There may be nothing new under the sun, but the moon it seems is a different matter. Certainly James Attlee in the course of his picaresque travels in pursuit of moonbeams stumbled on some phenomena that were, if not new, then novel, in the demotic sense of the word. Chief among these wonders surely is the Interstellar Light Collector, “a five-story-high array of parabolic mirrors” set up in the Arizona desert near Tucson, the aim of which is to gather and focus the light of the moon into a concentrated stream that the gadget’s endearingly dotty inventors believe can help to cure anything from depression through asthma to cancer of the colon. And maybe it can, once in a blue moon.
There seems to be a force at work deep in the psyches of certain English men, and a few English women, that will not let them rest, but sends them out, the heirs of Raleigh and of Drake, to roam the world in search of adventure, diversion and precious scraps of arcane and for the most part useless knowledge. What fascinates the rest of us stay-at-homes is the insouciance with which a Wilfred Thesiger, a Freya Stark, a Patrick Leigh Fermor or a Colin Thubron will take themselves off to the wilder regions of the world with not much more in their rucksacks than a couple of clean pairs of underpants and a packet of tea. George Mallory in the 1920s tackled Everest — and may have reached the summit before dying in a snowdrift on the way down — kitted out in a Norfolk jacket and a pair of stout brogues.
Attlee, a publisher, and the author of Isolarion, a sort of internal travel book about Oxford, where he lives, is fascinated not only by light, and the light of the moon especially, but also by the peculiarly cockeyed manner in which we see, or “see,” the world. As he points out, “the patterns of light that fall on the retina do not correspond with our mental image of the universe”; that image is formed through a marvelously intricate and awkward process that might have been dreamed up by Heath Robinson. “This then is the visual ‘reality’ most of us rely on for so many of our activities: light bounced off objects around us and projected upside down on to the backs of our eyes, translated into electric signals and unscrambled by our brains.” Yet what a magnificent instrument is the eye. Did you know, as Attlee does, that, far from being hopelessly inferior to nocturnal animals in the matter of eyesight, human beings can detect light “a billionth of the strength of daylight — the equivalent of the flame of a single candle seventeen miles away”?
Nocturne — a term taken over by Chopin from the Irish composer John Field, but frequently employed by painters, too, particularly Whistler — is written in the relaxed, ambulatory tone of an 18th-century rambler’s tale. Attlee conducts us on a latterday grand tour that takes in, among many other places, Turner’s Thames, Basho’s Japan, Pliny’s Vesuvius and Rudolf Hess’s solitary cell in Spandau prison. We learn little about the author, not necessarily a bad thing in these confessional times, although he does throw us hints as to his predilections and anathemas; for instance, he has a keen interest in painters — Samuel Palmer, Joseph Wright of Derby, England, the aforementioned Whistler — and in Japanese poetry; he deplores the seemingly unstoppable spread of light pollution yet considers Las Vegas at night one of the wonders of the world; he is not too happy about noise pollution, either — “Why aren’t we ever content to just shut the fuck up?” — and declares “a particular hatred for wind chimes, hanging bells and all such paraphernalia.”
One is glad of such outbursts, rare and for the most part mild as they are, for if the book has a fault, it lies in a certain blandness in the narrative voice, a perhaps too-easy acceptance of the world and its oddities and annoyances — at times in these pages one longs for a touch of the occasional curmudgeonliness of Paul Theroux, say, or the beady-eyed reprehensions of Theroux’s erstwhile friend VS Naipaul.
There is a sort of rueful running gag in Nocturne in the fact that almost everywhere that the author travels to he is frustrated in his hopes of a clear, unhindered and magical sighting of the moon. In Kyoto, on the night of the moon-viewing festival known as Tsukimi, there is cloud; wholly unseasonal clouds gather too over the Arizona desert when he is being hoisted in a chair-lift to catch the full blast of beams from the Interstellar Light Collector; and on Vesuvius there is fog. Returned home to England, he determines on a moonlit boat ride on the Thames, but has to settle for a night on a friend’s second-hand boat on the Lea, a Thames tributary, and even that goes wrong, so that “on the night of the August full moon, two men and a large, wet, epileptic dog [don’t ask], as well as several cans of beer, are confined to the cabin of a Dutch cruiser in driving rain.”
Yet Attlee is a true enthusiast, and is fascinated by, indeed loves, his subject. He writes beautifully and often thrillingly about the moon in all its — her? — aspects, and it will be a
dull-minded reader who comes away from this book without a new or at least renewed regard for the extraordinary, silver satellite that is our world’s constant companion.
Perhaps the finest section of Nocturne is the account of the author’s trip to Japan, a narrative that is lent added pathos by our awareness of the recent catastrophes that have befallen that country. Despite the crowds, the noise and the light pollution, he experiences in his Japanese sojourn that ancient peace which westerners have always sought in the orient: “At one moment during my stay, perhaps walking home from Ginkaku-ji along the Philosopher’s Path, perhaps while observing a flight of cranes across a flooded rice paddy from a Shinkansen Bullet train, or perhaps while eating cold soba noodles on a hot afternoon beside a river, I think to myself, I will never complain about my life again.”
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