Distance and Memory

Rezensionen / Stimmen

A northern perspective.

A remarkable, lyrical meditation on the soul of north-east Scotland and its landscapes, structured around its five-season, entrances Andrew McNeillie.

Scotland is another country. They do things differently there. The traveller heading north will notice the difference at once, even in the promiscuous Borders. It is about latitude quite as much as anything else, latitude and its partnership with light. Travel further, into the empty wastes of the north-east quadrant, and the distinction heightens to a radical intensity, equalled only in the western archipelagos, but as different there again, as if to say east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet.

This is a country of five seasons, autumn being fine-tuned into 'hairst' or harvest and 'the back end of the year'. The distinction says everything. It's like a delaying tactic, clinging to light to hold winter at bay.

Peter Davidson's profoundly civilised and lyrical book is structured round this five-part year. As Hamlet in Elsinore was 'mad north-north-west', it is rather 'melancholy north-north-east'. The writing is shot through with exquisite poignancies. These have as much to do with nature of the place-the nature of extreme northerliness-as with the author's finely trained eye. A Professor of Art History at Aberdeen University, and an accomplished poet, he knows how to see into things, and not only the simply visible, but also the rituals, the inner structures, and music-Liedner and ballad at the piano-of a sequestered, professorial life in rural Aberdeenshire.

We learn a great deal about place and the distinction between it and 'landscape', which is, of course, the artful framing of place within the conventions of painterly practice. We learn much about painters, from the author's beloved Cotman to the contemporary Scottish work of James Morrison.

The difference of Scotland is everywhere tangible in these pages, and all the more so for being grounded in scholarship lightly worn. We encounter a very different world here and something of another era, of houseguests who linger on over days and weeks, as if in imitation of the light of summer. Or as if in emulation of fiction-the novels, say, of John Buchan.

The distance of the title is both temporal and spatial, powerfully imbued with senses of history and memory. It is a European Scotland (with thoughtful diversions south of the border, sometimes epistolary, sometimes bodily) and a European perspective, both northern and southern, informs the author's journeying to and from home: the book closes with scenes of snow falling in Madrid and a visit to the Prado.

This is a 'once-in-a-generation deep winter' for the Spanish region. One feels the fates have laid it on to make our displaced author feel strangely at home. North has come south in his wake as if to remind him where he most belongs.

A deep sense of home and hospitality and seasons lies at the heart of this book. Light in all its seasonal registers inflects the prose, sharpens it with winter or softens it with summer shadow. Memory glimmers on far horizons. Sentences periodically contract into a shorthand of phrases and notes. The stuff and pace of poetry underwrites Prof Davidson's nights and days. He has written a most remarkable book in the same class of accomplishment as the work of Robert Macfarlane, who introduces it. In his chapter on 'Painting Northern Scotland', Prof Davidson refers to both John the son and James Morrison his father. On page 99, he refers, interalia, to the 'The Assynt landscapes of more recent years' that 'revisit the same territory in a mood of tranquil exaltation'. This might be something to pursue, although I am sure you will be spoiled for choice.