Jim Perrin - West: A Journey Through the Landscapes of Loss

West

Jim Perrin is one of Britains most highly regarded writers on travel, nature and the outdoors, and in his youth was one of the countrys most notable rock climbers. He is a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Climber and The Great Outdoors. Among many other awards, he has twice won the Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain literature and was voted Scottish Columnist of the Year 2009. He has written twelve books to date, including Menlove, The Villain: A Life of Don Whillans, River Map, The Climbing Essays and Travels with The Flea. He is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy, an Honorary Fellow of Bangor University, and the Guardians Country Diarist for Wales.

A brave, painful, beautiful memoir. This is a journey for which there is no conclusion; grief doesnt resolve, doesnt get cured. But it is a search for, and perhaps an arrival at, greater understanding Perrin has been described as a vivisector, wielding words as unflinchingly as a scalpel. In West, he turns the scalpel on himself. Susan Mansfield, Scotsman

A very moving memoir of lives shared and lost West achieve[s] a kind of grandeur. Andrew Motion, Guardian

A paradoxically vigorous, lovingly detailed account of bereavement. Stephen Knight, TLS

Perrin writes the blues, a life-affirming, uplifting journey of being; a love story. Perrin is one of the best landscape writers we have. He hasnt written this book for anyone to feel sorry for him, hes written it as an evocation of wild nature in all of us. Paul Evans, BBC Country File Magazine

Jim Perrin is one of the most distinguished voices on the multiple roles of nature and countryside in British cultural life. West is his finest and most important work to date: a blend of philosophical insight, political challenge and soaring lyricism. Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country

West takes the shattered heart and carefully, compassionately, mercifully, and with almost angelic generosity, rebuilds it West is an immensely readable book; erudite, witty, disarming and seductive. And it is ultimately a book about joy. Niall Griffiths

Jim Perrins tragic losses bring into focus all that has been important to him in a life lived, one full of extremes of nature and experience. West is an invigorating and frequently joyous reflection of what it feels like to be alive. Tristan Gooley, author of The Natural Navigator

In this astonishing book, as much factual novel or epic prose poem as anything else, Jim Perrin takes us on a celebratory, often hilarious, yet profoundly moving, journey through an intricate weave of lives lived, loved and lost. In recalling his wife and son, he conjugates love, pride and pain into an eloquent reflection on grief and mortality, set harmoniously into his lifelong preoccupations with travel, climbing and nature. Aonghas MacNeacail

This autobiography is a book of elemental passion, written with an exact elegance and a remarkable range of reference. It is a book of profound loss, intense joy, and a hard-earned wisdom. It possesses the strange beauty of a real work of art. Gwyn Thomas

This may be a book about grief but dont expect misery: West pulses with lifes vitality, is shot through with resilient spirit. Perrin, a writer peerless when mapping landscapes, now turns his attention to inner lands, to the empty plains of loss. He then fills them with memories of two people who were as dear to him as breath, a son and a lover who left chasms in the heart on their departure. What does it tell us? That life goes on, and thrillingly so. And that grief is the deepest lesson, if youre willing to learn. Jon Gower

A JOURNEY THROUGH
THE LANDSCAPES OF LOSS

Jim Perrin

First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2011 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright Jim Perrin, 2010

The moral right of Jim Perrin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The author and publisher would gratefully like to acknowledge the following for permission to quote from copyrighted material: The Savage God: A Study of Suicide by Al Alvarez, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, London; The Widowers House by John Bayley by permission of Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd; The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim. Copyright 1975, 1976 by Bruno Bettelheim. Reproduced by kind permission of Thames & Hudson Ltd. The Gamble, Bobok, A Nasty Story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, tr. Jessie Coulson 1966, reproduced by permission of Penguin; On Murder Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud, tr. Shaun Whiteside reproduced by permission of Penguin; The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud, tr. David McLintock 2003, reproduced by permission of Penguin; lines quoted from Ripple by Robert Hunter Ice Nine Publishing Company. Used with permission; Rocky Acres in Robert Graves, Collected Poems 1965, reproduced with permission from A. P. Watt on Behalf of the Trustees of the Robert Graves Copyright Trust and Carcanet Press; Darn o Gymru Biwritanaidd y ganrif ddiwethaf ydoedd hi, a line from Rhydcymerau by D. Gwenallt Jones from Eples, reproduced by kind permission of Gwasg Gomer; Funeral Music by Geoffrey Hill reproduced by kind permission of the author; Erntezeit (Harvest-time) by Friedrich Hlderlin in Leonard Forster (ed.), The Penguin Book of German Verse, 1957, reproduced by permission of Penguin; Distance Piece, 1964, by B. S. Johnson reproduced by permission of MBA Literary Agency; lines from On Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004) by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency; reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. Copyright 1986 by Giulio Einaudi Editore s.p.a. Torino. English translation Copyright 1988 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.; Braken Hills in Autumn, in Complete Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press; I saw you among the apples, in Hymn to a Young Demon by Aonghas MacNeacail reproduced by kind permission of the author; Leaving Barra by Louis MacNeice reproduced by permission of David Higham Literary Agency; lines from Detholiad o Gerddi by T. H. Parry-Williams reproduced by kind permission of Gwasg Gomer; Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation Gillian Rose 1996, reproduced by permission of Cambridge University Press; Autobiography of Bertrand Russell 1967 Bertrand Russell, published by George Allen and Unwin and reproduced by permission of Routledge and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation; The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse, published by Harvill Press. Used by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; Lights Out For the Territory