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Irish Times
09-05-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane: A potentially transformative vision
Is a River Alive? Author : Robert Macfarlane ISBN-13 : 978-0241624814 Publisher : Hamish Hamilton Guideline Price : £25 In 2017, the Whanganui river, which flows through the North Island of New Zealand , was accorded a legal identity: 'personhood', with appointed guardians to defend its rights. The Whanganui has long been bound up with Maori culture: it is regarded as taonga, a treasured possession; and its new legal status was achieved during the period of a conservative government in New Zealand, and passed into law with the backing of that government, though only after years of battle and argument. Legal personhood cannot be regarded as the end of the matter: far from it – the river and its catchment continue to suffer from pollution, and from the effects of upstream water diversions; the Whanganui is by no means a pristine ecosystem. But the attainment of legal personhood may be seen as a necessary first step: an essential moment in an inevitably long and tortuous process that defends the rights of nature – and of the future – against destruction in the name of economic progress. In the course of Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane argues compellingly the case for regarding rivers – and by implication, all other elements of the natural world – as living beings, with all that flows from this in terms of fundamental rights and protections. The decision to frame the book's title as a question indicates, one must assume, a nod to the niceties of diplomacy and persuasion, although the briefest glance at this issue – indeed, the briefest glance at the poisoned environments within which we all now live – demonstrates that the answer must be a resounding yes: that rivers, landscapes and ecosystems must now be imagined and engaged with in new ways. It is a potentially transformative vision – and one that makes fundamental sense, both intellectually and emotionally. Indeed, the book itself immediately sweeps away what is a redundant question mark: Macfarlane describes his book as 'a journey into an idea that changes the world' – and his remarkable and devastating prologue condenses time with a description of a single chalk stream through the ages, rising in and running through the south of England. He describes the origins of the stream in the deep past, its wells and springs laid down by Ice Age glaciers, its waters flowing before and through human history, witnessed by serfs, monarchs and poets, coming under increasing strain from an exploding and thirsty population that taps the aquifer feeding the stream and pollutes its diminishing waters – until in the boiling summer of 2022, the chalk stream chokes, runs dry, dies. Although Macfarlane has written feelingly of many specific places, the landscapes of southern England and the chalk rivers that course through them – among the rarest ecosystems in the world – are his home ground, his own place; little wonder, then, that he writes with such passion and persuasion of their desecration in the name of economic growth. But his prose moves almost at once farther afield: on from the desiccating springs of the Thames in England to the dying Po in Italy, to the shrinking Rhine in Germany, where drought stones have emerged from the waters: READ MORE Wenn du mich siest, danne weine. If you see me, weep. This, then, is no localised book. Just as our own lives and futures are in danger, Macfarlane makes clear, so are the futures of everyone – and Is a River Alive? weaves an interconnected global web in which human threats loom large. The narrative flows on, from the cloud forests of Ecuador, at risk from mining, to the lagoons of India, sickening from environmental pollution, to the river courses of Quebec, threatened by dams. In each case the perils are elemental and immediate; in each case the landscapes that are imperilled are bound up with the lives and identities of local human cultures – and in each case, it is these same human cultures that are resisting the essentially anonymised threat posed by extractive global capitalism. [ Abhainn: This Dublin walking trail is a love letter to the city's forgotten rivers Opens in new window ] Macfarlane returns repeatedly to the image of running water, relating it to our own identity and being. He quotes the Maori expression 'Ko wai koe?' (Who are your waters? – meaning, 'Where are you from? Where did you begin?') It is a question that goes to the heart of each of our identities, expressing the power latent in the image of a river running free. As Macfarlane observes, 'everyone lives in a watershed', and the world's waters run in our veins too. And while there is on the face of it little enough hope that environmental disaster can now be staved off, Macfarlane does find grounds for optimism, flowing from the essential nature of water itself as revivifying, replenishing, restorative – as healing, given half a chance. 'Hope,' he writes, 'is the things with rivers.' But hope must be accompanied by transformative action – before it is too late.
