After reading Unsheltered

Mary Treat, the real-life 19th-century naturalist and correspondent of Darwin, one of the improbable heroes of Kingsolver's fiction title Unsheltered [photo: public domain]

Some months ago I wrote about Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Unsheltered while in the middle of reading it. Now, finally, I have finished it, and here is a revision and update to my thoughts. To be honest my views are rather confused and contradictory, so I’ve labelled the thoughts into sections: what I liked, what I didn’t like, and what I noticed (but am neutral about). Spoiler alert, I give away details of the plot below. 

What I liked 

• Both the modern and the 19th-century tales are about the loss of shelter: Greenwood Thatcher and Willa both move out of their former home.
• The fearsomely intricate plotting: the entire book combines two separate stories, one chapter for each century.
• But the cleverness doesn’t end there. My partner very cleverly pointed out the book begins and ends with a little baby. The book opens with the mother’s suicide, leaving the baby alone and, well, unsheltered. The book ends with the same baby learning to stand up. The baby represents the new generation. The baby’s mother represents the old generation: materialistic, unconcerned with the environment, and committing suicide (no future for that kind of world view). The child, under the new management of Tig, the environmentalist, will grow up with a new vision, rather than remaining with her father, the financial trader (no future in that, either, at least not in this novel).
• The incredibly artful plotting, so that each chapter title is the final word or words of the preceding chapter.
• The capture, in all its horrific detail, of sibling rivalry (between Tig and Zeke) and how appalling it is
• The incredibly naturalistic micro-detail. By this, I mean that every sentence of the book is artfully composed and full of believable detail. For example (from chapter one):

He [Landis] should see his dying little burg now, with its main drag so deserted Willa felt safe taking out her phone to check the time as she and her legally blind dog casually jaywalked. 

Why mention “legally blind”? We have been told the dog was old, but not that it could barely see. And, of course, if the characters are jaywalking, there is clearly no traffic problem. The text is constantly artful, and draining.

What is Kingsolver’s world view? She is quite like Tolstoy: everything is grist to her mill, so she brings in her reading on whatever subject is of interest. It is indicated by the three books she recommends in her acknowledgements. The contents can be seen pretty clearly from the title of one of them: The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, The Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. That sounds like it echoes Tig's world-view. Another of the recommended books is The Book that Changed America, by Randall Fuller, about the impact of Darwinian evolution on contemporary America. That would be Thatcher Greenwood. It’s rare for a fictional work to have a kind of reading list at the end.

What I was neutral about

The sheer, overwhelming proliferation of detail. Whether is it Greek swearing, or the details of changing nappies, or how to treat an elderly man with dementia, or the details of how (or how not) to get tenure in academia. 

What I didn't like

• All that detail [Yes, I know this is the same point I just made in the section above]! It was impressive but overbearing. This was a novel I could only manage in small doses, otherwise I would have drowned in all that detail.
• The heavy-handed and trite plotting. The novelist includes as an essential part of the structure  for Willa and her daughter Tig to be arguing about the environment. They are too nice to argue that much! Truth is, adult children don’t typically get involved in stand-up slanging matches with their parents, but it provides for the novelist a way of expressing the debate about the environment. Rather clumsy plotting, I think.
• Likewise, the debate about Darwinianism versus evolutionism is clumsy (as I wrote in my last post). Mary Treat is an impossibly perfect character: a infinitely calm naturalist with infinite patience. Too good to be true.
• Similarly heavy-handed is the way Zeke, the financial trader, simply disappears when he hears his baby has been appropriated by Tig, his sister. In my reading of the world, financial traders like Zeke don’t disappear quietly. Yet in this novel the transfer of the baby seems to be the accepted and unquestioned order of things at the end.
• The heart-on-sleeve sincerity that is only possible in novels, which are not the real world.
• The transfer of real-world arguments to the fictional universe, which means that Kingsolver can take the parts she likes from her reading and create a good or bad ending as she chooses. Real life isn’t like that. At the micro-level, the characters are believable, but at the macro-level, the plot just doesn’t hang together.
• I drowned in the minutiae, the sheer proliferation of detail, that left me begging for mercy like a fighter on the ropes. There was so much detail, and the novel was so naturalistic, that I wondered: can any novelist hold so much detail in their head? At the same time, I realised that because of the detail, there could be no true closure at the end of the novel. Life would flow on, and I felt the book could have finished effectively at any point in the last hundred pages. And yet the final sentence does, improbably, offer a happy ending, unlikely as it may seem.

