Wanderland - Jini Reddy

 WANDERLAND - JINI REDDY

The past is another country but in nature is where you'll find the weird. Foreign countries can be referred to as being 'exotic' but in the depths of an English city or even out on the weather-eaten council estates you'll also find exotica and mad fauna along with quark, strangeness and charm. There is mystery and city hobgoblins in our man-made environs but in the English countryside dwells monsters, demons, life-force. magick and essence rare. That's my opinion at least, and that's the reason for me reading Wanderland by Jini Reddy.

In her book, Reddy takes heed of her inner voice and sets off on a personal quest to find the arcane and the mystical, or what she calls the 'Otherness' of the landscape. Indeed, the strapline of the book is 'A Search for Magic in the Landscape' but right there straightaway in the way she spells 'magic' is a clue as to where she's coming from and where she's going wrong because as any good alchemist would tell you, the way to spell 'magic' is with a 'k'.

You would have thought spirituality and 'New Age' would be classless, egalitarian and non-hierarchical, but it's not. It's absolutely riddled with class prejudice from a mealy-minded, entitled, middle class perspective and Jini Reddy's position in it is a prime example. She would deny it vehemently of course but that's because she's unaware of it herself, which is mightily ironic if not tragic for someone who has written a book on 'awareness'.

Wanderland is chick lit for New Age steppers. There's a very girlish-gosh!-dashing-hither-and-thither feel about it with a lot of anecdotal mentions of where the author was last week and who with. All along the lines of 'I was talking to a friend of mine, an ex-barrister who now lives on the foothills of Tibet drinking nothing but a finger bowl of water a day, and I mentioned that I'd recently spoken to our mutual friend, a neuro-brain surgeon from Hampstead who in her spare time is a tree hugger'. It's tedious, to put it politely. 

She contacts a woman who owns a labyrinth in Cornwall, who has a longhouse on 70 acres of land with her own beach. 'Just whizzing off to set up the Festival of the Sea in Looe' the woman tells Reddy 'But it's all yours for three nights.' And you just know Reddy is telling these people that she's a journalist on The Times or some other newspaper she freelances for who's writing a book and can she come and visit? Which is why everyone she contacts says 'yes'. The fact that she's on a quest for the 'Other' on the back of a book deal casts a shadow of inauthenticity over the whole thing, however, as in even if she doesn't find anything at the end of the Yellow Brick Road it will all be a jolly jape anyway and she'll get a book out of it at least.

In the process, unfortunately, she has to suffer the indignities of travelling to 'boringly tame' places such as Hastings, sharing train carriages with Sun newspaper readers. Can you imagine? For someone who throughout the book gushes about previous places she's been such as remote river valleys in Iceland, the desert in northern Namibia, remote tree-lined valleys in Australia, and so on, it must have been terrible.

But a book out of it she got, published by Bloomsbury and available at all Waterstones. And what a book it is. What a disappointment. What a let down. What a boring load of middle class, self-serving, pretentious piffle.

If nature is a language then it's one that Reddy neither reads nor speaks. At one point in her book she admits to feeling no connection to tales of King Arthur, Merlin or The Green Man and that's fine but then she also admits to having never been to Stonehenge or Avebury which is pretty incomprehensible given the subject matter of what she's writing about. At another point she admits to having never taken magic mushrooms. Well, perhaps she should try them one day? Or at least watch Ben Wheatley's film A Field In England? Or the film Enys Men? Or even Lars von Trier's film, Antichrist? 

Near to the end of her book Reddy writes of meeting musician Nitin Sawhney who quotes from Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance where Robert Pirsig says Buddha is not to be found only in the petals of a flower, but also in the circuits of a computer. 'I think that's absolutely true' Sawhney tells her and Reddy admires him for his honesty. But does Reddy actually understand what he's saying? Possibly not, because if she did then her book may not have ended up being so rubbish.

Sometimes I read these books so that you won't have to. I sometimes literally read 'em and weep.

John Serpico