.
2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539387452
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The Moor
Roger Butler
Geographical.
86.9 (Sept. 2014): p63.
COPYRIGHT 2014 Circle Publishing Ltd.
http://www.geographical.co.uk/
Full Text:
THE MOOR
by William Atkins
Faber & Faber, hb, 18.99 [pounds sterling]
According to official figures, our windswept moorlands account for just six per cent of the UK's total area, which,
despite drainage, grazing, tourism and other development, is only slightly less than the statistic from the 19th century.
Daunting and defiant, it seems that these empty uplands haven't yet been tamed, and as William Atkins strides out
across the backbone of Britain, he finds that they echo with tales of lonely landscapes and the people who live and work
there.
This is a personal journey inspired by childhood days spent exploring his local moor (although strictly speaking, it was
a fen) near Bishops Waltham in Hampshire. The author remembers it as an isolated and mysterious patch of ground,
covered in soggy tussocks, but as he travels from Bodmin to the Scottish Borders, he explains how the fierce landscapes
we associate with
Wuthering Heights and The Hound of the Baskervilles are often far from being raw, untouched wilderness. He digs
below the peat and the heather to tell tales of monks and priests, gamekeepers and miners, solitary birdwatchers, lonely
farmers and even prisoners held high on Dartmoor.
<
across skylines, but the terrain puts a stop to most encroachment.
Britain's C[O.sub.2] emissions could double if we lost five per cent of our moors and there are now concerted efforts to
restore damage. Whether such work would have repaired the vast bog burst above Haworth, as witnessed by the Brontes
on a dry summer's day in 1824, is debatable. Bridges were swept away and rivers turned into black ink as the moor
reminded everyone of its secret power.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Butler, Roger. "The Moor." Geographical, Sept. 2014, p. 63. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A383980442/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f1601ddc. Accessed 30 Sept.
2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A383980442
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The call of the wild
Charlotte Mitchell
Spectator.
324.9694 (June 14, 2014): p41.
COPYRIGHT 2014 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The Moor: Lives, Landscape, Literature
by William Atkins
Faber, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 352, ISBN 9780571290062
Spectator Bookshop, 15.99 [pounds sterling]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
'No, no' I said, when The Spectator's literary editor rang up, 'I'm sure you must be able to find someone who really
wants to read another postcolonial analysis of the figure of the North African in English literature.' But the book turned
out to be about the other kind of moor, so I said yes, though not without some anxiety that it might be like Eeyore's
Gloomy Place: Rather Boggy and Sad.
Luckily, William Atkins's book, though it acknowledges that moors can be bleak, isolated and unforgiving, especially
for permanent residents and those scraping a living off the land, <
Northumberland (Wales and Scotland do not feature).
He begins with his GCSE geography project on the moor behind his parents' house in Bishop's Waltham in Hampshire
where he spent his 'dusks after school and ... before-school dawns, and every weekend, and every holiday', watching the
wildlife and monitoring the water level. It's the picture of an odd teenager, but the self-revelation this seems to promise
doesn't really emerge. Once the GCSEs are behind, the autobiographical element is minimal, and Atkins preserves a
wary, detached voice.
As usual with travel books, the landscape conjures up our old friends--the man with a dog, the woman in the church,
and so on --but one doesn't feel the author warming to them and they don't emerge as individuals. He consults the odd
scientific expert, the occasional local historian, but he always seems quite glad to get away from them to his solitary,
exceptionally disgusting picnics ('I rested on a dais of moss ... and ate six Snack-Sized Cornish Pasties'; 'I sat down on
the rocky beach and had a King-Size Pork Pie and a sachet of Orange-Flavoured Capri Sun'; 'From the pocket of my
rucksack I took some raisins, a marshmallow, a date, a Fruit Pastille and an orange'.)
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Much more vivid are his encounters with the dead. Some of these are well-known, such as Ian Brady, Sylvia Plath,
Henry Williamson, W.H. Auden, the mad Vicar of Warleggan and Emily Brontë--rather a mixed bunch you might well
think, and not the kind of people everyone would choose as holiday companions, but despite this their encounters with
various moors are sympathetically integrated into Atkins's own journeys.
He disinters forgotten murderers and dim poets, and writes convincingly about geology and archaeology. There is a very
memorable account of the building of Dartmoor prison by Napoleonic prisoners of war. Old battles from Otterburn to
Kinder Scout are remembered. Traces of old ways of life and lost communities are found in abandoned mine-workings,
old churches, Celtic shrines and Roman camps. Excerpts from the heartrending journal of an Exmoor farmer, William
Hannam, animate the story of Victorian efforts to create productive farmland from wet and acid waste. It was Atkins's
bad luck that he did some of his research trips in the record-breakingly soggy summer of 2012, but The Moor is <
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mitchell, Charlotte. "The call of the wild." Spectator, 14 June 2014, p. 41. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A372555211/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0a23e890. Accessed 30 Sept.
2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A372555211
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Lone and level sands
Justin Marozzi
Spectator.