The Independent
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Zadie Smith on her groundbreaking debut, White Teeth, 25 years on: ‘I never think about my novels a year after I've written them'
In early 2000, the book that Zadie Smith had begun writing at Cambridge University 'as a way of managing anxiety about my exams' entered the world. It was called White Teeth. Its creation had been feverish, and, despite the myriad pressures of university life, it was all she'd been able to think about during her time there. 'I remember being totally obsessed, writing every day, all day,' Smith says now, 25 years and several million sales later. 'I'd have a massive fried breakfast at Café Rouge each morning – an insane luxury because it meant you didn't have to bother with lunch, which breaks up the writing day. Then I'd write and smoke all day until dinner.' Smith was 24 years old then, the daughter of a white father and a Jamaican mother, and had grown up in northwest London. A voracious reader, she changed her given name of Sadie to Zadie at the age of 14 in deference to one of her favourite writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Her subsequent route to publication was the kind most writers can only dream of: a dizzying advance of £250,000 awarded on just an 80-page extract, and, when her book hit the shelves, a sustaining hype that generated both endless column inches and bestseller status. Her publishers must have been relieved. A quarter of a million pounds on an unknown is quite the punt. 'It's always impossible to be sure,' says Simon Prosser, Smith's editor of 25 years at Hamish Hamilton. 'But from very early on, the responses from anyone who read it suggested that it could be a rare, perhaps even phenomenal, success. The characters and the writing just leapt from the page; the storytelling skill was remarkable; the voice unique.' And Smith's own reaction? 'I never really doubted I was a writer,' she says. 'That would have been like doubting I had arms or legs.' To reread White Teeth now, as it celebrates its 25th anniversary, is to remind yourself just how worthy it was of that initial fuss. Brilliant and audacious and giddy on its own propulsive momentum, it's ostensibly a multi-generational family drama with a large cast, but it's also a comedy, a treaty on race, racism and religion, a coming-of-age tale, and a thoroughly modern look at an increasingly modern Britain. Little wonder it runs to over 500 pages. Despite its endless digressions, and its very heft, the sense of control here is little short of miraculous for a debut author. Yes, there is an eagerness to please (and to entertain, always) that can perhaps be read now as a beginner's naivety – and Smith has certainly become a far more controlled writer in subsequent novels – but White Teeth remains terrific fun. Reading it is like being at a dinner party with Hanif Kureishi and Hilary Mantel alongside Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, each trying to speak over the other. All the wine has been drunk. The novel went on to sell over 6 million copies, and was lavished with flattering reviews – Rushdie himself called it 'astonishingly assured', while i-D magazine suggested that 'Zadie Smith's cracked it big style.' The Daily Telegraph proclaimed her the 'George Eliot of multiculturalism'. Like Trainspotting before it, White Teeth represented a genuine cultural moment, a changing of the guard. By taking the literary novel away from its comfortable Hampstead salons and into a younger, more multicultural world, Smith threw the doors wide open for fiction to become more interesting, and more relevant for today. In her wake, many writers have followed her lead, among them Caleb Azumah Nelson, Candice Carty-Williams and Natasha Brown. Perhaps inevitably, the occasional critique of White Teeth did trickle in. In those cases, the general complaint was regarding its complex, meandering plot. But plot didn't matter, insists the writer Lisa Appignanesi, an early supporter of Smith's, who first introduced her to a literary agent. 'There was such imaginative intelligence there, I was in awe. Its energy was extraordinary.' White Teeth went on to win five prominent literary awards, though it was notably overlooked for the prestigious Orange Prize, with one judge reportedly saying of Smith's shot at winning: 'Over my dead body.' All par for the course; after all, success breeds contempt. 'I was suddenly the subject of a lot of envy,' Smith concedes today, 'which was a 180-degree flip from my reality up to that point, where I was the one who envied others. It was all so far from my own self-conception that I didn't really process it or take it seriously. It is, of course, a bit lonely to be the one who is envied – I prefer to be in community with people. Also,' she adds, 'it was no great tragedy.' One might think that all this hubbub would cast a rather inhibiting shadow across whatever Smith did next, but no, she has only emboldened her reputation since. There have been five further novels: The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), NW (2012), Swing Time (2016), and most recently The Fraud (2023). If none made quite as big a splash as that ostentatious debut, how could they? Nevertheless, she has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times, and there is compelling evidence to suggest that NW, about four London friends over the course of many years, is one of the most satisfying novels of the 21st century. The Fraud, meanwhile, was her first fully historical work, about the real-life Tichborne case, a legal cause celebre that made headlines in Victorian England in the 1860s. 'Every book I have written, I have written because I felt compelled to write it,' she tells me. 