The last book on the shelf

So tomorrow I am finally leaving my Nottingham home of three years and moving back to sunny Watford. Yes, I will still be a postgrad (with Mr. Dissertation needing some attention) and yes, I'm certain I'll be back up here for various visits, meetings and library sessions, but nonetheless, I will no longer be able to call anywhere in this grubbily charming city my home. For days I've been stripping my room down to its constituent parts, so that now it is frankly a slightly depressing place to be. You know that bit in Friends where Monica goes and stands in Rachel's empty room after she's moved out? That kind of vibe.

However, I'm not here to moan, or even to provide a university retrospective. Let it only be said that these past four years have been the best of my life - I've done some incredible things with some incredible people.

No, what I'm here to do is to look forward, and I'm doing it via what has turned out to be the last book left on my shelf, Charles Portis' True Grit.

The novel - resolutely what the recent Coen Brothers film was based upon - follows fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross as she recruits the unglamorous, middle-aged US Marshall Rooster Cogburn and attempts to bring her father's killer to justice against the dusty backdrop of post-Civil War America. Mattie is smart and headstrong , with courage, religious piety and a sense of duty beyond her years. Rooster, burnt out and a little flabby, nonetheless appeals to the girl with his similar preoccupation with wit, bravery and hard justice - true grit, as it were. Mattie is less than impressed by his preoccupation with whiskey, however:

'I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.'

Like Mattie and Rooster setting out into the unknown void of 'Indian territory', I leave Nottingham not quite knowing what's going to happen. Sure, it could conspire that I get back to the ol' Watford homestead, saddle up and go about town lassoing no-good villains with regular breaks for a rye and soda down at the saloon. However, in lieu of there being a person I can send my CV and covering letter to for this kind of job, I'm just going to have to go full throttle at my other, less-yeehaw career aspirations.  And, like Mattie and Rooster, I'm determined to get done what needs to be done. Nottingham may feel cosy, just as Yell County, Arkansas must be to Mattie, but, simply put, it is time to move on, and anyway, there is something ever so exciting about the unknown void of new territory. I'm thinking less Heart of Darkness, more Treasure Island.

For now, though, it's time for one last pub visit with friends, where I plan to heartily welcome several thieves into my mouth, show them where my brains are hidden, and ask them if they'd like a cup of tea in the meantime. Sorry Mattie.

Richard Hammond, whales, and non-fiction done right

I had a dream the other day. 

As is always the case, everything became immediately fuzzy as I drifted into consciousness, but the long and short of it is this: I saved diminutive Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond from the jaws of a marauding killer whale (or more accurately orca. Or whale killer. This animal is a dolphin, after all).

Whatever late-night TV-watching prompted me to envisage Hammond as the subject of my heroics, and whatever subconscious cowardice made the rescue so exhilaratingly 'not me', obviously it was the whale that stayed with me as my eyes opened on another not-so-eventful day as a Nottingham postgrad. The creature was beautiful. And ferocious. And BIG. So very, very BIG. I'm sure we'd all love to see a similar scene play-out in next week's Top Gear (with, let's say, Clarkson complaining about the handling of a kayak as a Great White streaks towards him), but for today at least, we're talking whales. Whales and non-fiction. What a way to kick off this blog!

Leviathan by Phillip Hoare was one of those landmark reads for me, and most probably for many others too. Winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize, it was a huge success - though, on the surface, you might not have bet on it. Half history of whales and whaling, half literary analysis of Moby Dick, Hoare's future classic could not have been an easy sell to his publisher. But, by gosh and golly, I'll bet Fourth Estate were happy that they took the gamble.

What the book wins on, and this is something that I'll come back to again and again on this blog, is WONDER. There's nothing more wondrous than what is mythically mysterious and yet oh-so-real, and here Hoare's elegant prose - which wouldn't be out of place in an epic novel - is the evoker-in-chief. In masterfully portraying these animals as what they truly are - visible, tangible and yet also magnificently (even terrifyingly) alien - Hoare illustrates whales as the ultimate dream-weavers, with Melville's masterpiece acting as a suitably stupendous example of their power to excite.

Wonder is everywhere in this book. From Hoare's reminiscences of gazing upon the life-size model of a blue whale at the Natural History Museum (or not so life-size - the king of animals is now understood to be a far more streamlined creature) to the achingly evocative description of a whaling expedition and, most incredibly of all, how sperm whales could practise a form of 'religion', this book took me back to a time when being amazed was what I did for a living. Back when, for example, I was kicked out of my local tennis club for talking about dinosaurs too much. Back when I too looked upon that iconic model and felt reverently dwarfed by this spectacular beast.

In the last chapter of Leviathan Hoare describes what feels like the culmination of the entire book - his own face-to-face encounter with a sperm whale. In a hypnotically beautiful passage - the final lines of the book - he looks straight into the animal's eyes and it, sadly, knowingly, looks straight back. Much in the same way that I looked at my killer whale (albeit with added terror and Richard Hammond).

This - in a very round-about way and I do apologise - is what non-fiction must do to us. It must evoke our childhoods, it must inspire dreams, it must make us want to throw down our laptops and run away to sea. It must amaze, appall and allure in the same way that fiction does - though, in fact, it must do all this better than fiction because, by god, IT'S REAL. Where novels help us to escape, non-fiction must make us feel resolutely part of this strange, scary and often wonderful planet of ours, developing and strengthening the sense of our wondrous and real place within a wondrous and real world. If everyone I knew read Leviathan, the world would be about a millionth better. I'm just saying.