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WORK TITLE: Addlands
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.tombullough.com/
CITY: Brecon Beacons, Wales
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Welsh
http://www.tombullough.com/biography/ * http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/274663/tom-bullough
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1975; married; wife’s name Charlie; children: two.
EDUCATION:Attended Royal Holloway College, University of London.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and novelist. University of South Wales, (campuses at Cardiff, Newport, and Pontypridd Wales), visiting fellow. Previously worked as a sawmiller, a music promotor in Zimbabwe, a tractor driver, a journalist, a screenwriter, a tractor driver, and a T-shirt salesman.
WRITINGS
Contributor to various titles in the “Rough Guides” series of travel books.
SIDELIGHTS
Konstantin
Fiction writer Tom Bullough grew up primarily on a farm in Radnorshire and continues to live in Wales. He is a novelist whose novels include Konstantin. A book of historical fiction, Kostantin recounts the life of the Soviet space program’s founding father, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. As the novel begins, a nineteenth-century Russian boy named Kostya lives in Ryazan and then eventually Vyatka (which later became Kirov). Nearly deaf from the age of ten on because of scarlet fever, Kostya nevertheless is an optimistic person and dreamer. Kostya’s mother aids him in appreciating the magic and wonder of life, talking to him about the magic of the sun. “The opening chapters showcase Bullough’s talent for rural description, the specificity of a particular forest nonetheless dissolving into a vast emptiness; a landscape lunar enough that outer space is not, for Kostya, such a leap of the imagination,” wrote Ophelia Field for the Guardian Online.
Kostya’s childhood is over when his other dies and Kostya becomes Konstantin. He ends up goes to a library in Moscow to learn as much as he can about life and the world, sometimes under the tutelage of a librarian named Nikolai Fedorov. The novel follows Konstantin as he becomes a teacher himself and a devotee of science, who at a young age invented a device held up to his ear to help him hear. The novel reveals how Konstantin eventually makes important contributions to Russian science that will ultimately lead to Russia launching Sputnik, although in an afterword Bullough notes that this occurred 21 years after the death of the real Konstantin.
“Reading this novel is a joy: the writing is confident and not afraid to draw attention to itself,” noted a Bastian’s Book Reviews (& Politics) Web site contributor, who added: “It allows itself dramatic, poetic, aesthetically stunning sentences (the most fanciful of which is at the end of the very first scene, gloriously announcing: this book is not afraid to dazzle), and almost every scene is like a beautifully crafted little gem of its own.” Daily Record Online contributor Christopher Bryant remarked: Konstantin “is a book about dreams, and what it means to be different from the pack in order to follow those dreams. And therein lies its power, and its beauty.”
Addlands
Bullough’s next novel, titled Addlands, is the first of his novels to be published in the United States. It tells the story of a Welsh family over seven decades, from the birth of the novel’s main character, Oliver, in 1941 on through to 2011. Oliver’s homesteader parents, Idris and Etty, live a simple sheep farming life and are involved in their church community.” “Their livelihood depends on being attuned to changes in the environment,” wrote Stuart Kelly in the Spectator, who went on to point out that Bullough includes newspaper cuttings in the text “as neat little indicators of social change” as the years pass and technological advances encroach on the family’s way of life and politics help reshape their world.
As the story progresses, Oliver becomes interest in boxing, first approaching it as a pastime but eventually becoming more involved and earning a reputation as a brawler. Meanwhile, readers learn that Idris’s grim nature is due to his experiences in World War I while Etty is also hiding a secret about Oliver’s past. When Oliver eventually leaves the farm, he finds he cannot live happily in the outside world and longs for a life on the land. He eventually has a son named Cefin, who grows up away from the farm and struggles to find his own place in life.
“The freight of detail that Bullough has amassed in order to ground Addlands in place is impressive,” wrote Financial Times Online contributor Melissa Harrison, adding: “Not only does he grant the farms, hills and lanes their names, but also the fields; there are some lovely old dialect terms (he provides a glossary on his website), and beautifully precise natural and agricultural details abound.” Spectator contributor Stuart Kelly noted: “The novel has an elegant structural conceit” and went on to write: “One of the most impressive features of the book is how language changes” over the course of the novel.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2016, review of Addlands.
Spectator, June 18, 2016, Stuart Kelly, “Into a Cloud-Scratched Sky,” review of Addlands, p. 30.
ONLINE
Bastian’s Book Reviews (& Politics), http://www.bastianbalthasarbooks.co.uk/ (March 5, 2012), review of Konstantin.
Caught by the River, http://www.caughtbytheriver.net/ (July 12, 2016), Martha Sprackland, review of Addland.
Daily Record Online, http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/ (September 28, 2012), Gregor White, review of Konstantin.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (June 10, 2016), Melissa Harrison, review of Addlands.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (February 26, 2012), Opehelia Field, review of Konstantin; (June 11, 2016), Jem Poster, “Addlands by Tom Bullough Review — a Chronicle of Change in Rural Wales.”
