Output details

An inventory of heaven

The novel comprised the larger part of my PhD (awarded in 2012) and, taking William Empson’s lead, was based on my research into another version of pastoral, one that I termed ‘rhapsodic’. My exemplar was the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and the experimental novel she wrote out of her experience of the Second World War, The Corner that Held Them (1948).

The corner of the world depicted in my novel – a village in mid-North Devon – is in many ways as isolated as the fourteenth-century nunnery at the heart of Warner’s. It is a society that still retains many of its feudal customs and traditions; its small, mixed, family-run farms; a landscape characterized by the secrecy of its deep lanes and by the bleak, looming horizon of Dartmoor. Meticulously documented through the 1970s and 80s by the photographer James Ravilious, its distinctive farming experience recorded by Ted Hughes in the poems that make up Moortown Diary (1979), in many respects, little has changed.

I wanted to examine the tensions inherent in the pastoral mode from its Classical beginnings: the play between the metaphoric and the literal, nostalgia and documentary, fantasy and (often brutal) reality. In terms of language, I argue that the pastoral, with its built-in dialectic, is the original proponent of a mechanism that underwrites its continuing relevance: the rhapsodic art of metaphor.

Following publication, I’ve been called upon to talk in public libraries (by Literature Works, in Paignton and Plymouth), to literary festivals (Manchester, Dartington’s Ways With Words), to students at universities (in Plymouth, Birmingham, Exeter and Chichester) about my writing, and specifically as it relates to the sense and creation of place.