James Wilkes, A Fractured Landscape of Modernity: Culture and Conflict in the Isle of Purbeck. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014, 208 pages, £50.00 hardcover. ISBN 9781137287076.

The Isle of Purbeck, a peninsula in the UK county Dorset, is the launch pad for James Wilkes venture to unpack the rural as a locus for modernity. Historically, Wilkes observes, it has been rare for rural places to be credited for their connections, exchanges and conflicts, as well for as their capacity to affect. Taking Purbeck as his object of analysis, Wilkes aims to demonstrate the shifting and reforming, material and imaginative landscape of the English countryside as a counterpoint to a historical legacy that has masked the realities of rural labour and everyday life. To do so, he looks at the work of others who have engaged in the writing of non-urban spaces, and specifically at the “new nature writing” which has emerged in the last decade. However, for Wilkes this topographical style of writing is wanting, for it has a tendency of making landscape digestible through “a single authorial voice” (page 3). This, he argues, is a limiting factor in deriving meaning about landscape. How to write about landscape in a way that does not diminish its complexity then? A Fractured Landscape of Modernity hinges on this question.

Taking inspiration from Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, Wilkes approaches the problem by interweaving the poetic and metaphoric with more traditional forms of historic enquiry. The result is what he terms a “topographical-historical” mode of writing (page 5). Cautious of the poetics alignment with subjectivity and the problem of singularity, which he recognizes in “new nature writing”, Wilkes is attentive to his deployment of the poetic. He regards it as a tool for investigation and representation. In the four chapters that comprise A Fractured Landscape of Modernity, Wilkes adopts a narrative form made palpable through the use of metaphor and analogy to provide rich and yet contrasting historical descriptions of Purbeck. Wilkes’ text, however, is not only attentive to the use of metaphor and analogy as a mode of writing. He rather uses each chapter as a space in which to experiment with other methods of approaching the literary representation of complexity and fluidity in Purbeck’s landscape. I will relay these methods as I discuss each individual chapter. First however, I offer a brief note on the general approach taken by Wilkes across the chapters.

In each of the four chapters Wilkes takes the work of modernist artists and writers as his point of departure to unfold the “polyvocality” of  Purbeck (page 141). Always sensitive to complexity, however, Wilkes moves beyond, but still with, these creative protagonists and their various imaginaries of Purbeck. He juxtaposes such imaginaries to, for example, military structures, radar experimentation and geological thought in order to highlight the discontinuities of meaning that play out across this landscape.

In Chapter One Wilkes himself steps onto Studland beach to introduce and describe the shape, materials and history of two very different but also similar forms: the beach hut and tank traps. These forms, he notes, are coincidently similar in shape. The author follows this coincidence throughout this chapter as a method through which to “hang” a narrative (page 16). This narrative traces through three histories connected to Studland beach, a methodological maneuver that follows the metaphor of “triangulation” to compare and contrast various viewpoints. First, Wilkes uses the metaphor of struggle to consider the changes in beach use from a site of labor to a site of leisure. Second, attending to a crossing of histories provided with that advent of both bathing machines and amphibious tanks, Wilkes turns to consider the militarization of Studland. Third, he looks to the painting of Studland Beach by holiday maker and artist Vanessa Bell to draw out the different ways in which this beach has been imagined by this and other modernist artists and writers. This chapter, then, introduces the reader to Wilkes’ understanding that “heterogeneous viewpoints” are important for making landscape meaningful (page 42).

In Chapter Two Wilkes considers the work of writer Mary Butts, who spent her childhood in and around Purbeck. This author offers Wilkes a different perspective on Purbeck: a landscape “recollected” (page 35). In order to access Butt’s imagination of recollection, Wilkes analyses her novels to uncover a sense of distain with what she sees to be the materialistic effects of modernity on the landscape of her childhood. Drawing on juxtaposition as a method for instigating discussion, however, Wilkes brings to the chapter an imagination that contrasts with the remembered landscape Butts work presents. That is, he weaves the effects of Purbeck’s transformation by the military into the chapter, outlining the way in which radar experiments enabled “new ways of reading the landscape” (page 73). This chapter provides an excellent example of how analogy can assist in the weaving together of different “readings” through the “unhitch[ing of] words from [each] source or situation” to place them in another (Lorimer and Parr 2014: 544). For example, Wilkes interlaces his discussion of Butt’s anti-modernist, recollected Purbeck with the language of technology and science.

