Gareth E. ReesRecensioni

The second of the three that I read by this weirdo. He writes like an amateur but somehow carries it off in that half arsed way that the British seem to breed into themselves. I say that in a nice way. He is definitely out there somewhere but I cannot quite figure out where.

There are strokes of absolute brilliance in this book, mind boggling transpositions and juxtapositions of fantasy and reality in ways that are really good. In some ways it is like coming across an original artwork in Tescos, mark you, Tescos not Marks & Spencer or Waitrose.

A clever weaving of history, the present day and an alternative reality that gels into something every readable and rewarding.

Probably a mystery if you are not British, and if you are not British this book should put you off getting too close to one.

One of the weirder or stranger books that you may stumble across and something that only the English could produce.

A casual encounter with a supermarket car park after hours leads the author into the hidden life of these ubiquitous but invisible public spaces. Realising that after the shopping is done these spaces become the host to all kinds of surreptitious and dodgy activities like drug deals, burnouts, and bunkups.

This realisation leads to an obsession with the mythology and psychology of these modern arenas.

Freely admitted early on that this obsession will eventually lead to the loss of his marriage, his house, and some of his sanity, we are nonetheless invited to ride shotgun on this bizarre odyssey into the unknown territory that opens up when we question the seemingly ordinariness of this world in which we move, for the most part, like ghosts.

It would be nice to say that this book leads to insights and understandings of the modern world but in truth the fabric of the premise of this book disintegrates in sync with the authors life and grip on reality.

I admired his vulnerability.

As someone who has often sought the deeper meaning to superficial things and events, I could relate directly to this authors quest and also, sadly, to his unraveling.

Who wouldn’t want to know that there was more to this modern life than simply: consumerism, ill-disguised ignorance, a world where people seem unable to differentiate between opinions and facts?

Who doesn’t want a sense of mystery running through their lives?

The last of the three books of his that I read. To me they form a trilogy but I may be missing something like discernment and good taste.

Set down in Hastings / St Leonards, it chronicles the renovation of an old house, the demolition of his marriage, the tussle between Alister Crowley and John Logie Baird and much, much more.

By the time I got most of the way through this book I’d really had enough of Gareth E Rees and his woes but I did have some sympathy for woes nonetheless.

I still admired his vulnerability and his tenacity in getting all this down. He doesn’t come across an an author so much as the kind of bloke you wouldn’t want to get stuck next to at a party whilst also being someone you look forward to catching up with because their life seems interesting if not chaotic. I think I’d like him.

Would I recommend this or any of his books to anyone else? I think I would if you are kinda out there somewhere or recognise that “drawn to the edge of things” in yourself. Not to everyone’s taste but I found them engaging.

Gareth Rees’s Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places certainly lives up to its title. Despite having lived in the U.K. for a number of years, and the thousands of miles I’ve driven there, Rees took me to some places I never even got close to exploring (not that I would have likely explored them even if I’d known about them), some truly “unexpected places.”

Picture if you would a study of the country’s electric pylon networks, its ring roads and roundabouts, its abandoned housing and industrial estates, its underpasses and flyovers, its “concrete castles” (otherwise known as multi-story parking garages), and its abandoned hospitals. My personal favorite chapter in the book is its last, one titled “An Emotional Life of the M6,” in which Rees details his still very strong attachment to that particular motorway. This is the chapter that readers will most easily identify with, especially if they have their own memories tucked away of some long highway or interstate they once traveled regularly with their parents.

Gareth Rees visited multiple cities and towns in England, Scotland, and Wales in search of weird stories “about the lore of everyday urban life.” He traveled to major cities like Manchester, London, and Birmingham as well as to lesser known towns and villages such as Harlow, Grimsby, Greenock and Kirkintilloch. You might think that he was only looking for “haunted” spots in each location he stopped to explore. After all, how easy must it be to convince yourself that an abandoned hospital – complete with beds and other left behind equipment – or a long abandoned factory that looks like everyone just decided never to return one after work one day, is haunted? It would be particularly easy to do so at dusk, exactly the time of day Rees most often visited such places.

But Unofficial Britain is not a book about ghost hunters or one written for them. Rees has a much deeper observation than that to share with his readers. Rees reaches the conclusion that even though everything about a place changes over the years, very little that matters actually changes. He maintains that a certain place tone and spirit is maintained forever despite what is overlaid on any place through the centuries – that each use of a place leaves something behind forever in an “ever-turning cycle.” He uses examples such as these:

“The flyover where a viaduct once stood. The Victorian workhouse that became a hospital. The steelworks on the site of a monastery. The burial cairn surrounded by a busy interchange. Motorway earthworks that rise alongside their Stone Age predecessors.”

All places that Rees visits in Unofficial Britain” – all places where he feels the pull of the past so strongly that it gives him goose-bumps.

This book blends almost detached journalism, personal memoir, political commentary, post-apocalyptic horror, graphic novels, and other sources to produce a perspective on the marshes of East London that is both fantastical and believable.

Rees takes as his starting point a series of walks across the marshes of Hackney, Leyton, and Walthamstow with his cocker spaniel. Beginning with minor riffs into local history and events, then moving into what might be magical realism, he starts to reveal layers of mystery and excitement just beneath these ordinary parts of London. Moving further into fantasy, he oscillates between tales of every day life and apparent pure imagination. Then undercuts the reader’s perceptions by revealing that some of the fantastical elements were drawn from news reports.

Interspersed throughout the work are line drawings by Ada Jusic. Using the prose as an initial inspiration, these blur the line between illustration and interpretation, providing at turns a greater insight into events described and an alternative interpretation of them to Rees’ commentary.

This intertwining of prose and picture is used to the full in The Raving Dead, which functions equally well as a stand-alone graphic novel and as one chapter of the greater whole.

The shifting between ostensibly real and surely invented, with new chapters subverting or supporting others, conveys better than a dry listing of fact and experience how the marshes (and by extension anywhere) are a product of human interaction and perception: a piece of ground has financial or emotional value depending on what the viewer believes it to be; or lacks value to a viewer who only accepts objective existence as the measure of qualities.

This revelation of value allows Rees to tie together different stories and themes without losing the feeling of a coherent whole: detailed political analysis of building the Olympics sits next to time-travel yarns, united by the idea that what we think we see is the equal of what is there.

Rees has a definite talent for sketching character with a few quick words, making even the supporting cast immediately seem both deep and interesting. The recurring characters unfold from these short sketches into complex beings, often exposing unexpected qualities like the marshes they inhabit.

Rees is also not afraid to turn this whimsical knife on himself, skilfully casting himself as a narrator who is both unreliable and informative. This talent for – almost – self-parody, combined with the clear evidence objective truth is secondary to subjective values throughout the book, makes Rees-as-participant an Everyman figure; free to be baffled, petty, joyous, or sad, without requiring the reader to accept these as a judgement either on events or the reader’s perception of them.

After closing his immersive prose-scape with the libretto of an opera about Hackney, Rees puts aside Rees-as-participant and dons instead the role of Rees-as-academic, providing an appendix describing his experimental method, a bibliography, and additional reading. This provides readers, fantasists and sceptics alike, with the option to reproduce his experiences, making the book more than a modern incarnation of the dropping out and tuning in of earlier generations.

I enjoyed this book immensely. I recommend it to any reader who enjoys seeing the world through others eyes, who does not require strict documented accuracy for every moment of a narrative.

I received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for a fair review.