TLS Review of TO THE EEL ISLAND, AN EVENING JOURNEY by CHARLES MOSELEY - 'Relentlessly Fascinating'

The Times Literary Supplement -  Book Review - Charles Foster

ROOTS 

TO THE EEL ISLAND, AN EVENING JOURNEY by CHARLES MOSELEY 
256pp. Merlin Unwin. £16.99.

For forty-seven years, the writer Charles Moseley lived with his wife in a Fenland village. She died, he remarried, and his new wife found a house in nearby Ely. To the Eel Island is his account of uprooting and re-rooting; of the nature of change itself; of the significance of place for embodied creatures; of the texture of time and the presence of the past.

Moseley’s criteria for a decent town are simple but exacting: an ironmonger, a seedsman, a butcher who knows how to hang beef properly, a good bookshop whose staff actually read, a market, a place “unmolested by cars” where, like Milton’s bees, people can “expatiate and confer”, allotments, a church that takes music and religion seriously, and the audible dead.

Ely qualifies. He delights in the market: the shape of the fish on the slab, the patina of the antique tools, the “gungy cakes” and even the joggers “intent on their feet and their headphones”. Slowly its living inhabitants come into focus as he grumbles to other allotment- holders about the weather, learns the names of the dog walkers whose dogs’ names he knew first, and shivers in the early-morning Eucharist. His left hip complains: he never does.

He inhabits the present properly because he knows that “the past is not dead; it isn’t even over”. The past is like a drone “running below a musical harmony, deepening and colouring the present”. The sound of that drone, he says, has become much more pronounced as he has aged.

Moseley is splendid company, and a bevy of literary friends from a lifetime of deep and wide reading join and illuminate the conversation – always casually, never once to show off his learning. There are disquisitions on marmalade and martyrdom, ornithology and drain- age, Canute and boat-building. It’s relentlessly fascinating.

Moseley is sometimes smilingly acidic. Oliver Cromwell, he notes, once sought to emigrate to Connecticut – “If only”. Yet he is never cynical, dismissive or reductive. “Never think people are simple”, he declares. Nor is anything else: “Nothing is normal, even what has always been”. And so this book, about a time when its author has come to realize that his “own sun is westering”, is an epic adventure story. “The world is charged with wonder”, Moseley tells us. “Every- where is a theophany.” When he makes the move to Ely, he and his wife having “folded their wings”, he thinks that this “may be the greatest adventure of all”.

I don’t doubt it.