To be honest, I’m no closer to a balanced judgement than I was three months ago. Exasperating and enthralling in equal doses. 

Whaley Bridge in the Peak District: 100 feverish years

To be honest, the idea behind the holiday was simply to get away from home. The Peak District was conveniently close, and  a house picked almost at random simply because it was available brought us to Whaley Bridge. The house was chosen for the view, and it certainly had a spectacular view, positioned as it was a few hundred feet above the town itself. This is how we arrived at our destination without the slightest idea of what the town might be like. 

Whaley Bridge is a small town on the Goyt river, which forms the border between Derbyshire and Cheshire. We never actually saw the bridge; there didn’t seem to be much evidence of the river in the centre of town. Whaley Bridge looks like many other small towns in the area: small-scale urban, a Co-op, a fish and chip shop, several charity shops, a small station on the line from Manchester to Buxton. Most of the buildings were of the typical dark stone found in the Peak District (to be precise, Whaley Bridge isn’t part of the Peak District National Park at all). Houses were rather small, and there was little to see that was at all remarkable. 

But Whaley Bridge soon revealed a rather different image. From our house on the hill, it was evident that there is little flat land in the area. A walk into town was easy going down, but a ten-minute strenous exercise to get back up the hill again. On the first day, with constant drizzle, we followed the path just to see what was there. Down by the river was the first shock: an old railway bridge, which seemed to be in the middle of the town. 

 

This bridge was the start of the Peak Forest Tramway, an industrial railway moving goods to and from the canal up into the hills. When you turned round from this bridge, there was a very uninspired new housing development (the Woodbrook Housing Estate). The only difference between these new houses and the traditional terraced housing in the town was a few inches of space between the houses, as if detached houses provided clear evidence of higher status for the owners; plus, of course, the almost obligatory glass-roofed conservatories, breaking all the insulation provided for the houses. 

The estate would not be worth mentioning were it not for one sign at the entrance: Goyt Mills, 1865. This was the site of the former textile mill of Whaley Bridge, with 200 looms when it opened. What a sad contrast! 

A few yards further on was more evidence of an industrial past, but this time intact: a grand stone building, the Transshipment Warehouse of 1801, which, even without its third storey, is still a very impressive monument to the industry of the day. The Warehouse was used to transfer goods from barge to rail and vice versa. 

But the biggest discovery was still to come. About half a mile down the canal spur to Whaley Bridge is the Bugsworth Canal Basin, a complete inland port, gloriously restored to something like its former state, with flyovers (from the early nineteenth century!) for the rail trucks carrying the goods. You could imagine from the scale of the site how many canal boats would be loading and unloading here. A curious incidental detail was that the nearby village changed its name from Bugsworth to Buxworth in the 1930s – perhaps evidence of a shift towards euphemism, and the present-day mania for naming streets with bland and inoffensive titles. 

That short walk was quite a revelation. Whaley Bridge does not rank as a major tourist site, and yet here were some of the most significant industrial remains in the Peak District. How did all this arise? 

Well, despite all the usual sources stating that there are Roman and earlier remains and that the bridge is “ancient”, the earliest reference to Whaley Bridge appears to be from 1597, an enforcing order to repair the bridge. If there was a community there, it must have been very small. But in 1791, an advertisement was placed in the Manchester Chronicle, offering for sale land at Whaley Bridge, for the establishment of industry, stating that “children and grown-up persons are mostly in want of employment”. In other words, present-day Whaley Bridge is largely the result of speculation from the time of the industrial revolution. At various times in the 19th century, Whaley Bridge had coal mines, quarrying, textile bleaching and printing mills, lime kilns, and even a gunpowder factory! To give an idea of the scale of the activity, there were 21 people employed at the station in various roles. 

Leaving aside for a moment the appalling labour conditions during the Industrial Revolution, it is astonishing to think that such a small place can have become such a hotbed of innovation for a hundred years, and then somehow to have reverted back to the pleasant but insignificant town of today. The only sign of interesting activity in the present-day town I noticed was the Footsteps Bookshop. “Bookshop” is a bit of a misnomer; it turned out to be more a community centre and coffee shop, although as I visited people were bringing in bags of books – the sort of bookshop where your value as a book donator was more the size of your bag than the quality of the books. Footsteps is run by a community trust, and looked lively and well populated. 