'Nobody made me, nobody asked for any of them. Not one was written for money or for any reason other than because I wanted to write it.' Smith has always given the impression that she's dealt with her brand of fame rather well, perhaps because she's kept it at a safe distance. She has never engaged with social media, and she soon stopped giving interviews. She only consented to this one over email – normally a nightmare for journalists, but her responses, in big paragraph chunks, sing with her trademark eloquence. In 2004, she and her husband, the poet Nick Laird (with whom she has two children), left what she had previously called 'London's claustrophobic literary world, or at least the role I had been assigned within it: multicultural (ageing) wunderkind'. They moved to Rome and later Boston, eventually settling in New York, where Smith immersed herself in Manhattan's claustrophobic literary world instead. There she taught creative writing at NYU and threw martini-fuelled dinner parties in the evenings for her new friends, Lena Dunham among them. 'I [also] got to sing jazz at The Carlisle, a dream I'd had since childhood,' she says. 'That never would have happened if it wasn't for White Teeth.' Smith is today back living in London with her family, where she is a serious woman of letters, a public intellectual routinely sought out by newspaper editors for her take on world events, like Black Lives Matter and Israel-Palestine. Her op-ed pieces, later compiled into several essay collections, either cause or court controversy for the simple fact that her stance is not a universal one. Whose is? After Smith wrote in The New Yorker in 2024, for example, about Israel's offensive in Gaza – a piece in which she suggested that 'my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn' – the British commentator Nadeine Asbali responded that 'Smith's literary reputation allows her to overlook the perceived banalities of right and wrong', before concluding: 'My literary idols have failed the moral test on Gaza.' Smith herself remains sanguine about criticism in general, the inevitable consequence of having a public voice. 'I always write freely,' she says. 'I can't write unless I feel free. I know that strangers read me, and that I am therefore being judged or psychoanalysed or politically or aesthetically found wanting, or whatever it is. But that's how it should be. 'If I was very online and had to be in direct dialogue with them all – well, I imagine that would trim my sails a bit. But as it is, I have the relation[ship] with my readers that all writers had for hundreds of years until about 2003. I write, they read, sometimes someone sends me a letter.' Now on the cusp of 50, Smith suggests that she isn't particularly fussed about the 25th birthday of White Teeth – at least, not half as much as her publishers, who have just reprinted her debut in handsome hardback. Instead, she prefers to look forward. 'I thought I should [read it again] for this anniversary, but didn't get past the first page,' she admits. 'But then I never think about any of my novels a year after I've written them. I have this need to keep moving.'
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, old-school publisher who fought against corporate behemoths
Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, who has died aged 85, was once hailed by The Daily Telegraph as 'the last of the great lunching publishers'; after three decades with Hamish Hamilton, he struck out in 1989 to launch his own firm, Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd, in a valiant but doomed stand against the increasing corporatisation of publishing. At Hamish Hamilton, where he was managing director from 1974, he had earned a reputation as one of the best editors in Britain. Among the authors he guided to success there were Susan Hill (who would only go on with a novel after he had approved the first chapter), William Boyd, Jane Gardam and Paul Theroux. He liked to size up a book's potential over a long lunch with an author or agent, without recourse to the marketing department's views on its saleability. Trusting to his instincts, rather than the dictates of common sense, often proved lucrative. He came away from one lunch telling himself he must have been mad to offer an advertising executive a £5,000 advance for a memoir about living in France; but in the event Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence sold six million copies. He did not disdain blatant money-spinners, a book of photographs by Prince Andrew among them. At the other end of the intellectual spectrum, he paid £80,000 for the rights to Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde (1987) – a record-breaking sum for a literary life. It sold so well that literary biographers found their ill-remunerated trade briefly awash with money as other publishers scrambled to emulate its success. He began to feel increasingly out of place in the publishing landscape of the 1980s, however, as international conglomerates mounted aggressive campaigns to buy up venerable British imprints. In 1985 Hamish Hamilton was sold to the US-backed Penguin Group; four years later Sinclair-Stevenson resigned as managing director. 