Polari, http://www.polarimagazine.com/ (August 23, 2012), Christopher Bryant, review of Konstantin.
Tom Bullough Home Page, http://www.tombullough.com (February 18, 2017).
Tom Bullough grew up on a hill farm in Wales, where he still lives. He has worked as a sawmiller, a music promotor in Zimbabwe, a tractor driver, and a contributor to various titles in the Rough Guides series. At present he is a Visiting Fellow at the University of South Wales. Addlands is his fourth novel, the first to be published in the United States.
This picture shows me at my most foresightful. It comes from a poster popular in Athena in the 1980s, which has been removed from circulation for obvious reasons.
I spent most of my childhood (just) on a hill farm in Radnorshire, which looked a bit like Penllan in The Claude Glass and is the source of my enthusiasm for Wales, hills, castles, birds of prey and How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban. For a couple of years, we lived on a strawberry farm in Herefordshire, which had a castle of its own and complimentary strawberries. Then we returned to the border.
I spent three years at Royal Holloway College, University of London. A is in its debt.
I tried four or five times to live in London but I couldn’t.
Among other things I have worked as a journalist, a sawmiller, a screenwriter, a tractor driver, a T-shirt salesman and a Zimbabwean music promoter.
For the past ten years I have lived in Breconshire. Firstly, in a remote, inconvenient and entirely beautiful house above the Elan Valley reservoirs in the Cambrian Mountains, where you could see 30 miles from the kitchen window and, being off the mains, had to run a laptop off tractor batteries and a very old generator which preferred not to work in cold weather, which was much of the time. As I have since discovered, the house is well-known in certain circles for an alien abduction in 1909. It was also the original inspiration for Peter J. Conradi’s superb At the Bright Hem of God: Radnorshire Pastoral.
Now I live in the Brecon Beacons with my wife Charlie and our two small, vocal children. It is here that I have written Konstantin and Addlands – often while tramping round the hill, Mynydd Illtyd, since views of the Epynt, Pen-y-Fan and the Black Mountains do wonders for thinking clearly. Our hall is papered with The Tempest, Lanark by Alasdair Gray, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, The Iron Man by Ted Hughes and The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban – arranged so that you can read them round the walls. There are books and bits of paper pretty much everywhere. Across the lane, on a sort of tumulus, is a fibreglass canal boat I may one day transform into somewhere to work.
At present I am a Visiting Fellow at the University of South Wales. I am at the very early stages of a story that may become an Elan Valley novel.
LC control no.: nb2002023281
LC classification: PR6102.U47
Personal name heading:
Bullough, Tom
Found in: A, 2002: t.p. (Tom Bullough)
Konstantin, 2012: t.p. (Tom Bullough) jkt. flap (b. 1975;
lives in Wales)
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Bullough, Tom: ADDLANDS
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bullough, Tom ADDLANDS Dial (Adult Fiction) $27.00 8, 16 ISBN: 978-0-8129-9872-6
Piety, pugnacity, and secrets shape the lives of a rural Welsh family across 70 years.Bullough's fourth novel and first published in the United States is mainly centered on Oliver, who is born in 1941 to Idris and Etty, two homesteaders whose lives appear to be simply circumscribed by their farm and church. As Oliver grows older, though, problems emerge: Idris struggles to keep the farm solvent, his estranged brother has his eye on the property, and Oliver's youthful interest in boxing expands to a more wide-ranging interest in fisticuffs. Past secrets come up, too--Idris' grim, no-nonsense demeanor stems from the agonies of his service in World War I, and there's a secret about Oliver's past that Etty has hidden as well. As Oliver grows older and becomes a father himself, Bullough means to explore the ways that tensions are passed from one generation to the next. At times that message is communicated opaquely, though. Bullough's consistent use of Welsh dialect is at once colorful and something of a stumbling block: "sclem," "mawn," "mimmockin," "pwntrel," "lattermath," and "addlands" itself, the edge of a ploughland. (Bullough's website has a glossary.) And the overall fecundity of the prose--Bullough delivers plenty of longueurs about the landscape--can swallow up his characters' tensions. But as progress stumbles on--church buildings are torn down in 1996, livestock succumbs to foot-and-mouth in 2001--Etty's and Oliver's sheer endurance is plainspoken and admirable, even if that endurance has an ironic cast. When Oliver is told that his son's mother (a disappointingly underdrawn character) has written an important work of "post-pastoral poetry," Oliver retorts: "Post-pastoral? We in't done yet." A serious if sometimes-overgrown farm tale.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bullough, Tom: ADDLANDS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA455212486&it=r&asid=649ed900ff366dd62d639bf4dae31639. Accessed 23 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A455212486
Into a cloud-scratched sky
Stuart Kelly
Spectator. 331.9799 (June 18, 2016): p30.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Addlands
by Tom Bullough
Granta, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 304, ISBN 9781783781645
There have been a number of attempts to graft the style of the so-called new nature writing onto the novel: works such as Melissa Harrison's Clay, for instance, or Amy Sackville's Orkney. Tom Bullough's Addlands is a very creditable contribution to this genre. The form does have an intrinsic problem: how does one dramatise seeing? The solution here is that the characters--the reserved Idris Hamer, his stoical wife, Etty, and their son Oliver, a principled bruiser-are farmers in the Welsh borders. Their livelihood depends on being attuned to changes in the environment.
