I am about to confess to a weakness. Bookshops in Airport Terminals. They are one of the highlights and hazards of air travel, and this time I was caught by the old 'buy one, get one half price' sales pitch. Which I duly did.
The Outrun was what I found myself reading in one of those hard plastic chairs near the B Gates somewhere in Heathrow's T5. It was an odd choice (the book, not the chairs). The autobiographical story of a recovered alcoholic rediscovering herself on the windswept Orkney Islands isn't my usual fare. I suppose it was the cover that got my attention. Sea, landscape, a hint of empty spaces, and a passing nod at the cover of another favourite of mine Land's Edge by Tim Winton, which is also autobiographical, features the sea, empty spaces, but no alcoholics.
What actually happened was that after seeing the cover, I opened a copy at random somewhere near the middle, and began to read. Moments later, I was in a world of vast open skies, low walls and short turf, a treeless landscape alive with the sound of the endless Atlantic breakers falling upon the rocks as they have from the dawn of creation. But Amy Liptrot writes much better than I, so I closed the book, searched for a companion volume to get my second half price 'bargain', and prepared to fly. And when, eight or more hours later we landed at JFK, I had travelled much further than the 4,500 miles between London and New York.
The basic structure of the book is simple but effective. Liptrot recounts her return to the Orkney Islands from London, immediately after she has 'dried out', and as she revisits a series of locations or scenes of life before she left for the bright lights of the south, she takes the reader through another step of her descent into the haze of drink. When she returned North, she called the intervening time ten lost years. Ten years of chasing a chimera of she knew not what, constantly attempting to find it through ever heavier drinking. She is painfully, albeit understatedly, honest with the reader, she exposes the labyrinthine internal logic of the alcoholics world, continually comparing it with what she had abandoned on Orkney. It makes an alternatingly evocative and painful read.
Along the way we are exposed to her schitzophenic dad, her born-again mum, farming with no trees, oil workers, life in a wholly rural community, and landscapes on what seems like the edge of the known world. It is perhaps her ability to evoke the shape and feel of landscape and place that is the books most satisfying element. She deftly uses surprise, reflection, anecdotes, local legends, and the etymology of place names to conjour a world of skies and wind, of ordinary beauty in un-looked for places. And all the while wondering why she left it, and could she really return and live among it without falling back into drink.
How did she dry out ? Once again, it was AA. While she keeps a distance from her mum's faith, she eventually realises its the 'higher power' that she needs, and, after that, things change. Back on Orkney, at one point she contemplates some quasi-Celtic manifestations of Christianity linked to the islands, but while appearing to admire that world's faith, she keeps that too at arms length. But she does rebuild life, she lives and works in an online world, blogging, tweeting, facebooking and the rest. And she starts to swim, but how and why I'll not divuge here.
Would I recommend this book ? If you like travel writing, or writing about places, or if you've had close encounters with alcoholism, yes. If you'd like a worked example of what going down to the bottom, and coming back up looks like, yes. If you like the Orkneys, probably yes. If you're interested in a worked example of the life of 20-somethings in the noughties, yes definitely. But be warned, for all its ability to evoke a place, The Outrun will leave you mildly sad. It did me.
The Outrun, by Amy Liptrot, Pub by Cannongate, pb, ISBN 978-1782115489
