Review: Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines by Patrick McGuinness

Martin Shipton

In all his writing, Patrick McGuinness has an acute sense of time, place and memory.

His novel The Last Hundred Days, set at the tail end of the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania, includes a character who compiles a series of “lost walks” in Bucharest, highlighting historic buildings that have been demolished but live on in the imagination.

And his memoir Other People’s Countries evokes with the help of all the senses the present and past of the atmospheric Belgian town of Bouillon where he was brought up – his mother was the daughter of a local dressmaker and a factory worker who gave up work early after contracting emphysema, while his father worked for the British Council.

McGuinness, an Oxford professor of French literature who has lived for more than 20 years in Wales, has now published a book of essays called Ghost Stations in which he explores his own preoccupations with characteristic thoughtfulness and originality.

Rail journeys

Rail journeys are a theme – sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical, and never involving the main line – that runs through the book, whose subtitle is Essays and Branchlines.

He quotes with approval the fact that it takes significantly longer to reach the nearest station to Bouillon from Brussels now than was the case decades ago. For McGuinness, a slower journey perhaps illustrates the truth that unhurried contemplation can lead to a deeper appreciation of all things.

There are plenty of “branchlines” in this book of essays that take us in many unexpected directions.

We visit the wonderful Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, where the superbly evocative novel of that name by Orhan Pamuk has been given an extra dimension through the display of objects that appear in the book.

The experience of visiting the museum leads McGuinness to consider the nature of nostalgia and how it compares with a variation of the concept unique to the city where it is located: “Nostalgia and its bandmates – melancholy, morbidity, introspection – get their bad reputations mostly because they are individual and isolating, preoccupations of the atomised self.

Though his characters have their fair share of these, Pamuk has something larger and more expansive to convey, which he calls Hüzün. The word, originally Arabic, is used in the Koran to express the sadness of those who have become distant from God in their pursuit of earthly things. In modern Turkish, it means something more numinous, secular and encompassing, and Pamuk seeks out the Hüzün ‘unique to Istanbul’.

It is a sense of loss, of the distance between one’s great past and one’s diminished present … Because it is a shared thing, Hüzün has the paradoxical effect of joining the individual to the community in ways that are the opposite of what nostalgia and melancholy and all the variants of aesthetic moping conventionally do in Western literature.”

Described in that way, Hüzün bears a remarkable similarity to the sense of hiraeth experienced by Welsh people.

Sheerness

Another branchline takes McGuinness to Sheerness, an unprepossessing seaside resort on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent where the renowned East German writer Uwe Johnson spent his final years because he found it reminiscent of the Baltic coast he had known as a child.

Johnson wrote his 1,700-page magnum opus Anniversaries there. He spent much of his time in a pub, where he had his own stool, and where the locals knew him as “Charles” (he reacted badly when anyone called him Charlie). He fell out with his wife and they separated, but she remained on the island, living nearby. Perhaps inspired by the partition of Berlin during the Cold War, he divided Sheerness up into two zones – one which was exclusively his territory, and the other his wife’s: they were not permitted to cross into the other’s patch. There were common areas for shopping etc, but to ensure they didn’t accidentally encounter each other, a rota was drawn up specifying the times when each was permitted to enter the common zone.

When he died at the age of 49 in 1984, Johnson’s body remained undiscovered for three weeks: he had fallen while trying to uncork his third bottle of wine of the night.

Baffled

McGuinness writes: “Some friends remained baffled about Johnson’s choice of residence. His publisher, Siegfried Ubseld, recalled: ‘How can one live here, how can one write here, in this run-down town with little or no possibility of preserving what makes the outer life worth living?’ Others, however, understood what drew Johnson to Sheppey. They saw that it was consistent with his politics, with his dislike for middle-class liberalism, consumerism and snobbery.”

Other essays include interesting insights on the little-read prose of the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, one of McGuiness’s favourite writers, and another on the Swiss-French painter and woodcut artist Félix Vallotton, whose images were controversial at a time when anarchist bombers were a source of fear and outrage at the turn of the 20th century.

The most heartfelt and indignant piece in the collection relates to one of his teachers when he attended a boarding school in Bristol.

The story is familiar. Chris Jeffries was demonised by much of the media as the suspected murderer of Joanna Yeates, a 25 year-old landscape architect who went missing a week before Christmas in 2010 and whose body was found on Christmas Day. She lived with her partner in a flat they rented from Jeffries, another of whose tenants, an architectural engineer named Vincent Tabak, was later convicted of the murder.

McGuinness, who wrote a novel based on the case called Throw Me to the Wolves, concentrated in his essay on the “monstering” of Jeffries by the media, who used his eccentricities and intellectualism against him to create the innuendo that he was the killer.

At a time when mobs are being used for political reasons to stir up hatred against people who are different to what is perceived as the norm, the story as interpreted by McGuinness seems to have even greater pertinence than it did at the time the events occurred.

As a book, this series of essays somehow achieves a coherence that may initially seem surprising, given the eclectic nature of its content. It’s a thought-provoking and rewarding read.

 Ghost Stations by Patrick McGuinness is published by CB Editions and is available here and at all good bookshops