Culture

Geography can be history and history geography — and sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. Laurence C. Smith’s Rivers of Power endeavours to make us see beneath the surfaces of arterial waters and consider them as carriers of civilisation and arbiters of destinies. Rivers are elemental and ambivalent. They are frontiers and highways, destroyers and fertilisers, fishing grounds and spiritual metaphors, power-givers and flushers of poisons. They are the veins of terrains, which like our own veins carry oxygen or pathogens, and extinction when they fail. They inspired Babylonian and Roman legal codes, outlining ideas about access, drainage, fishing, irrigation, maintenance, navigation, pollution and sharing that still course through 21st-century jurisprudence.

‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t realise is that smokers often smoke to be alone. As Mass Observation had reported a decade earlier: In an increasingly gregarious world, where fewer and fewer habits and pastimes are entirely individual, the cigarette remains for most people a pleasure that, whatever its social significance, can be enjoyed in entire solitude, and a pleasure that remains entirely individual. At the time, 80 per cent of British men and 40 per cent of women were regular smokers. Smoking was not just a means of inhaling death and of escaping the dead hand of others’ sociability, but briefly put the unbearableness of life behind a smoky veil.

How refreshing in a time of general sensitivity to find a book intended to infuriate and debunk. Welcome to the desolate Canadian Arctic, to the mystery of the Franklin expedition, which disappeared in 1845 seeking the North-West Passage, and to a world of disagreement about what happened to it. Ernest Coleman’s story of his search for clues to Franklin’s fate is delightfully prejudiced and pugnacious. The purpose of No Earthly Pole is, he writes, ‘to speak out in opposition to the clustering together of some academics and experts who have closed their minds’. Middle-aged lieutenant goes to the ends of the earth to defend the reputation of Queen Victoria’s Navy would make a lovely film.

Lamorna Ash came to the fishing port of Newlyn in south-west Cornwall to write a memoir. This is not unusual. There is a tendency, as old industries die, to watch them covetously and with awe; to paint them a paradigm of all that is lost. In the 19th century, fishwives posed for the artists of the Newlyn School on the quayside. Today, journalists are found at the Star Inn, which featured in Gavin Knight’s The Swordfish and the Star, buying pints for Ben Gunn, a ‘celebrity’ fisherman, for a tale. Ash is a woman who can lose herself ‘along the simplest of paths’. She immerses herself in the real Newlyn, which is doughty, and the Newlyn of her imagination, which is mournful and filled with legends.

From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier could see the bright yellow plumes of smoke rising into the sky. Notre-Dame de Paris was on fire, and suddenly, in that tourist-crowded, hyper-expensive ‘cradle of France’, nothing was certain — ‘democracy, peace and fraternity’ — any more. The following morning, children living on or near the Île de la Cité took to school little plastic bags filled with blackened bits of roof picked up from balconies and pavements (as well as probably quite a lot of lead dust) which ‘dated back to the Crusades’.

On a winter’s night an artist of moderately exalted reputation and in lateish middle age journeys across London, away from the stuccoed comforts of what was until recently home towards a studio in the East End, where a much younger lover lies waiting. Observations, generally of a caustic nature, about the comédie humaine encountered along the way and the state of the wider world jostle in the artist’s febrile mind with an apologia for the previous nine months’ events.The artist is a woman, Eve Laing, but the tropes past which Nightshade flits like an Underground train are strikingly, almost mundanely, male — the ageing, status-anxious creative, the mid-life crisis, the much younger lover, even the caustic observations.