The novel has an elegant structural conceit. It begins in 1941, with Oliver being born and his father telling the midwife that 'I had best fodder the beasts, I had', then cycles through the decades to conclude in 2011. At the same time, the individual chapters inch through the seasons, from 'cloud-scratched skies' back to the 'pearl-like' mistletoe. Newspaper cuttings intersperse the text, as neat little indicators of social change.
The narrative is, to coin another genre, Elegiac-Georgic. Idris is a natural conservative, who thinks tractors will break down more frequently than horses. Technology and politics encroach on farming throughout, from the War Ag to (inevitably) the foot-and-mouth crisis. But the characters are not propositions in a thesis about postwar agriculture. Though she would not use the word, the resilient Etty is a feminist; Idris, though inflexible and laconic, is, if not good, then honourable, and quietly damaged; Oliver chafes at and embraces his fate. It may not be as visceral as, say, Cynan Jones's The Dig, but there is no way these lives would be described as easy.
One of the most impressive features of the book is how language changes. It is like an incarnation of the argument put forward in Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks. In the opening chapter we get 'whilcar', 'fescue', 'copps', 'reens', 'glat', 'tump' and 'flem'. 'Addlands' itself means the border of a ploughed field, the part done last--and this is a novel of last things. In the final chapter we get 'Whazzup (-;'. The lilt and timbre of spoken voices is handled beautifully, but even here what is distinctive is gradually eroded.
There are a few infelicities. Is it necessary that almost every female character, however fleeting, must have their breasts described? One character goes on to become a 'post-pastoral' poet, which seems more like a jibe than essential to the story. Nevertheless, at its heights the prose glimmers and shimmers. 'Somebody had to defend the margins, to keep the past in its place' is stated towards the denouement, and the novel does exactly that.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kelly, Stuart. "Into a cloud-scratched sky." Spectator, 18 June 2016, p. 30+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA455406167&it=r&asid=e9a1731f3711754efa267e807194962c. Accessed 23 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A455406167
Addlands by Tom Bullough review – a chronicle of change in rural Wales
Language and literature intertwine in this tale of family feuds and farming life over seven decades
Pastoral visions … the landscape near New Radnor, Powys.
Pastoral visions … the landscape near New Radnor, Powys. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Jem Poster
Saturday 11 June 2016 09.00 BST
Last modified on Tuesday 20 September 2016 10.46 BST
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Visiting Presteigne in 1867, George Borrow was told by one of the town’s inhabitants that he was neither in England nor Wales, but in Radnorshire. Tom Bullough, whose fourth novel is set in the south of that debatable county, clearly understands the point: he skirts abstract questions of national allegiance and identity, focusing instead on the land itself and on the interconnected lives of the families who wrest a living from it.
It is through the eyes of hill farmer Idris Hamer that we first see the land – the mountains streaked with thawing snow, the faded grasses and bracken, the dark soil turned by the plough – but it’s the child he brings up as his son who dominates the narrative. Born in 1941 into a world torn apart by war, Oliver Hamer is in some ways representative of his generation but is also, within the narrow bounds of his community, an extraordinary figure whose street-fighting exploits become, as he grows to manhood, the stuff of local legend.
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Like Idris, Oliver is intimately bound to the land he lives on. As a child, ranging the pasture and peatland around his home, he learns a love at least as strong as the bonds of family, and in time he comes to equate his surroundings with the vision of paradise described by the local Methodist minister. When a relationship with a visiting student results in the birth of a son, he finds it impossible to follow his new family into the city and he stays on to run the farm with his now-widowed mother. Driving back from the student party that precipitates the breakup of the relationship, he feels the strength returning to his body as he re-enters familiar territory. Twyn y Garth, Ty Isaf, Erwood, Llanbedr Hill: the place names tell him he is home and the valley is suddenly suffused with light and colour.
Bullough’s quiet insistence on the link between language and landscape crucially shapes the novel. His unapologetic use of the local dialect is a source of power, lending a rich and (to most readers) unfamiliar music to his prose. If he can’t quite make us read the land as its inhabitants read it, he can certainly nudge us in the right direction. Words such as feg and flem, plock and prill, are used not to baffle the uninitiated reader – though bafflement may sometimes be the initial response – but to provide access to alternative modes of seeing and saying and, ultimately, a fuller and more authentic understanding of the world the novel portrays. When Oliver’s son, Cefin, visits the farm as a child he is disconcerted by his father’s “foreign words”, but as he starts to absorb the alien vocabulary he also begins to form his own connection with the land.
