REVIEWS
On Trying to Keep Still By Jenny
Diski
At rest with the reluctant traveller
By Tony Gould
Published: 07 April 2006
For someone whose sense of adventure is "as thin as a slice
of
prosciutto", Jenny Diski gets herself into some strange situations
- and
none stranger than herding reindeer in the freezing forests
of what the
Finns call Lapland and the Sámis of northern Sweden
don't. Not that
she's herding; merely observing for a newspaper. Diski characterises
herself as a strictly non-participant observer. She doesn't
do strenuous
activity, or joining in; she doesn't even do walking if she
can avoid
it. So what kind of a travel writer is she?
As a novelist whose third "travel" book this is, she worries
about being
cast as a travel writer and denies this is a travel book. She
is at
pains to play down the distinction between "being a fiction
and a
non-fiction writer"; all writing stems from curiosity and involves
the
same productive processes. She thinks of herself "as a writer.
Period".
The word she is eschewing is "creative", as in that baneful
phrase "creative writing", which applies only to fiction
and relegates all
non-fiction to a lower league. And she's not having that. She
belongs to
the Republic of Letters, not to some spurious pecking order,
or class
system.
To underline the point, she concludes On Trying to Keep Still
with a
story she wrote for radio, in which a woman who "wrote novels
long
before she became the travel writer she is now mostly known
for" decides
to short-circuit the effort of going to some far-off place
by making up
her travel books, "using a mixture of conscientious research
and
free-floating imagination". Fine, except that "authenticity" was
the
sine qua non of travel writing. She would get round that by...
no, I
won't spoil the story.
The book is divided in three parts, covering three different
journeys.
In the first, Diski uses a writers' festival in Wellington
as the
jumping-off point for a New Zealand journey that takes in Auckland,
the
Coromandel and (to Diski's ear) the wonderful-sounding Dreadful
Sound in
the southern Fiordland. Along the way, she makes a virtual
visit to a
glow-worm cave from her hotel sickbed by means of the brochure
and
reflects brilliantly on the "desire to plummet... everywhere
evident" in
New Zealand: "People drop off any ledge, bridge, building or
mountain
they come across... Falling down is institutionalised in New
Zealand".
For a fleeting moment, even the non-participant Diski is tempted
to have
a go.
The central, and longest, section is the most Diskiesque, in
that it
finds her staying on her own, in comfort, in a converted granary
in the
Quantock Hills. Here she is more or less free to stay in for
days on end
and read, write, listen to music, or just sleep. "I am a sloth,
not a
cat that walks alone". Yet there is plenty going on, around
her and in
her head. The reader regrets her departure from this Somerset
idyll as
much as she does.
The nearest she gets to conventional travel writing is in the
final
section, where she has to suffer for her art in the far north
of Sweden.
But there, too, she is uniquely herself, entertaining us with
a
hilarious disquisition of what is involved, if you're a woman,
in having
to go outside the tent you're sharing with three male strangers
for a
pee in the middle of an Arctic winter's night. More please.
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