The tradition of the American west seems to have fallen away somewhat in the 21st C. As I grew up, people were still weaned on images of a wild country, full of men riding horses across dusty plains, women in caravans, native indians on the edge of the horizon. It was still a time when young children were given The Little House on the Prairie to read. The West was that uncharted territory which lay beyond the boundaries of ‘civilisation’, waiting to be explored and, implicitly, ‘tamed’. At university, we studied Willa Cather, along with commentaries on Gatsby, even Jack London. The West as an intellectual space, one which the mind had yet to colonise. That strain of Americanism seems to have dissipated. Silicon Valley, the Hollywood machine, the hipsters of Seattle, have collectively buried the idea that the west contains territory, mental as well as physical, which is a point of conflict with an oriental, European tradition.
Pocock’s book does a lot to resuscitate this notion. The book feels like a travelogue, as it details the writer’s explorations of alternative cultures from her base in Montana. Pocock, along with her family, is on a kind of pilgrimage, looking to find a way to reconcile her materialist (Londonised) existence with her fears for the world’s future. There is something millenarian about this quest, one which any rational, thinking person cannot help but be aware of. Anyone who belongs to the capitalist materialist system would appear to be complicit in the slow (but quickening) murder of the natural world. Nature and mankind, it seems, have become pitted against each other in a zero sum game, a new hot Cold War. Pocock goes in search of those who are are seeking alternatives. Some are nomadic rewilders who have gone off-grid, others are more settled, searching for a middle ground which will help to gradually bring about the changes required to rebalance the human and natural worlds. Floating around the edges is a more scary, libertarian movement, one which goes around armed and questions the very notion of the state. Pocock weaves her way through these groups, like a modern day Cobbett, detailing her observations and offering up pointers for anyone who’s trying to work out how to keep going in the face of the anthropocene apocalypse.
What roots the book (which has a certain crossover with Powers’ Overstory) is its resolutely subjective tone. Pocock discusses the death of her parents, her menopause and above all, her relationship with her family who share much of her journey with her. She’s not proselytising; she’s trying to work something out; a city-dweller’s journey into the possibilities of a de-urbanised future.
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(nb: a memory: The driver tells me that we’re going to visit a nuclear power station. His car is a green 2CV with a roof that flies off at regular intervals. There might be a tape recorder on the seat playing Bo Diddley or Stravinsky. The driver rolls his cigarettes one handed as he steers. We roll through an England which is as green as history suggests it always has been and always should be. We get to the power station late in the afternoon. We’ve driven half a day to get out of the car and stare at a monster. Albeit a beautiful, brutalist monster, framed against a dying sky. I have no real idea why we’re here, or what the reason for this mission might be, but as we gaze at the monster, with the sea behind, everything makes a kind of unintelligible sense.)
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