What to make of Whaley Bridge? My understanding of the town was greatly helped by the admirable Whaley Bridge in the mid-Nineteenth Century, a pamphlet published in 1978 as a result of an extra-mural class run by Manchester University. But even that excellent publication, based on analysis of records, didn’t answer the fundamental question, for me. Did Whaley Bridge just have a hundred years of feverish activity, almost by accident? Just because there was a good source of water? How does innovation like that happen? Did the industrial innovation have any connection with the town, or was it simply imported, only to disappear as the industry moved away?

How did terraced housing become so desirable?

Earlham Road, in the Norwich Golden Triangle (By Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0)

A week ago I visited an area of Norwich dubbed The Golden Triangle, with Unthank Road at its centre. For the most part, the area consisted of largely undistinguished terraced housing, if considered purely in architectural terms. But there were indications everywhere that the inhabitants liked living there. Looking at visible indicators as you wandered around, this was a very successful community. One of the local parks, Heigham Park, was very lively with many different groups co-existing: people walking their dog, teenagers playing frisbee, parents with young children. There was a community noticeboard that gave details of how money had been found (I believe donated) to repair the leaking pond. The park itself was not just grass; it comprised several recognisable areas, each with a slightly different identity.

As for the streets, there were plenty of signs of life: posters in the windows for Black Lives Matter, and drawings supporting the NHS. Lots of plants in the front gardens. There were trees in the streets to provide something for the eye. There were lots of people walking about and chatting. This living community begged the question: did those terraces enable the community, or could that community have grown up anywhere? In England, there are similar areas in Cambridge, in Oxford, Bristol, and Sheffield (to my knowledge). Why do some areas of terraced housing just look run down, while others thrive? 

I remembered reading Stefan Muthesius’ The English Terraced House (1982) many years ago. Here was a book that celebrated the terraced house; would it give me an answer to the magic of communities? Would it explain the interaction between buildings and people?  I returned to Muthesius’s book with eager anticipation. Does this book capture something of the distinctiveness of the terraced house? What about the myth of the East End of London, the distinctive sense of identity and belonging that many residents claim was lost when they were rehoused in new developments such as Harlow New Town? Of course it is unfair to critique a book by an architectural historian for not describing community. But one of the intangible yet very real aspects of architecture is that the built environment and community can, perhaps, interact.

Sadly, the book doesn’t appear to consider this aspect. The book is arranged thematically: layout, energy, sanitation, improvements, plan, façade, decoration. Only the last chapter appears to look at the people who lived in these houses, but even that chapter is more about class differentiation in style, rather than communities. There is no entry for “community” in the index.

You could say that it is not the job of an architect to describe how buildings are used over a hundred years after they are built. My feeling is just the opposite. I remember architects getting very interested in the idea of “defensible space”, creating a built environment that did, or did not, create a feeling of safety and well-being to the people using it. Some benches in parks and on streets are regularly used by people walking by; others are never used. The interaction of people with their environment, although a challenging subject, is perhaps the most important of all for an architect.

Muthesius writes, in the Introduction to the book, “Most of what is said and illustrated in this book is common knowledge.” That may be, for people who live in terraced houses, but it seems to be common knowledge that can be lost when new housing development takes place. Yet Muthesius’s focus is elsewhere: “Our attention needs to be drawn to the individual features, as well as to the story of the type of house as a whole.” Does it? Does the presence or absence of a central staircase make much difference to that community in Norwich?

At the time the book was written, 1982, the terraced house was low in the pecking order for domestic property. Muthesius writes, in the Introduction: “We do not just inhabit these houses because we cannot afford newer ones, but also because we still approve of them, at least in general terms.” For areas such as the Golden Triangle in Norwich, people pay a premium  over similar properties elsewhere in Norwich: what is it that they are paying extra for? It’s not the quality of the brickwork, or the effective building design. On the contrary, many of the terraced houses are dark, have small rooms, and inadequate space for a kitchen, without major redesign.

Most desirable was a detached house with garden. Today, however, terraced houses are among the most desired and most over-priced. Take Cambridge’s Mill Road area, for example: there are streets where a poorly built terraced house will sell for substantially more than similar properties outside this desirable area. This high valuation has nothing to do with the quality of the building; it is the community and proximity to peers that is all-important. Is this considered in the Muthesius book? I don’t think so. It looks as though his book predated the dramatic change in fashion that made some terraces desirable. We will have to look elsewhere to find a book that considers both community and architecture: the approach of John Grindrod look like a good start: he describes not just the buildings, but talks to the people who designed them, as well as the people who lived in them (Concretopia, 2013, and Outskirts, 2017, for example). In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy my pleasant wandering around the parks of the Golden Triangle.