The Giant on the Skyline by Clover Stroud

I love Clover Stroud’s writing. Her book about being a parent: My Wild and Sleepless Nights, is one of the few books I recommend to people when they want a book about what motherhood is really like as oppose to what Miriam Stoppard tells you it’s going to be like. Her writing is raw, personal and full of vitality. She is unstinting in the generous way she explores and shares her life on the page. I was delighted when I got the email from Netgalley that my request for her latest book; The Giant on the Skyline had been approved.

I powered through the first half of the book in a day. Then I had that creeping dread that I would finish it too soon, so I have been rationing myself in the days that followed, trying to eke it out. I finally finished it at the weekend.

It’s a book about what home really looks and feels like. It’s a love letter to both her husband and the landscape in which Stroud has made herself a home after years of living a nomadic existence. It’s an exploration of what happens when the man you love wants to live somewhere else and make a new home with you and you have to choose between two things that define and shape you. How do you choose between two loves when both of them feel necessary to your existence?

You could say that this book is a kind of psychogeographic memoir, except that when I think about psychogeography I think about dark, angry, slightly sinister intellectual works like Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd or scarily haunting works like Alan Moore’s From Hell. While both of those are very worthy books, this is not that - and I am very glad. This is a book that speaks to me, that feels real to me and that has things to say that help me think about things I’m going through. It’s not some academic idea of what home and the landscapes we choose mean. In the book, Clover often refers to her love of the landscape coming not just from the land itself but from the thoughts, energies and memories of people like her, who for generations have made their homes and lives on the land. The book is full of vividly rendered, painterly descriptions of the land but it is a land that is full of ghosts and memories.

Stroud’s is a landscape full of people stretching far back in time, linking to the present, generation on generation, people of the land and in the land. It made me think most of Julia Blackburn’s Time Song, which I read recently. In it, Blackburn spends her days combing the Norfolk/Suffolk coastline where she lives, looking for evidence of Doggerland, the land that connected mainland Britain to the Netherlands in 6000 BC. Flitting between her forays with archaeologists and her conversations with amateur fossil hunters, she thinks about the real lives of the humans she sees only the smallest traces of, repopulating the landscape with ghosts. Like Stroud, Blackburn isn’t just looking for ghosts in the abstract. She conjures the shade of her recently dead and much missed husband, catching glimpses of him in the garden, passing through the places they shared together. Conjure one ghost and you can conjure all.

And for Stroud, the landscape she doesn’t want to leave is also full of her precious ghosts, her sister and her mother, women who are rooted in the clay and chalk of the Ridgeway and who will remain when Stroud leaves. How can you carry your lost loves across the sea? How can you keep your ghosts near when they are so much a part of the land you will leave? What if you think they are in your heart and you only find out you have left them behind when it’s too late to go back?

One of the things I love best about this book is how it asks the big, gnarly questions and sets them firmly in the day to day mess of life. Stroud is no Alain de Botton, taking to his bed with a handful of almonds and a soothing oil painting to look at until his nerves calm down. All the magic, all the history, all the mystery and the love is tumbled together in Stroud’s book with trips to the Co-op, what to make for dinner, how to stop children squabbling and arguments with her husband. There is mud and fighting and the relentless day to day chores that don’t wait while you grieve or puzzle out the bigger picture. Your heart breaks but the dishes still need doing.

There is a brilliant description of a walk to find some sarsen stones while the children moan about being bored and think that archaeology is stupid and wouldn’t it just be better if you could list all the ways you could kill someone? That made me laugh out loud. I have many memories like that. I used to think the sacred should exist separately from the mundane. Now I know better. Sometimes the mundane is the sacred. And the sacred is everywhere if you’re willing to look for it.

A talisman in the book is the white horse, carved into the hill at Uffington, near Clover’s home. It’s seems to be an anchor point, linking her to home and the chalk beneath. Chalk that was once a sea. Water that became land. This feels like such an important idea in The Giant on the Skyline. It’s a sign of such power that it carves through the land, describing the sacred magic of one thing becoming another, even when you think it can’t. The book is a constant attempt to describe the ineffable miracle of what it is to be a human being, connected to time and place through the things we do with our hands and our hearts both working together.

So many times as I was reading, I thought of Tiffany Aching (as I so often do), a girl who grew up on the chalk, the daughter of a farmer, a girl who knows the land she comes from in the most practical of ways. A girl who grows into a powerful witch. A witch anchored in the land, but who understands the mutability of the land that was once sea. A witch who understands the power of looking at things with the third sight. I thought of her as one of the characters in Clover’s book that she describes as both human and yet also more than human. The supernatural man who may work in the post office, but who may also be a giant. Tiffany Aching, it seems to me, is the supernatural alter ego of Stroud herself.

As I so often do when I review books I love, I’ll leave you with a quote from a different book. In this case, A Hat Full of Sky. Read Clover’s new book and then read A Hat Full of Sky. For me, they should come as a pair.

The Chalk rose out of the plains quite suddenly on this side of the hills. There was a little valley cupped into the fall of the down, and there was a carving in the curve it made. Turf had been cut away in long flowing lines, so that the bare chalk made the shape of an animal.

"It’s the White Horse," said Tiffany.

"Why do they call it that?" said Miss Tick.

Tiffany looked at her.

"Because the chalk is white?" she said, trying not to suggest that Miss Tick was being a bit dense.

"No, I meant why do they call it a horse? It doesn’t look like a horse. It’s just . . . flowing lines . . ."

. . . that look as if they’re moving, Tiffany thought.

It had been cut out of the turf way back in the old days, people said, by the folk who’d built the stone circles and buried their kin in big earth mounds. And they’d cut out the Horse at one end of this little green valley, ten times bigger than a real horse and, if you didn’t look at it with your mind right, the wrong shape, too. Yet they must have known horses, owned horses, seen them every day, and they weren’t stupid people just because they lived a long time ago.

Tiffany had once asked her father about the look of the Horse, when they’d come all the way over here for a sheep fair, and he told her what Granny Aching had told him when he was a little boy. He passed on what she said word for word, and Tiffany did the same now.

"’Taint what a horse looks like," said Tiffany. "It’s what a horse be."

Taint what a book looks like, It’s what a book be.