337.9901 (June 2, 2018): p30+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
William Atkins passes one of the desert's great tests with flying colours, says Justin Marozzi. He loves the
imperiousness of camels
The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places
by William Atkins
Faber, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 416
Here's a treat for desert lovers. William Atkins, author of the widely admired book The Moor, has wisely exchanged the
dank, wind-lashed chill of Britain's moorland for eight of the world's fieriest deserts, from the Empty Quarter of Oman
and Egypt's Eastern Desert to the Taklamakan in China and an unlikely stint at Burning Man in America's Black Rock
Desert.
It's not entirely clear what prompted these particular journeys or this specific quest. We learn in the second sentence that
a long-standing girlfriend has gone to live and work abroad and Atkins is not going with her; so perhaps a retreat into
the desert is the wholly appropriate response in a travel writer searching for new territory to furrow. After a flurry of
desert travelogues (Lawrence, Doughty, Thesiger, Philby, Thomas et al), he reckons that the ultimate objective of every
desert traveller is 'the axis where the absolute coexists with the infinite'. And off he goes to Oman.
Atkins is amusingly down on adventurers, whom he considers a 'new breed of fanatic: rangy, large-toothed guys seeking
not knowledge, or even territory, but novelty, managed suffering, "experience", material, sponsorship'.<< He is far more
interested in the desert as a concept, its history and culture,>> and the mostly fraught, frequently fatal interaction between
the indigenous inhabitants of these wild places and those outsiders who have come to explore, civilise, appropriate and
all too often desecrate them.
He has certainly put in a lot of research at the dune face. He explains how the grains of sand in the Empty Quarter are
composed of quartz whose 'rind' of ferric oxide imparts that unmistakable, reddish tinge. He is also a lover of camels,
which means he passes one of the desert's most important tests with flying colours. 'It is the imperiousness of camels
that people dislike; and it is that imperiousness--that they will not be cowed and cannot be humiliated--that I love.' Well
put.
He is particularly good on Australia, musing on how, unlike the desert monotheisms that 'tip their heads skywards, seek
divinity in the heavens', the indigenous Anangu 'know that it is the land--the ground beneath their feet--where the
creative spirit resides'. This makes it all the more tragic that the nuclear tests carried out by British and Australian
scientists in the 1950s and 1960s should have effectively killed their ancestral homeland.
More gloom awaits the author in Kazakhstan, where he explores the new Aralkum Desert, created by the retreating Aral
Sea, victim of the ruinous Soviet river-draining experiment to grow cotton. I remember Muynak, a threadbare,
tuberculosis-haunted town on what was once the southern shore of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, as one of the most
depressing places I have ever visited. Thankfully, a shot of self-deprecating humour relieves the gloom. Atkins's arrival
in Almaty coincides with the World Weightlifting Championships, so that among all the giants in tracksuits 'at the
public baths it was possible to feel diminished'.
In the Sonoran Desert on the American border with Mexico, Atkins becomes more political and preachy, and the writing
a little precious. Sitting down with illegal migrants outside a church in Tucson, he hands out cigarettes and 'cans of San
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Pellegrino lemonade'. It feels a bit selfconsciously virtuous and unselfconsciously transactional--your story for treats--
while the chichi Italian brand sounds a dissonant note.
The story comes to a close after a blast of Burning Man madness in Nevada, where Atkins, engagingly, just wishes he
could 'lie somewhere quiet and read a book'. Fortunately, he maintains his observational powers, which are put to good
use recording cock-lollies (cast from a man's penis), 'shirt-cocking' (wearing shirts without underwear) and the assorted,
drug-addled exotica of your typical Burning Man exercise in decadence and abandon--or 'radical self-reliance and
radical self-expression' as the organisers put it.
There is a final, more austere sojourn in Saint Antony's monastery in Egypt's Eastern Desert, where Atkins reflects on
the desert as a place for withdrawal, none so complete as that of the cave-dwelling saint who was forever pursued by
crowds of salvation-seeking acolytes.
A brief word on the jacket blurb. While all publishers indulge in a bit of showboating on the cover--a soupcon of
exaggeration is forgivable in the interests of books flying off shelves--the claim that this author ranks alongside 'greats
like Newby, Chatwin and Morris' is over-enthusiastic. Leave that sort of comparison to others.
Atkins is <>. He uncovers the many guises of
the desert with much imagination, insight and wit. There is a lot of good material here, but at mopre than 400 pages his
book does feel too long. Sometimes, as the desert often reminds us, less is more.
Caption: Bactrian camels in the Khongoryn Els sand dunes of the Gobi Desert
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Marozzi, Justin. "Lone and level sands." Spectator, 2 June 2018, p. 30+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543465224/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=353e3ad9. Accessed 30 Sept.
2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543465224
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Walks on the wild side
Philip Hoare
New Statesman.
