Update: The September meeting has been cancelled.
As normal there will be no July meeting and due to the ongoing corona virus there will also be no meeting in August.
The next meeting is scheduled for Mon 14th September at 7:30pm in the Ferryhill Community Centre. The book under discussion is the The Outrun by Amy Liptrot.
Missing you all- shame we can’t meet. Here my views on the book:
“The Outrun” is a memoir giving glimpses of the 30-year-old author’s life but focuses on 2011/12 when she struggles to abstain from alcohol after years of binge drinking and alcohol dependency. Born in Orkney Mainland to English parents (who met in Manchester and moved to farm in Orkney) Amy Liptrot, restless and searching to belong, moved to London on graduating from University. The book starts with her back in Orkney crouching in the outrun next to the cliff top after 10 years in London.
I was charmed by the first three (of 28) chapters: succinct and unsentimental they describe Liptrot’s return to Orkney island life, her childhood home with its landscape and memories. The writing is precise; for example page 18-19 the story of “the only black kid at the secondary school” is told in five sentences and we fully understand. Chapters four to seven are her life and loves in London and are excruciating to read as she searches for places to live, friends and paid employment. Chapters eight and nine describe her experience at a community detox programme and her decision to return to Orkney. The names of landmarks on the route to Orkney- London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen at the start of chapter ten are enchanting. I know that train route, I can see the view out the train window.
From chapter 10 to the end Liptrot describes working on her dad’s farm dyking, lambing, surveying for RSPB, winter on Papay with descriptions of island residents, their lives, landscape, weather all intermingled with reflections on Liptrot’s craving for alcohol. This is the meat of the book and what the Times Literary Supplement declares is “the new form of nature writing”. By which I imagine they refer to books such as Helen MacDonald’s “H is for Hawk”, 2014. Liptrot’s writing is lively and charming, for example “the birds are going bonkers” (page 125) but lacks the humour of MacDonald, the simple elegance of Kathleen Jamie (“Findings”, 2005) and the magic close looking of Nan Shepherd (“The Living Mountain”, 1977). The images Liptrot evokes are perfectly adequate to recognise Orkney but are without odour and that slippery something for our sixth sense.
Colette