Laura Beatty

This is an extraordinary novel. It is fiction but it reads as if it is travel literature. It is packed with history from the Ancient Egyptians and Celts to the lives of present day refugees. It is a campervan trip across Europe and it is a story of a woman searching for answers. We begin with the unnamed narrator packing up her belongings into plastic crates ready to take a sabbatical. This is her own Lost Property. She buys a motorhome with Rupert and they set off across the channel and into France. Lost Property turns up as artifacts or stuff in the museums they visit. She meets characters from history and chats with them in the streets and in the van. Joan of Arc is here, French poet Christine de Pizan. In Ferrara we meet Ariosto who coined the term humanism. At times the narrator brings many characters together in an expansion of the dream dinner party idea. They explore nationalism and war and humanity. They drive through Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria, crossing borders to Greece where they work as volunteers at a refugee camp. At the end of the book she tries to sum up what she has learnt on her journey while sitting on a balcony overlooking a Greek harbour. She can feel the Englishness (as it has grown or adapted) of England pulling her home. She writes, 'The emotional response to a place, which is what nationalism depends on, is private. There's no commonality of experience ... a country is a kind of glacier, solid and always slowly moving and changing, while a nation is just a huge number of individual experiences of the glacier, jumbled together, under the assumption that they are the same. Which they aren't.' Her writing is never cliched, it is individual and interesting, her knowledge of historical figures is deep and I learnt a lot. This is both an enjoyable read and a book that activated parts of my brain that are often dormant.… (plus d'informations)

Having never heard of Theophrastus, I guess I was bound to learn a number of things. First of all that there was a Greek philosopher called Theophrastus and that he was a contemporary of Aristotle – indeed they worked together. Together they might be called the founders of plant and animal sciences. Theophrastus concentrated on the plants and Aristotle on the animal life of Lesbos at a place called Pyrrha.
The blurb for the dust-jacket says: When Linnaeus was developing his modern system of plant taxonomy, it was Theophrastus’ work on plants that he used as a basis.’
The book does try to identify some of the places where Th did his botanising and maybe the photos are an effort to expose to the reader some of the plants that Th covered. Plate 13 with what I think is asphodel and Plate 14 with grasses are examples. They are identified only as Irakleio and Kythera.
I also learned about Philip of Macedon, and his son Alexander the Great who was Theophrastus’ pupil when Aristotle and Th moved to Pella on the mainland. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature doesn’t say that he moved to Pella in Macedonia nor does it say that he was Alexander’s pupil.
Guy Pentreath’s Hellenic Traveller has a section on Pella p.221 ff and the book on Macdeonia by Ioannis Touratsoglou is furnished with pictures. It seems to have been a very impressive place.
Theophrastus is not mentioned in Adam Nicolson’s work The Mighty Dead: Why Homer matters. But that is almost certainly because Theophrastus is too late 300-200 BCE.
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice sort of frames the book. In the story Orpheus looks back at Eurydice after she is recovered from hell and because Orpheus had been enjoined not to look back she disappears for ever. The first paragraph describes Orpheus’s head being washed up in Lesbos after it was torn from his body by Thracian maenads. The last sentence of the book is ‘I will not turn round.’ Maybe the author doesn’t want what she has discovered about Theophrastus to disappear. The information she finds is very conjectural and almost evanescent apart from her conclusion that the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer are based on or use Theophrastus’ work Characters as inspiration. I think the modern novel has a lot to thank Theophrastus for in terms of characterisation.
The map which Beatty provides doesn’t have a lot of places that are referred to , on it e.g. Chalchis. The endnotes refer to the page but not to any specific point on the page. This is because Beatty says this is not an academic work.
I wished I had finished the book being able to remember something about his philosophical teachings but alas I am not able to. This is a work which needs application – it is worthwhile.… (plus d'informations)

This is a beautifully crafted, evocative and alive debut novel. We see Anne fleetingly as a misplaced adult at the opening of the book, the village outsider. But this is the story of a child who doesn’t even fit into her relatively mis-fit family, who seeks solace in the wood near where she lives. Leaving home aged 14 with nothing but a wheelbarrow of miscellaneous tools and objects liberated from her father’s shed, Anne takes up residence under a Pollard Ash tree in the depths of the wood. She learns how to survive within the wood, she learns how to prosper and to grow.

(As reviewed on my blog, March 2010)

Foraging one day Anne meets Steve who lives with his aging mother and runs the local dump, and with whom she strikes up a friendship of support. Steve teaches her some of the survival techniques he has learned in the armed forces. In return for food and companionship, Anne works at reinvigorating some of the detritus that ends up at the dump, and with her care and attention Steve can sell it on to earn a living. It gives her a purpose and a connection, however tenuous, to the world outside the wood.

Gradually, in the wood, she is no longer an outsider to herself. She fits, she has a place in this fertile and living place. And Beatty makes us hear and breath and smell the wood. Only when the world outside encroaches within her world does Anne become insecure again.

Anne and the wood are sculpted with great warmth. As are some of the friendships she makes. I did feel however that the ending needed something else. We needed to be more fully led back to the life of Anne in adulthood, as this was not fully drawn at the outset, and I did feel I’d been left hanging a little at the close of the novel.… (plus d'informations)