143.5210 (May 16, 2014): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2014 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
The Moor: Lives, Landscape, Literature
William Atkins
Faber & Faber, 371pp. 18.99 [pounds sterling]
In the upper reaches of the National Portrait Gallery in London, Branwell Bronte's oil painting of his sister Emily is
cracked and fissured. The paint barely sits on the canvas. In front of it, an American woman employed by the gallery is
delivering a lunchtime talk about the Brontes. She is knowledgeable and efficient, and she quotes from a contemporary
review of Wuthering Heights, written by a critic who found the book barbaric, shocking and disgusting; beyond the pale
of respectability.
But Emily Bronte is now the accepted face of the wild moors, and we cannot think of the Yorkshire moors without her.
The savageness of her work has become polished by our preconceptions. It needs to be renewed; we must reclaim our
moors from cream teas and see them from the vantage point of the raptors wheeling overhead.
William Atkins does that, gloriously, in his disinterment of the English moors. His book, which has an affecting section
on Emily--who was called "the General" by her family and who emerges as fairly barbaric, too, not above whipping her
own dog ---approaches those mythic wastes in the way she did, walking over them, and populating their wilderness
(which covers 6 per cent of the country) with the humanity that shaped it. Drawing on literature, art and industry, The
Moor is as much social history as natural history. Atkins is an expeditionary anthropologist, making his way into
England's dark heart.
He starts his countrywide trek at an unlikely place: a vestigial moor in southern Hampshire, so insignificant that, even
though it is less than ten miles from where I live, I never knew it existed until now. Atkins grew up there, in the town of
Bishop's Waltham. As a 14-year-old boy, he wrote a precocious GCSE essay on these few acres of wild land. The Moor
is an imaginative, allusive extension of that enthusiasm--sometimes I felt young Will was doing his Duke of Edinburgh's
Award, and feared for his safety in bog and mist. But as Atkins sits down to his King-Size Pork Pie and sachet of CapriSun,
poetry spills out. Not since Tim Binding's haunting On Ilkley Moor (2001) has a writer<< evoked the uncanny spirit
of the moors so powerfully.>>
The moors lodge in our collective imaginations from early on. As my father was Yorkshire-born, we spent summer
holidays visiting the blackened parsonage, graveyard and cobbles of Haworth or the moorland asylum where my own
uncle was incarcerated. Dartmoor, too--with its Gothic prisons and red-eyed hounds--is a fixed childhood memory for
many. In the village of Princetown, Napoleonic prisoners of war froze to death in a building whose windows went
unglazed. Inmates killed one another "over half a raw potato". In its first ten years alone, 1, 478 men died at the prison;
Atkins describes their bones rising to the surface as if rejected by the moor. More benevolent is the presence of Buckfast
Abbey and its bee-breeding monks, in whose company the author finds a certain anachronistic solace.
On Saddleworth, other ghosts appear those of Hindley and Brady (Atkins could well have included the white-shirt-clad
spectre that lurches out of the same midnight moor in Morrissey's autobiography). And on the North York Moors,
Atkins encounters the eerie early-warning installations of Fylingdales, with their ominous domes and oddly lyrical
acronyms: SSPAR, "solid-state phased array radar".
Deeper into Yorkshire we find Ted Hughes as a boy, climbing up the hills of Hebden backwards, because it was good
for the leg muscles. And we follow Hughes and Sylvia Plath up to the ruined shell of Top Withens (claimed as the
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model for Wuthering Heights). "We could buy this place and renovate it!" says Plath, only for Hughes to reply, darkly,
"except, of course, except/For the empty horror of the moors".
But these are places of recreation and procreation, too. Atkins takes issue with Auden's "celibate, evacuated landscape".
Instead, he sees the land alive with burping frogs, whinnying curlews and rising larks. He "landlopes" over every moor,
and even immerses his body in the peaty brown water that runs from farm bath taps (Victorian spas offered the ultimate
invasion of a peat enema).
While he charts murders, plane crashes and fields filled with the lethal leavings of army manoeuvres, he also walks out
in the summer, continually turning his cap peak against the beating sun. In the winter, he crosses frozen expanses where,
in a memorable scene, he sees what he thinks are wading birds taking off from a lake, only to realise the shapes are "fine
platelets of ice being torn away by gusts of wind and flung up twenty feet into the air, and scintillating".
At points, Atkins might well be describing Antarctica, a terra nullius. At others, he evokes a more obviously managed
landscape, joining a grouse shoot in an exciting episode evocative of a battle scene, with circular butts as trenches and
well-dressed "guns" from town. Even in this celebration of futile death, an artificial harvest for which countless hen
harriers and falcons have been poisoned or shot, Atkins sees a kind of transcendence. Handed a dead grouse, he swings
its head between his forefingers as he has seen the hunters do, and it seems to weigh almost nothing at all.
Perhaps that is the beauty of this book. Vivid with incident and exquisite description, it has a touch so deceptively light
that it too seems to weigh nothing, yet mean everything.
Philip Hoare's "The Sea Inside" is out now in paperback (Fourth Estate, 9.99 [pounds sterling])
Hoare, Philip
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hoare, Philip. "Walks on the wild side." New Statesman, 16 May 2014, p. 47. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A386607830/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=65e6479c. Accessed 30 Sept.
2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A386607830