Thin Places
Kerri ní Dochartaigh Canongate £14.99
Derry/Londonderry – where even the choice of name reflects ‘which foot you kick with’ – has a compelling and fractious history. It has often been synonymous with sectarian tensions, not least at the violent onset of the Troubles in the early 1970s, during which large numbers of Protestants moved to the Waterside, while Catholics stayed on the Cityside.
The writer Kerri ní Dochartaigh not only grew up amid these divisions in the 1980s, but, with a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, she embodied them. If religious identity was not an issue at home, it certainly was outside.
The family was living in a working-class Protestant housing estate when their father left, and the thuggish enforcers of tribal purity soon came after those who remained. Their message to leave arrived in the form of a petrol bomb through the window – ‘We were not Protestant, now that Dad had left. We were not Catholic either, though… we were nothing other than other – indefinable, unnameable, fallen down the gaps in between.’
The family was living in a working-class Protestant housing estate when their father left, and the thuggish enforcers of tribal purity soon came after those who remained
At their next house, this time in a working-class Catholic housing estate on the Cityside, they were yet again identified as outsiders. A youth club minibus from her grandmother’s church arrived to pick up the young Kerri, bearing the telltale words ‘Clooney Hall Methodist Church Londonderry’.
This went down badly: in the view of the ‘lad in the house opposite’, shared by others, they were ‘dirty orange bastards’ who needed to be put out.
Many people outside Northern Ireland will have encountered Derry recently through Lisa McGee’s hit television show Derry Girls, a portrait of four Catholic schoolgirls characterised by quick-fire humour and group resilience.
There’s very little levity here, but much poignant intensity: Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s (above) story is of an identity in crisis, recurrent exile and a returning
If that series told certain truths about Northern Ireland, then this book – also by a Derry girl, now a woman – reflects different, darker ones, and is in many ways the TV series’ opposite.
There’s very little levity here, but much poignant intensity: ní Dochartaigh’s story is of an identity in crisis, recurrent exile and a returning, deep-rooted anxiety whose presence she characterises as a ‘human-sized crow’.
These things, too, are abiding legacies of the Troubles for many, manifesting themselves in high levels of substance addiction and suicide.
Ní Dochartaigh’s delight in wild things weaves a thread of light through her childhood and adulthood (above, water rats, as depicted in British Quadrupeds by William MacGillivray, 1828)
Politics, place and her personal life all knit together in the book, and for a long time none offers any sense of safety. Ground keeps giving way beneath her feet. A stretch of happiness that begins with a move beyond Derry, to the village of Ballykelly – where Protestants and Catholics mix harmoniously – is eroded by her stepfather’s descent into heavy drinking and the appalling murder of her ‘gorgeous, kind, funny’ closest male friend at only 18 years old.
‘He made me laugh, so very much,’ the author recalls, but the laughter died with him. ‘It broke something in us, that murder of one of the best people we knew.’ A neighbour served jail time for helping to dispose of the body, but the murder itself remains unsolved.
In adulthood she finds it difficult to trust others and uses an excess of alcohol to numb her feelings. Two things bring solace: the wisdom of her beloved paternal grandfather, an instinctive storyteller, and the natural world, including the ‘thin places’ of the title.
These are places, whether in Ireland or elsewhere, ‘that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds’. When the author leaves Ireland she finds them in ancient sites such as Treshnish on the Isle of Mull, and Mwnt cove on Wales’s Ceredigion coast.
Ní Dochartaigh’s delight in wild things weaves a thread of light through her childhood, adulthood and the book itself. For her they are both comforters and spiritual signifiers: she fondly recalls a ‘beautiful, warm water rat’ that her younger brother brought home, and a dream in which her lost Ballykelly friend appears as a white egret.
When she returns to Ireland, eventually settling, now sober, with her partner in ‘an old stone railway cottage in the very heart of Ireland’, she finds a growing rootedness in those things that offer both mystery and constancy: a discovery of the Irish language and the seasons, light and birds that exist beyond strident human arguments.
The acutely personal writing is often wonderfully evocative: on a drive down the Wild Atlantic Way, for example, ‘the storm threw horizontal sheets of rain down onto the grey, swollen world’.
There are, however, stray passages in which the lyricism tips into a kind of incantatory, quasi-mystical assertion that might have been better reined in. What, the author asks, is ‘That thing that means we still rise, we still rise, we still and we always rise?’ and answers: ‘We are women.’ But women can also slide, as we know.
Politics has already partly resolved the author’s palpable concern over the possibility of a post-Brexit hard land border in Ireland (instead, the customs border is in the Irish Sea, which may bring its own problems).
Yet another global worry has sprung up alongside it: the Covid-19 pandemic, which has rendered the outdoors a place of relative safety from the virus. Many more of us are now seeking and finding consolation in our own ‘thin places’, even if we never named them as such.
