Anemogram

I wanted to read this book because people I knew had praised it highly. It took me three attempts. The opening paragraph is willfully obscure. The title was, the author says, chosen at random. (For what it’s worth, an anemogram is a graphic record of wind speed.) The first few pages sometimes seem overwritten. Those who read this review, and then read this book, will think at first that I’m mad to give it five stars. I’m not.

Rebecca Gransden’s anemogram. (sic) opens in an abandoned yard in the woods. It’s late summer, and a girl of six or seven has been sleeping rough. We follow her as she wakes and moves through the forest, and finds a hut, a sort of site office. She breaks in, and is eventually caught by a young man. She tells him her name is Rachel, and that she is alone because of an accident, and he takes her in search of her parents, who he thinks must be injured. She slips away from him and spends the night in the woods.

But it isn’t long before she looks for food in another site office, where she is taken in hand by a slightly older man, David. This time she says her name is Sarah. We learn that his estranged wife has gone abroad with their children. He is alone and decides to keep the girl with him and pretend that the girl is his niece. But he knows that he may be suspected of molesting the child. For the next few days they travel together as David looks for somewhere they can be together without exciting this suspicion. It is a search that leads to tragedy.

Who, really, is the girl, and where has she come from? Gransden’s in no hurry to answer this, and you eventually realize that she might not even do so. To find out if she does, one must read the book. But in any case, by the time I was halfway through, I’d decided it didn’t matter. What did, was David and Sarah’s strange journey through the physical and psychic landscape of modern England.

It’s this journey that raises this book so far above the ordinary. Gransden is a visual, almost tactile, writer, and has a wonderful ability to conjure up a time and place. Thus Sarah spends a night in the woods early in the book; the twigs, leaves, damp earth and gnarled bark are so real that you can smell the forest. She and David visit a hilltop on the coast, and the light on the sea is as real as the flakes of pastry from their picnic that are blown about in the wind. When it comes to the human environment, Gransden is even better; the tatty inside of a site office, motorway service stations, a run-down farm building, an antiseptic and regimented care home where they visit David’s mother. The people, too, feel real; a casual encounter with a fast-food worker or a youth in the park or a man in a hard hat – they’re all right there in your head.

Whether Sarah herself is real, or a ghost or a runaway or what, is secondary; in fact, I’m not sure Gransden greatly cares. It just isn’t the point. What the point of this book really is, only Gransden knows. But I think I can guess. The building sites and supermarkets and fast-food restaurants in this book all convey an atmosphere of sterility and alienation through which David moves as if in a dream. For him, Sarah represents connection and meaning, and a chance to revisit the excitement of childhood. anemogram. seems, at first, infuriating, but in the end it is an extraordinary and evocative meditation on what it is to be English in the 21st century. We yearn to be in the woods with Sarah, but our world is the supermarket checkout, cardboard fries, motorways, and the smell of petrol in the rain.