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Oliver may be handy with his fists but the valley, and his place in it, are threatened by forces he is poorly equipped to resist. Idris’s brother, Ivor, is greedily acquisitive and willing to go to considerable lengths to establish his claim to a portion of the farmland. The brothers’ feud affects the next generation, poisoning Oliver’s relationship with Ivor’s son and subtly weakening his efforts to keep the farm going. But more radically disturbing is the threat posed by rapid technological development and related changes in farming practice: as in much of postwar Britain, the traditional ways of farming in the valley are being displaced and the old, intimate relationship between nature and humankind is in decline.
Keenly observant and unusually knowledgeable about the wild flowers of the region, Oliver reads the signs clearly enough – the increasing rarity of certain plants, the bulldozed hedgerows, the diminishing salmon-shoals – but he can’t entirely withstand the forces of change. Bullough skilfully implies the complexity of the dynamic: Oliver’s sympathy with the natural world runs deep and strong but it operates in dialogue with a necessary realism. He is no sentimentalist but he retains into old age an awareness of the value of the ancient ways, as well as a sense that they may not be entirely lost. When an earnest young student speaks to him of post-pastoral poetry, he throws her words back at her. “Post-pastoral?” he says. “We in’t done yet, girl.”
That uncharacteristically knowing remark perhaps reveals as much about the author as it does about Oliver. Bullough is positioning himself within a tradition of rural writing which, while registering the general loosening of our ties to the land, nevertheless continues to draw fruitfully on the energies offered by those ties. If, in chronicling seven decades of farming life in a small corner of a changing world, he inevitably sounds an elegiac note, he also makes it clear that we’re far from finished, either with the land itself or with our evolving versions of pastoral.
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Addlands
12 July 2016 // Books //Landscape
Addlands-cover-1-600w Addlands by Tom Bullough
(Granta, hardback, 304 pages. Out now.)
Review by Martha Sprackland
Tom Bullough’s Addlands is a novel of quiet and cumulative power, a book in which the minutiae and the momentous are indistinguishable and life in the borderlands carries its own ancient magic. This book is an anthem to those places, to the blurred boundary between England and Wales where the historic Marcher county of Radnorshire lies, and to the people who live and work the land there. Sheep-herding country for centuries, the Edw Valley between Painscastle and Hundred House is the backdrop to this expansive, powerful narrative following the Hamer family over seventy years and five generations, though we are able to see farther along that same line in both directions.
At the book’s centre is Oliver Hamer, a fatherless boy born in the first chapter to Etty Hamer, a young woman newly married to Idris, a god-fearing sheep-farmer many years her senior. A cuckoo, a changeling, unconnected by blood to Funnon Farm, Olly nonetheless appears more than any other character a human manifestation of the land itself. Massive, pugnacious, legendary, taciturn and weatherbeaten, he seems an immovable object, an absolute fact of the landscape as much as Mynydd Troed and the mawn pools, as much as the grey larches and the Wye, the shadowed hills and graven Goidelic stones.
Olly grows from a young boy, gathering eggs and feeding the beasts, accompanied always by the farm dogs and, throughout his life, by his pet raven, to a towering figure of mythology. His own son, Cefin, born in the late seventies, grows up in a different world, travelling to exotic countries and studying for a degree in some strand of computing, but the pull is deep and powerful, the magic of the farm strong for him as he grows up, and we leave him possibly on the brink of return, his own child days away from being born.
At its heart Addlands is about continuity, about allegiance and feud, about belonging, about the endurance of place, and Bullough imparts this expertly not only in his characters’ resistance to new ways, but in the Lawrentian saga of the family story; in his trick of accrual, with each iteration of birth, disappointment, union and death, our specific knowledge deepens, until we possess the profound family understanding that comes only through bearing witness to their history, their secrets, pride, shame, their relationships towards each other, and towards the land. It is only by living through this that we gain true fluency.
That fluency could refer also to the glittering trove of local words and semi-corrupt Anglicisations of Welsh place-names Bullough offers, his use of dialect for the most part swerving cliché and in many places providing beautiful and illuminating texture to the prose, like patterns in tree bark: flem, glat, gambrel, prill, mixen, hackling, poochy, larp, chawm, cratch, sclem – these are a joy to read and learn. Bullough, who spent much of his childhood in these places, does provide a glossary on his website, but I’d rather read without, first time round at least, and feel that added complexity and curiosity.
Some interpersonal encounters weigh a little heavy: the confrontation in which Olly’s schoolfriends call him a ‘gypo’, bringing out into the light what we had already come naturally to understand of Olly’s parentage, and in a similar way Etty’s expositive emphasis on learning, a few pages on, feels a little bald, particularly landing as it does at the end of a section, but these complaints are piddling. What is only very occasionally clumsy in the interactions between people is carried along effortlessly by fast-flowing, luminous, exhilarating lines in which Olly rides across the glowing hills at dusk, or defies a treacherous blizzard to dig buried sheep from the deep drifts; encounters moon-daisies and larks, and anthills covered in flowering thyme, wych-elms and skylarks and the deep, dark mythical pools of water concealing the prehistoric roots of trees.