'Corporate publishing does not encourage editors' enthusiasms and eccentricities … [so] an anodyne, homogenised culture has broken out,' Sinclair-Stevenson told the Telegraph. He had tired of endless unproductive meetings and decisions being taken across the Atlantic by executives he did not know. Penguin was taken aback by his departure – he was told that he would have continued to be 'tolerated as an anomaly' – and the parting was acrimonious. The following year he launched Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd, housed in a mews off the Old Brompton Road, with Lord Rees-Mogg as chairman; with the help of his old friend Tim Waterstone, the bookseller, he secured backing from 3i Group. He was determined to prove that an independent company specialising in 'upmarket publishing' ('I hate the expression, but it does describe what I am trying to do') could thrive. Several of his big-name authors at Hamish Hamilton took a risk and went with him. He launched his new firm with books by three of them: Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens and novels by AN Wilson and William Boyd. Rose Tremain, Sybille Bedford, Bernice Rubens and Maureen Duffy also defected. The new venture was well-publicised, with the press keen to support the underdog against the American, Australian and German conglomerates devouring UK publishing. Much of the coverage was devoted to a discussion of whether Sinclair-Stevenson was inspired or insane in giving Ackroyd a £600,000 advance for two biographies. Days before the firm launched, Sinclair-Stevenson's glamorous secretary Sarah Johnson outed herself to The Guardian as the long-term mistress of Leo Cooper, husband of Jilly. Her employer was suspected of guiding the timing of her revelation; in any event, the launch party was thronged with press. The Sinclair-Stevenson list boasted some bestsellers, such as the memoirs of Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and enjoyed a good deal of prestige: under its aegis Rose Tremain secured the James Tait Black Prize and the underrated poet James Michie won the Hawthornden Prize for his collected verse. The Telegraph's Jeremy Lewis feared, however, that Sinclair-Stevenson took too little interest in 'those solid if unglamorous 'bread and-butter items' – books on fishing or bridge or accountancy – that plod steadily on and pay the bills.' The dream of independence proved short-lived: in 1992 the firm was sold at a loss to the conglomerate Reed. Tim Waterstone told the press he had learnt his lesson about investing in friends' businesses. Sinclair-Stevenson was retained to run the imprint, but his role was gradually downgraded to 'ambassador-at-large' (or, as wags in the company asserted, 'ambassador-at-lunch'). He was powerless to prevent Reed from dropping his poetry list and refusing to honour some authors' contracts. In 1995 Reed sold Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd to Random House, and his connection with the imprint that bore his name formally ended. He took the unusual decision to cross the Rubicon from publishing to become a literary agent – 'I suspect it will annoy some people, so that makes me all the keener to do it.' Although his agency remained his focus thereafter, he was not quite done with publishing. In 2000 Random House decided to wind up Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd, and he asked if he could have his name back for a new venture. Random House loftily agreed that he could, as long as he published nothing which would bring into disrepute a name with which they were associated. He wrote back to ask if his first proposed publication, a new translation of the Bible in 24 volumes, met this criterion; Random House did not deign to reply. Christopher Terence Sinclair-Stevenson was born on June 27 1939, the son of George Sinclair-Stevenson, an officer in the Coldstream Guards and later a leading lawyer in Hong Kong, and his wife Gloria, née Gordon. Christopher inherited an Argentine peerage descended from a paternal great-great-uncle, but chose not to use the title, Baron Belgrado. He came from a long line of soldiers and was destined for Sandhurst, but at Eton – where he was remembered as 'a scholarly schoolmaster's dream but the despair of the games master' – his housemaster persuaded him that Cambridge might be more suitable, and he read modern languages at St John's College. In 1961 he became an editor at Hamish Hamilton, and came to look on Jamie Hamilton, who had founded the business in 1931, as a father figure, absorbing his belief in running a small-scale firm founded on the personal relationships between editors and authors. He proved adept at publicity wheezes. When he published Raymond Briggs's anti-nuclear graphic novel When the Wind Blows, he had a copy sent to every MP, leading inevitably to usefully noisy outrage from the pro-nuclear element. One bestseller he missed out on was Spycatcher, the controversial memoir by the ex-MI5 officer Peter Wright. Wright's agent Giles Gordon reported that Sinclair-Stevenson agreed terms, 'but then backed out after a visit from a sinister person in a bowler hat'. His martial ancestry remained apparent, according to one commentator, in his 'unpublisher-like neatness of dress'. Unpunctual authors attested that he was 'tougher and more autocratic than his elegant, easygoing exterior might suggest'. One of his closest friends was Sir Alec Guinness, from whom he finally coaxed the long-delayed first volume of his autobiography, Blessings in Disguise, in 1985. Sinclair-Stevenson later became his literary agent: the hardest part of the job, he recalled, was, on book tours, trying to prevent press or public from asking the great actor anything about Star Wars, which he had come to loathe. Sinclair-Stevenson also gained a reputation as a popular historian in his own right. He wrote books on the Jacobite Risings of the early 18th century (Inglorious Rebellion, 1971); the Gordon Highlanders (The Life of a Regiment, 1974); the Hanoverian Georges (Blood Royal, 1979); and France (That Sweet Enemy, 1987). He also translated works by Simenon. He was founding director of the Southwark Literature Festival from 2000. He reviewed often for the Telegraph, and was treasured for his waspishly neat reflections on memoirs by his fellow publishers. Of Tom Maschler he wrote: 'There is… something rather endearing about a man so convinced of his brilliance, as if Mr Pooter had come to Bloomsbury.' Sinclair-Stevenson retired last year and Andrew Lownie took on his list of clients. He married, in 1965, Deborah Walker-Smith, daughter of the Conservative politician Lord Broxbourne. She died in 2022. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, born June 27 1939, died January 20 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
