No Direction Home – which way is best?

Getting Your Bearings... 

'The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward'

Who’d have thought it?

When I did a post on compass directions in books I knew my clever readers would have plenty to say, and I saw myself - having concentrated on North in that post – perhaps doing some posts on the other cardinal points, collecting up the suggestions from readers.

But I’m not going to do that, because – and this is unprecedented – the level of participation in the comments below the line is so high, that the only sensible thing is to suggest that people go and look at them in situ. They range all over the place, both (reasonably enough) geographically and also metaphorically, and make for fascinating, hilarious and thought-provoking reading. I’m not able to sort them out or file them by N S E & W, but the randomness and serendipity of the entries bring their own joy. Please scroll through to the comments from this link:

 

Compass directions, a children’s classic, and is North best?

And thank you all for giving me such joy. As I've said before, when there is so much depressing unkindness online, it is amazing that we can all participate in good-natured discussion and sometimes disagreement, and demonstate nothing but friendliness, community feeling, and a longing to share our great literary favourites with each other.

There are now pushing 200 comments (a blog record), and I am going to quote blogfriend and major contributor Sovay:

“ I haven’t been quite nerdy enough to do an actual count, but my impression based on all the comments is that North and West are the most popular directions in book titles; South not too far behind, but East not getting much play at all except in conjunction with West. I think ‘East of Eden’ may be the only title in which East stands alone.”

I think she is spot on.

So do please go and browse through the comments and enjoy.

And I will just fill in a few more items from me.

I was saving this sublime quatrain for a theoretical post on West, but of course readers (looking at you Dame Eleanor) got in first, and it is much discussed btl - which gender is speaking?

Western wind, when will thou blow?

The small rain down can rain.

Christ, if my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again!

 

One of my favourite blogpost titles of all the 2600 I have done is this – a line from a book rather than a title:

One Block West of the Light

and which led to a later entry:

Still One Block West of the Light...

I thought I would surely find the East featured in one of my favourite passages from Dorothy L Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, set as it is in  East Anglia, the Fens, and having very much the feel of the remote parts of the East of England. But to my surprise the key bell-ringing scene mentions other directions:  

Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees, bursting from the snow-choked louvres of the belfry, whirled away southward and westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of the bells.

Ringing in the New Year

But there is this to put in the balance something for the East – this is a para from my entry on Agatha Christie’s (famously bad) book Postern of Fate:

The phrase Postern of Fate comes from a poem by James Elroy Flecker, The Gates of Damascus. Flecker had a huge facility for language, but his spirituality always seems bogus, and nowadays he would surely be accused of Orientalism. However, Postern of Fate is a great phrase, and a great title – what a shame it was wasted on this book. There is something called the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, a very well-known spot, but this is not what Flecker was referencing. Ancient historical Damascus had seven gates: Flecker writes about four of them, and the Eastern gate, below, is the Postern of Fate, the road to the desert and to Baghdad.

 

I don’t think I have written about  any book with East in the title, astonishingly – given that I have featured more than 2500 books on the blog. Proving Sovay’s point.

Some 'direction' books I have covered - many of these featured in the comments:

Byron Rogers  The Man Who Went into the West   [This sounds as though it will be a Buchan/Kipling-style thriller but is actually a riveting account of the life of a priest-poet largely set in Wales]

Matthew Sweet West End Front

Nury Vittachi  Mr Wong Goes West

Mrs Gaskell   North and South

Jim Harrison True North

Fair Flower of Northumberland - traditional ballad, linked to Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree

 

Then some cheat ones, where a direction is mentioned in the title as part of a name…

Agatha Christie’s  Poirot Investigates  includes a story called The  Western Star

Stella Gibbons Westwood

[double whammy] Vita Sackville-West  Devil at Westease

Jane Austen   Northanger Abbey

Angela Thirkell Northbridge Rectory

And one more move to the west – I cannot resist an opportunity to quote  yet again one of my favourite passages in all of literature: the closing words of the James Joyce short story The Dead:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

"In the full glory of some passion": James Joyce

Something tells me there will be more to come - keep checking the comments.

And, take a bow, Clothes in Books readers!

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