As the narrative pulls over the turn of the century the adamant rumble of modernity becomes louder, bringing to the valley satellite dishes, foot and mouth disease, bulldozers, emoticons, visitors in search of writing retreats, the backyard privy nailed shut, jet aeroplanes booming overhead during the harvest.
Newspaper headlines in bold, scattered throughout the novel, chart unobtrusively the cultural and social change occurring outside the farm and the valley: ‘Brecon Motors, Ltd, are dealers for David Brown Tractors and ploughs’, ‘Let the stars guide you during 1941’, ‘Birmingham offers well-paid factory work to single women aged 21-35; lodgings found, fare paid’ giving way to ‘Teachers may flush drugs’, ‘Gay voters could determine the next MP’, ‘Many believe telematics will provide the biggest opportunity for pro-active development in rural areas since the agricultural revolution four hundred years ago.’
Just months after his son’s birth, Oliver’s jarring departure from a university house party illustrates perfectly the unbelonging figure – his waistcoat and shoes are wrong; he can’t join in the conversation, he bangs his head on a low doorframe and appears an animal in confines, turning about to extricate himself from a building too small to hold him. He is out of place, out of time.
The future is not made explicit, but there is the nature writer’s clarion alarm-call in observations of diminished salmon stock, or a bank previously covered in wildflowers now bare. At the same time, however, there is resistance and a stubborn renewal: the dusty mistletoe hanging from a beam is replenished; Cefin’s wife Ada is close to giving birth in the house Oliver grew up in; Etty, herself an adaptable and long-lived figure of force and permanence, gazing at Oliver’s raven Maureen, realises that ‘she could no longer remember if she had always been the same bird or if there had been several’. When a student of Cefin’s mother’s poetry confronts Olly with the research to her thesis, I feel he turns his gaze outward, straight from the pages, defiant: ‘Post-pastoral? We in’t done yet, girl’ before he turns back to the land, engrossed in his world, and disappears back into the gloaming, the red-gold oaks, the green-gold hazels, where he belongs.
Bullough has written a novel of sublime attention and done so with great authority. Quietly passionate, dexterously evocative and engrossing, Addlands is indisputably relevant. It deserves to be recognised as such.
*
Along with fellow Caught by the River poet-in-residence Will Burns, Martha Sprackland will host proceedings in the Caught by the River Thames Faber Poetry Chapel, which the two have co-curated. Includes appearances from Patrick McGuinness, Helen Mort, Joe Dunthorne and Virginia Astley. Full Poetry Chapel info here.
Martha Sprackland on Caught by the River/on Twitter
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‘Addlands’, by Tom Bullough
A Welsh sheep farm is the backdrop for a powerful novel with a rich sense of place
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June 10, 2016
by: Review by Melissa Harrison
Spanning 70 years on a remote hill farm in the lost Welsh county of Radnorshire, Addlands is a quiet rural novel of enormous power. Very little happens bar births, deaths and the slow accumulation of scars and experience — life, then, as it happens to all of us — but told from a perspective that’s hard to acquire when we consider our own messy, close-up histories. The result is a haunting study of change and continuity.
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The book opens in 1941, when Etty, the new young wife of a deeply religious and superstitious sheep farmer named Idris Hamer, gives birth at home to the child she conceived out of wedlock. Oliver, strong and swarthy, is clearly not Idris’s son; when, some years later, Etty miscarries Idris’s baby in a blizzard, it is in part due to Olly’s childish stubbornness in undertaking the rescue of some of the flock. In this way are the later taunts of “cuckoo” well earned.
Oliver becomes a brawler, famed for miles around: the kind of man around whom local legends gather. Eventually he has a child and strikes out for himself, but life away from the farm proves impossible — he is too deeply rooted to the land. His son, Cefin, grows up away from the valley, and we wait to discover whether he will find a way to put down roots of his own, despite the weight of nine generations of Hamers there.
Meanwhile, the distant world turns: television comes to the valley, and second-homers; we watch the slow dissolution of a tiny chapel to a ruin in the 1980s, only to be reborn as a desirable residential property in 2011. On the Hamer’s farm, the Funnon, there are slow changes, too: wrapped silage bales replace haymaking; eventually, foot-and-mouth disease arrives. Tom Bullough’s vision of the Edw Valley, though, is steeped in history, from the holy spring for which the farm is named to the record of a hard winter left in the rabbit-nibbled bark of the trees in Pentre Wood, to the mysterious stone carved with Latin and Ogham characters that Idris discovers up on Llanbedr Hill.
Bullough has written about Radnorshire before, in his 2007 novel The Claude Glass, shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year; it also happens to be the place where he spent much of his childhood. No surprise, then, that he knows it well; nevertheless, the freight of detail that Bullough has amassed in order to ground Addlands in place is impressive. Not only does he grant the farms, hills and lanes their names, but also the fields; there are some lovely old dialect terms (he provides a glossary on his website), and beautifully precise natural and agricultural details abound. These observations are never overworked — in some cases they are made almost in passing — but together they create a canvas that feels rewardingly concrete yet drenched in myth and meaning, as the real landscapes we all live among are.
