“Ulverton” by Adam Thorpe

Diachronic regionalism

Old Abraham ud say to me, “Samuel, if thee en’t a doer, thee be good as dead.” He were cock-eyed, mind, and this gid him a queer look. But he had the truest line of arn on us. He ud snap that lampblack and saw on it like it were butter, an the grain felled away clean like it were made that way.

I knew I had to get around to this book eventually, for two reasons. First, when I was thinking up a name for the fictional town in Social Distancing, “Roverton” came into my mind. There was no obvious reason for it to have popped into my head like that – except for one thing: I was aware of this novel by Adam Thorpe, published in 1993, which was about the history of a fictional small town in England. Change the first two letters and I get a name I can use without outright stealing it.

Second, I am professionally involved in linguistics and geography, and this book is concerned with both. Thorpe’s work of deep geographical fiction certainly has its fans, and appears to have stood the test of time, so it was worth checking out just on that basis. An easy comparison here is with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson’s book is a series of character studies (or short stories) set in a fictional town; whether it adds up to a novel is a discussion I don’t feel like having. Thorpe calls his book a novel, but it is a series of stories linked by a single location. The main difference is that (to borrow a couple of terms from linguistics) Anderson’s approach is synchronic – his stories are all taking place at roughly the same time. Thorpe’s book is diachronic – the stories are snapshots from the history of Ulverton, starting in 1650 and ending in 1988.

William Least Heat-Moon, who has been featured on this site, coined the term “deep map” to describe one of his books. Here’s a definition of the concept:

The deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place…

Heat-Moon used the term in relation to a type of non-fiction, which is also sometimes called “vertical travel writing.” Jonathan Raban’s Hunting Mister Heartbreak does something similar, settling down off the road to really soak up the character of a place, in different parts of the continental United States.

Ulverton is something like the fictional equivalent of a deep map. Thorpe’s approach is not, however, to write a continuous history, tracing the gradual changes over the centuries. As noted, the stories are snapshots, or slices of life. If you’re expecting to be told what year the town hall was built or how many Ulvertonians died in the plague, you’ll be disappointed. The overall impression is of a sheaf of primary documents and field notes found in some archive. You, the reader, get to play historian and sociologist, putting it all together.

Thorpe does help you out in a rather bare-bones way, by punctuating the book with some simple structural elements. Obviously, the shared setting of the town itself is one of them. Another is that each story after the first refers back to some character(s) or event(s) that appeared in the previous story (or stories). If you’ve seen Kieślowski’s Decalogue, it’s a bit like the technique used there of having characters from one episode put in brief appearances in another (although Kieślowski’s ten films unfold synchronically). The fact that each section title consists of a single word and a date (“Dissection 1775”) produces another simple unifying effect.

Ulverton gives off a strong whiff of experimentation. It’s missing a lot of the things you expect in a novel: characters who last longer than one chapter; an overarching story that keeps you reading from beginning to end; a basic style that predominates despite variations and digressions. Overall, it seems more like an anti-novel than a novel, with the narrative continually putting up obstacles to comprehension.

The biggest obstacles are stylistic. The English language changes over the centuries, and its concrete manifestations are conditioned by such factors as class, education and region. I have to take my hat off to Thorpe here; he has managed to create a different style – in some cases, almost a different language – for each section. It’s a genuinely virtuosic linguistic performance, leaving aside any questions of authenticity.

The readability of the sections ranges from easy to extremely difficult. The stylistic nadir (or apogee, depending on your preference) comes in “Stitches 1887,” where you have to plow your way through the following, an experience rather like trying to wade through seaweed for a couple of hours:

gate ope now maunt lope about it Gore patch wi’ they crusty bullocks yeeeeeeeeeow bloody pig-stickin them old hooks just yowlin out for grease haaf rust look yaa that old Stiff all pinch an screw all pinch an bloody screw aye shut he fast now hup ramshackle old bugger see med do with a stoop spikin onto post wi’ that hang yaa a deal more years nor Hoppetty have a-had boy

It goes on like this for 20 more pages. Struggling with such minutiae, it’s easy to overlook the overarching structure, but it’s rather simple: like the people who inhabit it, the town gets older, and just like them, it has to adjust to the new realities. Thus, the individual episodes concern themselves with war, religious enthusiasm, advances in agriculture, the rise of industry, more war, changes in media, and so forth.

Sometimes, in the more linguistically comprehensible episodes, you get a gem of an observation, like this one, from “Treasure 1914”:

I fancy, too, that those old men outside the alehouse, in almost permanent agonies from various rheumatic complaints brought on by their lifelong exposure to cold and wet, some crippled by the sheer weight of the work they had endured and mastered, had an unspoken bond amongst themselves, that thrilled more to silence than words, and might be recalled next time the reader enters an ale-house in the country, and thinks himself in the company of dumb idiots.

It all adds up to an achievement I can admire without loving it. While the experience of reading Ulverton was something of a slog, I kept hearing bits and pieces of it in my head while I was away from it. Remembering it was better than reading it, which was an odd feeling. It suggests that I should revisit the book in a few years, after it’s been further digested in my memory.