MEMOIR: PAUL CLEMENTSreviews West: A Journey Through the Landscapes of Loss,by Jim Perrin, Atlantic, 328pp, £18.99
BEREAVEMENT MEMOIR appears to have taken over this year from misery memoir. Antonia Fraser’s life with Harold Pinter and Barbara Want’s account of the death of her husband, the BBC broadcaster Nick Clarke, as well as Christopher Reid’s Costa prize-winning sequence of poems about the death of his wife, received much critical attention.
Now the Welsh-based writer Jim Perrin has added a poignant memoir labelled “a journey through the landscapes of loss”. Perrin’s story is one of personal anguish but is, surprisingly, laced with humour and joyful writing. Born in 1947 and brought up in post-war Manchester, he has lived in Wales for over 40 years and has written 12 books about travel, nature and rock-climbing, winning several awards for his biographical studies of mountaineers.
In 2004, his son Will hanged himself, at the age of 24. He was one of Britain’s most outstanding adventure rock-climbers – a sport in which his father excelled in the 1960s and 1970s. Two weeks after his funeral, Perrin’s wife, Jacquetta, was diagnosed with breast cancer and she died nine months later. His own diagnosis with terminal cancer led to what Perrin calls a “triad of catastrophes”.
The book is divided into five sections that tell the before and after stories of these tragic events. Following the death of his wife, Perrin fled on impulse to an island off the west coast of Connemara. The first section deals with this instinctive flight and the time he spent at an ancient graveyard on Omey Island, roaming around a beach strewn with skulls. As the sea pours around Aughrus Point he tries to fit together the pieces of his life that have brought him to this place. Drawing on the example of Joan Didion, who wrote about the deaths of her husband and daughter, Perrin indulges in some “magical thinking”, wishing he was with the dead and even contemplating suicide: “Here on Omey, the wind offshore and the place at distant remove from habitation, I could make sounds I would not have believed myself capable of producing . . . No formal and disciplined expression of sorrow here, but primitive release”.
Following the “westward pull” of an Irish writer he calls Gráinne (not her real name), with whom he had been involved some years previously, he tries to understand what has happened before then launching into the back story. Beginning with an account of his early days growing up in Manchester in the 1950s, he moves on to describe his relationship with his son and their last climb together in August 2001 – which makes compelling reading.
There are many sharply observed encounters featuring his wife, as well as some Welsh women he later got to know when he moved house from Llanberis to Llanrhaeadr, where the ladies-who-lunch befriended him. With some bawdy comments, they try to work out his sexual orientation and in the village store, run by Glenda, he is “given the first degree”.
Perrin is at his most eloquent when describing the natural world and the experiences he and Jacquetta, a stained-glass artist, shared on their travels. Always responsive to what he calls “the bright particularity of things”, he moves skilfully from describing “the curl of rosetted lichen on a sunlit rock” in Wales, to Tobago where “the geckos blinked and stalked staccato across the ceiling”.
West is a courageous attempt to come to terms with the deaths of his wife and son. It is a moving love story with many moments of humour that give the book vitality and energy. A prolific writer on landscape and mountaineering, Perrin is an elegant stylist and writes an incantatory and exuberant, if at times overwrought, prose. Despite the difficult subject matter, he is free-thinking, wide-ranging and generous.
As in his other books, he puts himself at the heart of the performance and he humanises his stories with warmth and a powerful passion. His primary purpose in this book is not grief but celebration and it is much more than just a memoir; as well as personal pain, it covers travel, anecdote and, in particular, literature on a grand scale. He shows considerable literary erudition, invoking Yeats, MacNeice and Kavanagh as well as Ted Hughes, RS Thomas and WG Sebald, and offering a host of references to American authors, from Thoreau and Whitman through to Peter Matthiessen and Barry Lopez.
His journey ends on his 60th birthday with an ascent of the Old Man of Hoy on Orkney in memory of Will and Jacquetta, during which he concludes: “West is the landscape of loss. West is where the light dies”.
Written with a rigorous honesty and deeply felt empathy, Westis an unflinching account of loss, with an unexpectedly playful side to engage the reader and prevent the tear ducts from welling up too much.
Paul Clements is a writer and the author of the travel book The Height of Nonsense