This heartfelt memoir, with its message on the saving grace of nature, may speak to an even wider audience than it first imagined.
Two-Way Mirror: The Life Of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Fiona Sampson Profile £20
Rating: 
Due to the success of the 1934 biopic The Barretts Of Wimpole Street, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (right) is better known for her London address than her once famous verse-novel, Aurora Leigh.
In the classic film, where she is played by Norma Shearer, Elizabeth, suffering from a mysterious and disabling illness that confines her to her bedroom, is tyrannised by her father, who has forbidden any of his children from marrying.
She is rescued from her prison by the handsome poet Robert Browning and, after secretly marrying, they run away to Italy, where they live happily ever after. ‘How do I love thee?’ she wrote. ‘Let me count the ways.’
Due to the success of The Barretts Of Wimpole Street, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (above) is better known for her London address than her once famous verse-novel, Aurora Leigh
Taking a cudgel to the fairytale version of her life, Fiona Sampson’s vivid new biography gives us Elizabeth Barrett Browning as busy and ambitious rather than a swooning sleeping beauty.
‘She is a big personality,’ says Sampson, who writes throughout in the present tense, ‘crammed into the small frame of a diminutive body – and of a restricted life.’
The eldest of 12 children, Elizabeth, Sampson suggests, found freedom in her illness, which was a combination of chronic spinal pain and lung disease. Released from the drudgery of social life and domestic duties, she had time to concentrate on reading, thinking and corresponding with the key players in the literary world.
Her father, meanwhile, was less a villain than a complex human being whom we should pity rather than hate. Sampson paints a lively picture of a close family in which the brothers have careers, the sisters remain at home and everyone has their own nickname (Elizabeth is Ba, her siblings are variously Stormie, Addles and Bro).
The family wealth comes from their West Indian plantations; Elizabeth is the daughter and granddaughter of slavers, and in one of her most famous poems, The Runaway Slave At Pilgrim’s Point, a female slave describes the horrors of her servitude.
By the time she has run away herself, Elizabeth will have become an abolitionist.
Two-Way Mirror is divided, like Aurora Leigh, into nine parts and the book’s theme, like that of Elizabeth’s long poem, is the process by which a girl evolves into a writer. Sampson’s biography consciously mirrors her subject’s masterpiece, but then biography, she suggests, is itself a mirror that both reveals and distorts its subject.
Her previous biography, In Search Of Mary Shelley, made the same point about mirrors. Each part of Two-Way Mirror is accompanied by a ‘frame’ that further reflects on the nature of biography.
‘Is biography a kind of portrait?’ Sampson asks in the Second Frame. ‘If stories can be portraits,’ she later says, ‘we also read portraits as stories.’ These frames become a tad self-indulgent, and most readers will skip them in order to get on with the story itself, which is beautifully told.
It is high time that Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Aurora Leigh were once again household names.
Frances Wilson
Aston Martin: Made In Britain
Ben Collins Quercus £20
Rating: 
If an owner likes to think he resembles his car, there is no doubt with which motor Ben Collins would want to be associated. Ever since his dad took him to the showroom and bought one on a whim, Collins – who played The Stig in the Jeremy-Clarkson-punch-a-producer-while-wearing-dad-jeans era of Top Gear – has been hopelessly in love with Aston Martins.
The style, the swish, the fact that an entire herd of Highland cattle is required to source the leather for the driving seat: these are the vehicles that make his heart swell.
And here he tells the car’s story with a genuine affection. Sure, there are occasional lapses into ‘space frame perimeter chassis’ and ‘helicoidally threaded gears’ territory, but this is largely a glorious tale of British seat-of-the-pants invention.
And of people too.
What becomes clear is that The Stig most admires the drivers who hurtled Lionel Martin’s early designs around Silverstone and Le Mans, a team of rogues and reprobates, fuelled by war-bred sang froid, the sort capable of saying, when found in the wreckage of a smash by emergency crew: ‘Got a smoke, old boy?’
Never mind that the firm has gone bust more often than Donald Trump’s businesses, for Collins, Aston is an outfit of enduring class. Among its early admirers was Ian Fleming.
Collins reckons, like him, the writer was smitten as a boy, watching one tear around the circuit at Brooklands. There was never any other machine he was going to allow James Bond to drive.
And when Sean Connery leaned against the bonnet of a DB5 in Goldfinger, Aston became the chic-est motor in history.
As he cannot help but tell us at length, Collins has been a stunt driver on every Bond movie since Quantum Of Solace. It’s him swinging a recincarnated DB5 around in the forthcoming No Time To Die.
Though we will have to wait to see him in action as the film has been postponed several times. Collins must be despairing at its tardy release: it marks the first time an Aston has ever been late to the party.
Jim White