Just as Iain Sinclair's travelogue London Orbital mapped every inch of the
M25 in beautifully lyrical detail, so Sara Maitland's Gossip From The Forest (Granta) leaves no leafy corner of British forestry
undisturbed. And just as Sinclair’s book showed that the green and pleasant
lands in England’s folklore are now nothing but ashphalted memories, Maitland
pours dappled sunlight on the surviving areas of British woodland… well, those
that haven’t become housing estates.
With inescapable ethereal
overtones, Gossip From The Forest ensures
the folklore we've garnered from the woodlands is tightly preserved for another
generation. And it's a worthwhile project because, as Maitland notes, the fairytales
we learned as children were bastardised repeatedly from inception. So much so
that many bear little relation to their original tone or intent, often because
the marketed audience shifted from adult peasants seeking distraction, to
privileged children in city nurseries being told moralistic tales. You know, the
sort of tales where the princess always has golden hair, animals are always
anthropomorthic, and where avarice always meets a grisly end. Maitland reminds
us it wasn't meant to be this way. But just as folk music has seen songs evolve
through the travelling generations, forestry folk stories have been edited and
tweaked. And both are equally in danger of being forgotten now that British lifestyles
have changed and the habit of storytelling is dying out.
Gossip From
The Forest is
about much more than fairytales, though. This book is also a fascinating and
unlikely sociohistorical commentary on how we have changed as Britons over the
centuries. How we live, how we learn and how we treat one another. Not to
mention some considered thoughts on etymology, society, politics and child
rearing. Maitland leaves no tussock unturned!
In many ways, Maitland’s book
reminds me of key messages from Nicola Bown’s Fairies in Nineteenth Century Literature, which again places
Britain’s forests and nature at its core to explore the particular obsession of
the Victorians with fairytales… the very generation whom Maitland credits with
making the stories as moralistic as we now know them, and for most adjusting
the tales for a young audience. But the Victorians weren’t the first to amend
the stories... even the most-recognised fairytale-tellers of all, the Grimm
Brothers, come in for a bad reputation in Maitland’s eyes. They may have been
the pair who went around the peasants to gather up the spoken stories to
publish for the first time in 1812, but they were also the pair who repeatedly
reworked those same stories in every new edition of their book, until the
stories bore little relation to the originals.
Framed as a monthly pilgrimage to
12 of Britain’s most important and contributory forests, in painstaking detail and
beautiful language Maitland relays the origins of that woodland, the people who
lived in or nearby it, the stories derived from it whether old or new (for
instance, Raoul Moat’s hideout in Epping Forest in 2010 doesn’t pass
unnoticed), and the present condition and use of the land.
Each chapter is supplemented with a
fairytale of Maitland’s own, which are sinister reworkings of original stories.
There’s surely no one more suited to this task than Maitland, a magical realist
writer who knows these stories inside out. And considering that, as she
explains, these are stories that have been rewritten innumerable times over the
centuries, it seems only fitting that she is the one to rewrite them for a 21st
Century reader. But be warned, Maitland’s reader is an adult (as was the
original intention): hers are not fairytales for children.