The glancing nature of these observations stems from the way in which Addlands all but eschews a separate narrative voice, mentioning things only as they are observed by the book’s characters, to whom most things are deeply familiar and so require little description or comment. The penalty for this style is a slight loss of clarity and significance; at times it isn’t clear what has happened, where, or to whom. I found myself reading and rereading certain sections, trying to sift clues from otherwise oblique references to events; fortunately, this is a novel that easily repays the effort.
Although in some ways a story of three generations of men, it is not Idris, Oliver or Cefin who give this book its heart but Etty, whom we first meet with “round, girl’s cheeks” and at last see bent and tiny with age. It is she, an incomer to the valley, who learns to manage the farm; she is both implacable and unstinting, testament to the hidden work that women do and always have done in making sure that farms, and families, survive.
“Sometimes I think Addlands is a book about feminism,” writes Bullough on his website. “Sometimes I think it’s about the sacred in the landscape, about what is left once the church and the chapel have gone.” It’s both those things, and something more: a quiet hymn to place, an exploration of the way in which our relationship to it makes us who we are.
Addlands, by Tom Bullough, Granta, RRP£14.99, 304 pages
Melissa Harrison is author of ‘At Hawthorn Time’ (Bloomsbury)
Monday, 5 March 2012
Konstantin by Tom Bullough
The Serbian cover is so much prettier
than the ones used in Britain...
I'd been keenly awaiting this book thanks to hearing snippets of it at a reading.
Konstantin is a book inspired by a real historical character. It isn't quite a biography, but rather a novel that takes known data, and fleshes it out with plenty of imagination and details and narrative flair.
Now, I am not entirely sure how much to give away of the historical role Konstantin would play. I realised near the end of the novel that I may have known far too much before I started reading it: I knew something about the nature of his work, I had heard a scene from the book (which, in the text, is actually about 80% into the book, i.e. rather close to its end), and I had assumed this would be a traditional biography, with a hefty focus on the man's achievements.
It is not. It is the tale of a boy, growing up in Russia, and becoming an oddball young man. The narrative ends before his main body of work really starts - only a final chapter that is far removed in time from Konstantin tries (ineffectively) to give us a glimpse of the relevance of his work. We get (exciting) hints at embryonic ideas, but we never get the full picture.
So, for the sake of this review, I will try to imagine that I knew nothing of Konstantin at all before reading the book. (Sorry for not using his surname - I really, really struggle with Russian names, and, at any rate, it is different in the book from the historical figure, presumably to indicate narrative freedoms that were taken).
Konstantin is a boy with a huge imagination, and a fascination with technical things. Falling ill, he nearly dies and loses most of his hearing. As a result, he spends the rest of his life a bit removed, a bit of an outcast, a bit different from everybody else - and struggling to find his place.
This is not a misery book - rather the opposite. Konstantin is full of infectious enthusiasm, permanently fascinated, and brave, even foolhardy. He can be headstrong (it is as if everyone else is not entirely sure what to do with him, but he somehow has a sense of his purpose, even if no one else can see it, and even if he cannot really put a name to it himself). He has that peculiar tunnel vision that great minds often have, where his imagination takes him away from the immediate surroundings. He is never boring.
Reading this novel is a joy: the writing is confident and not afraid to draw attention to itself. It allows itself dramatic, poetic, aesthetically stunning sentences (the most fanciful of which is at the end of the very first scene, gloriously announcing: this book is not afraid to dazzle), and almost every scene is like a beautifully crafted little gem of its own. This is not a book where each scene ends on a cliffhanger, or a harbinger of the next scene. Rather, each scene finds a perfectly crafted, beautiful ending for itself, and, if the reader so chose, he/she could read the book one scene at a (bed)time, slowly, and enjoy it immensely, without ever feeling a need to speed-read, to reach desperately for the next scene before turning out the lights...
All that said, there are some areas where this particular reader felt a little let down: I felt a bit let down by the ending, partially because the book does not really show the lasting impact of Konstantin. Here is a man whose thinking was years, even decades ahead of his time, and yet, if all I had to go on was just this novel, I don't think I would have got a sense of the full scope of his genius. But to be fair, the novel consciously chooses to be about a boy growing into a man, rather than about a man growing into a shaper of history.
The other main criticism is that, for me, the descriptions were a bit unbalanced: huge focus on details, but often revealing the bigger picture so slowly (or sparsely) that I felt a bit disoriented. It's as if the book had been written by a photographer with a macro lens, always a few centimetres away from Konstantin's hands, but rarely stepping back for a wide angle view. On the one hand, this may be authentically how human perception, deprived of one sense, works. On the other, it can be a bit confusing.
