Sightlines
Kathleen Jamie
Sort Of Books
Memoir/Travel/Essays
When I first got my copy of Sightlines and ran down the
contents list I felt I had to jump to the essay titled The Gannetry. It was
good, solid nature writing but it didn’t propel me to read the rest of the
collection. Months later I finally sat down to read the whole book.
But these essays are not just nature writing; they are not
easily categorised. Jamie writes about
everything and anything: travel, memoir, archaeology, biology, anthropology, history.
It feels as though her interest in archaeology has best prepared her for her
writing though; she roots out her subject and never fails to find the subtle
layers of meanings that others might miss. Her subject doesn’t seem to matter.
It is her writing that sells the book and there are some brilliant turns of
phrase: on a trip to St Kilda she notices, “Once, a whale arched from the water
below, blew and rolled down again, a black sigh.” Sightlines vividly brings to
life that cold Northern world of uninhabited Hebridean islands and elongated
Scandinavian days and nights.
But it got me thinking, should a book of essays be read from
cover to cover or jumped about in? The organisation of the essays must play a
role in engaging the reader, so the weaker essays get dropped into the fat at
the middle of the book. Reading The Gannetry – an essay halfway through
Sightlines – hadn’t inspired me to read the other essays. On my second approach,
reading Pathologies did. Unfortunately, there are themes that continually roll through
her essays and reading Sightlines wholesale feels like sea-watching. At times I
did get sick of it. So I was grateful for essays that broke up the collection.
La Cueva is an outstanding essay, a dry-break from the sea-life, a trip down
into a cave that brings alive the history of consciousness. Maybe it’s my fault
for reading cover to cover and not picking essays to read apart from each
other? Maybe that’s the nature of essays.
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