In Chapter Three Wilkes puts the use of coincidence to great effect, initiating an almost seamless transition between this and the previous chapter, specifically, between protagonists Mary Butts and Paul Nash. To draw the reader into the landscape, Wilkes takes Paul Nash’s thesis of “seaside surrealism” as his point of departure and looks to this artist’s photographs, through which he articulates the surrealist qualities of the Swanage Seaside. Wilkes is not uncritical of Nash’s work however; he acknowledges the artist’s lack of interest in Purbeck’s history, a history that made the images possible. In order to draw out the historical conditions that set the scene for these photographs, Wilkes uses “figuration as a method for representing and conceptualizing landscape” (page 142). The figures of Wilkes interest are the fossil, the folly and the ruin. He uses these figures to discuss cultural and geological histories that are an absent presence in Nash’s photography and which bring divergent realities and temporalities together. Through these three figures Wilkes considers Purbeck as a site of natural history, as well as a place of popular culture. For example, he juxtaposes limestone and processes of dissolution and discussions of neon lights and mass production, to highlight geological, social and political faults and fractures. This chapter covers the most ground with regards to time. True to his word however, there is no linear progression in the discussion. Rather, he uses “geological thinking” as a method to drive his consideration of writers and artists whose objects of concern straddle both past and present, creating folds in time. As such, this chapter perhaps resonates the most with Wilkes’ aim to produce a narrative of place which “snaps between then and now” (page 10) to unpack the multiplicity of landscape and its various imaginaries. This, he suggests, justifies “a mode of writing which accepts discontinuity and juxtaposition” (page 112).

In Chapter Three and Chapter Four Wilkes traces the figure of the ruin through Purbeck to settle in the latter chapter on the writer and former quarrier Eric Benfield and his literary “failures”. For Wilkes, Benfield offers something different from his previous protagonists, Bell, Butt and Nash. He presents a lived understanding of Purbeck, dislodging perceptions of it as a “restful idyll” and replacing them with the “tensions and conflicts” that make up everyday community life (page 119). Wilkes takes what Lorimer and Parr have noted to be the “general preference … to treat telling and the teller as the subjects of scholarly attention” (2014: 541) as a method through which to create another narrative of place, one framed by Benfield’s “textual ruins” and fleshed out through Wilkes’ own ethnographic visits to the quarries, as well as through the analysis of other writers and artists work. Creating a narrative from narratives, Wilkes offers a "more temperate" method in this chapter, which, for me, produced a more fluid read, as compared to the previous three.

Wilkes’ book is timely. It sits alongside a growing body of work which, Lorimer and Parr note, demonstrates “a preparedness to experiment with different ways of telling” (2014: 544). In A Fractured Landscape of Modernity experimentation has enabled Wilkes to approach the ‘telling’ of Purbeck’s multiples histories and imageries, through the use of “…narrative as a creative method as well as subject of critical analysis” (Daniels and Lorimer 2012, page 4). It is worth noting, however, that other bodies of work such as geopoetics, for example, have attended to landscape as milieu (Lorimer and Parr 2014). It would have been interesting to see how Wilkes saw his experimental manuscript alongside work such as this.

A Fractured Landscape of Modernity, however, is not the lyrical text that characterizes the aesthetics of such work. To be sure, Wilkes plays with analogy, metaphor and coincidence to produce carefully crafted sentences and seamless transitions. Yet, alongside techniques of juxtaposition and discontinuity, his text holds to a different aesthetic that makes absent imaginaries present. For this reader, the presence of absent imaginaries through analogy, for example, at times led to moments of halted reading in order to question which landscape imaginary I was currently engaged with. As such, the text takes on a baroque quality that serves the book’s intent well. Furthermore, not only does Wilkes experiment with methods of writing; he is also transparent about his methods through the provision of his “thinking” (Delyser and Hawkins, 2014: 132). This is a book, then, that “[a]nimate[s] the writing process” (ibid.), whilst simultaneously making Purbeck lively through its movement between the various viewpoints and imaginaries of its landscape. 

References

Daniels S and H Lorimer (2012) Until the end of days: narrating landscape and Environment. Cultural Geographies 19: 3-9.

DeLyser D and H Harriet (2014) Introduction: writing creatively–process, practice, and product. Cultural Geographies 21: 131-34.

Lorimer H and H Parr (2014) Excursions: telling stories and journeys. Cultural Geographies 21: 543-48.