Despite those minor niggles, I would heartily recommend this novel for its beautiful writing, its infectious energy, its loving portrait of a young person coming of age - it is a joy to read. But I would also recommend checking out Wikipedia after reading it, to find out a bit more about the historical Konstantin.
Rating: 4/5
PS: The working title of the novel was, apparently, 'Celestial Mechanics' - and many of the translations have chosen that title instead of Konstantin. Apparently, the publisher worried it might be mistaken for a textbook, so the title was changed. I must admit, I would have been more intrigued by the title 'Celestial Mechanics'... and much more intrigued by the Serbian cover (included above) than the UK covers.
Book Review: Konstantin, by Tom Bullough
Konstantin, by Tom Bullough
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ByGregor White
00:00, 28 SEP 2012Updated16:35, 11 NOV 2013
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Konstantin, by Tom Bullough
Published by Viking, £12.99
Based on the life of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founding father of Soviet space travel, this novel begins promisingly.
Young Kostya is striding out across a snowy landscape towards the forest.
He runs and slides, clambering over logs, before he comes across a streak of blood on the track, and then a dog with a half-eaten hare.
It’s a not exactly unfamiliar scene and yet it’s steeped in strangeness, not least in that suddenly-there dog with its icicle-coated coat, “webbed claws” and “pyramid ears”.
Pushing on Kostya meets his forester father and offers him a can of soup as his reason for being so far from home - as it becomes clear he’s not meant to be there at all.
Town versus country, and nature versus science/ progress, are two of the novel’s main themes and it’s Kostya’s father Eduard who lays out the grounds for argument most succinctly when he explains to his son that “In the town, a man is a mind...an intellectual being...able to rise above his surroundings...”
By contrast, in the forest, “a man is simply an animal with neither fur nor claws. Alone in the forest in the winter, he may consider himself to be in terrible danger.”
In other words, men belong in towns where they can use their brtains, not out in the wilderness relying on their puny physical attributes.
As daring as Kostya clearly is it’s a lesson he appears to take to heart, though never losing that daredevil, forge-ahead edge - as when a brush with scarlet fever leaves him close to deaf and he simply constructs his own ear trumpet and gets on with things.
Flight and then outer space specifically become the focus of this 19th century boy’s life, leading him to subject himself to a rigorous process of self-education in a Moscow library under the direction of a very eccentric librarian.
Actually, once Kostya’s childhood is out of the way (culminating in the death of his mother) things get a little less involving - and the section where he starts to work as a teacher is almost twee.
Still his story ends on a pleasing note, with the sense of Kostya still dreaming and still striving to expand his knowledge.
A final chapter also shows just how far the human race has come, thanks at least in part to him and his discoveries.
For all the great advances we have made, though, there’s also a stark lesson in how truly vulnerable we still are.
Just in case we need reminding.
Konstantin • Tom Bullough
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23 Aug 2012 / Comments Off / in Books/by Christopher Bryant
Konstantin ★★★★★
Tom Bollough
208 pages • Viking • March 10, 2012 [PB]
………………………………………………………………………………………….
I heard Tom Bullough read from Konstantin at Damian Barr’s magnificent Shoreditch House Literary Salon. I was struck by the music of his prose, and how it made me feel the sense of wonder that the protagonist, Kostya, experiences in the world around him. The year is 1868, and Kostya is being raced by horse and carriage through the snowy roads to Nizhny Novgorod. “He clung to his seat and squinted against the flying snow and the freezing wind, while the horses poured steam like a locomotive and the bell in the arch between the shafts danced and told the forest, the long straight track and any other peasants unwise enough not to have collected sufficient firewood back in the autumn, that this was a post-sledge and would be travelling at speed.” Kostya pushes the driver to go yet faster, and in this one scene the emotions and the ideas that power that book are all at work. It was an astute choice, and a magnificent piece of writing.
Konstantin, Tom Bullough
Konstantin opens in 1867 and tells the story of how the young boy Kostya grows up to become Konstantin Tsiolosky, the father of Russian rocketry and astronautics (1857-1935). At the age of 10, Kostya catches scarlet fever, which leaves him almost deaf, and it is with this incident that Bullough opens the story. There is a childlike wonder to the writing in the early pages. It has a lyrical quality that from the opening sentence conveys the curiosity that drives Kostya, and his raw confidence in that curiosity. “Everyone, it seemed, had some portent of doom to report – although to Kostya, standing at the foot of the steps with his toboggan, the city looked very much the same as it had every other winter he could remember.” His sense of wonder, and his dreams, are powered by optimism. Kostya invents a listening device, an ear trumpet, to combat his hearing problems, rather than let it hold him back. It is that unwavering buoyancy Bullough deftly communicates.
In a touching section, Kostya’s mother talks to him about the sun, “a big, grand character, fat and important”. The sun, her sun, is the power of life itself, the power of God, and it dies each night only to be resurrected the following morning. He learns the magic of the sun from his mother, and then at the age of 15 he learns the science of the sun from his teacher. “Light,” he is taught, “requires 8 minutes and 17 seconds to flash from the sun to the earth,” and “an express train going at the rate of about 50 versts an hour, leaving the Earth on the 1st of January, 1866, would not arrive at the Sun at the year 2213, nearly 347 years after the day of its departure”. His eyes widen at this. He searches through books to understand it, only understanding half of the words yet striving to understand the whole. Like so many great minds, Konstantin is bored by school and he does not do well. He teaches himself, and with the aid of the librarian Nikolai Fedorov he learns what he wants to know. And thus the imaginative magic and the practical possibility start to come together for the teenage Konstantin.
It is this union that creates the thinker who would go on to become the founder of the Russian space programme. The real achievement of Konstantin is how Bullough pieces this process together. It is not an historical novel so much as a novel about the opening of a young mind to a world of wonders and possibilities. And as such it is punctuated with moments of beauty and of fascination.
Konstantin is an unconventional, impressionistic novel. It is a book about dreams, and what it means to be different from the pack in order to follow those dreams. And therein lies its power, and its beauty.
Konstantin by Tom Bullough – review
Tom Bullough blends fiction and history in reimagining the life of the founding father of Soviet space travel
soviet stamp
Konstantin Tsiolovsky, commemorated on a Soviet-era stamp.
Ophelia Field
Sunday 26 February 2012 00.08 GMT
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The 19th-century Russian literary trope of longing to escape the provinces (best known from Chekhov's three sisters' desperate invocation of "Moscow") feels like the launch pad for this intriguing story about a 19th-century Russian who looked not just to a westerly metropolis, but vertically upwards, into the stars. In The Claude Glass, Bullough's previous novel set in Radnorshire, close to his Welsh home, the author explored another of this book's (related) themes – nature versus civilisation – with a semi-feral child and his friend being pulled, and trying to pull themselves, in opposite directions. Here the protagonist is introduced as a little boy named Kostya, who lives in 1860s Ryazan (nearly 200km south east of Moscow) and then in Vyatka (now Kirov) – the latter described as akin to Siberia, "the ends of the Earth".
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The opening chapters showcase Bullough's talent for rural description, the specificity of a particular forest nonetheless dissolving into a vast emptiness; a landscape lunar enough that outer space is not, for Kostya, such a leap of the imagination. Local geography and astronomy are both expressed in the now obsolete and alien-sounding unit of the Russian verst. And, like nature, myths and superstitions lie cheek by jowl with modernity, as when Kostya's negligent yet self-sacrificing mother takes him on a gruelling pilgrimage to the icon of St Nikolai, hoping its miraculous healing powers will cure his partial deafness.
Kostya shows a mechanical aptitude, building toboggans and an ear trumpet for himself, but also a love of all that ascends: when trainspotting, for example, "he gazed at the smoke in the sky, that signature of power". He climbs a church tower to be free from the earth "which pinned him to its surface, wretched as a worm". "Wretched" is a recurring word, marking the gap between our bodies' limitations, the hardship of physical human existence, and the infinity of man's imagination. Kostya's imagination sees even Moscow as merely "a point on the planet, rotating through space at 960 kilometres per hour".
The childhood section, closing with the death of Kostya's mother, is much the most involving, largely because of our inclination as readers to project our past selves into the shoes of any given child protagonist. Bullough loses this advantage in the 1870s section, in which Kostya becomes "Konstantin", an autodidact in a Moscow library, growing mouldy facial hair like some beggarly Rasputin, and guided in his reading by Nikolai Fedorov, an eccentric librarian who articulates a quasi-mystical theory of the vertical masculine (culminating in space travel) versus the horizontal feminine (of worldly materialism).
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This is historical fiction that wears history lightly – a trick made easier in a country such as Russia where the past remains strangely near to the surface, so that research can be done as much by travel as reading. It is also biographical fiction, based on the remarkable life of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founding father of Soviet space travel. An author's note at the end mentions that the launch of Sputnik I, 21 years after Tsiolkovsky's death, was timed to mark the centenary of his birth – an act of respect for this unlikely scientific genius that would not be nearly as poignant if invented within a fiction.
The novel does many wonderful things that a non-fiction biography could not (or would tend to avoid – like allowing for the possibility of pure inspiration), but, at the same time, it fails to do a few things a novel should. A narrative slackness overtakes it precisely because it is tethered to a life with a knowable ending and in which the important actions were intellectual, not dramatic.
In trying to deal with the latter challenge, the penultimate section, in which Konstantin becomes a teacher, feels like a thinly disguised introductory course on astrophysics – not uninteresting as an essayistic digression, but a bit wearying. Konstantin's young pupils' faces become "set with little frowns" of confusion, while his baby daughter falls asleep listening to his discourses. In the last section, the writing rockets beyond the terrestrial confines of the biographical and concludes with a symbolic alignment, which, like the magic of a rare eclipse, provides the sense of an ending. Such powerful symbolism is not, however, as profound as the satisfaction that comes from a well-plotted novel, in which a character truly develops, or grows to become a part of us.