Friday, July 18, 2014

On Silbury Hill review – 'a rich and evocative book of place'

Adam Thorpe has a deep, nearly lifelong bond with the largest manmade hill in Europe, a site open to endless interpretation

Silbury Hill
‘The point about Silbury Hill is that she has no point,’ writes Adam Thorpe. Photograph: Getty

The late American poet Anthony Hecht opened his debut collection with a strange chiller called "A Hill". We are in Rome, and the poem's speaker is assailed by a kind of vision: a warm sunlit piazza, its busy "fretwork of shadows", "small navy of carts", even the marble of the Palazzo Farnese, are dissolved, and in their place he is stood before a hill, "mole-coloured and bare", looming in a childhood wintertime's cold and silence "that promised to last forever, like the hill". 

Hecht's hill poem is quite different from Adam Thorpe's Silbury Hill in prose, not least in the way the latter poet's imaginative excavations reveal something central and nurturing, wholly at odds with the "plain bitterness" of the former's. But looming, inscrutability and visionary elements are common to both; and it also calls to mind how Thorpe's astonishing debut novel Ulverton opens by picking out a figure "on the hill at first light". Perhaps, its speaker wonders, "the warrior buried there had stood up again to haunt us".
    Over eight chapters, On Silbury Hill orbits and explores Thorpe's near-lifelong relationship with a manmade prehistoric mound, a flat-topped pudding dish of grassed-over chalk, whose origins and purpose are essentially mysterious. Fittingly, the book is a gathering, a layering, and Thorpe is at any moment liable to range 
      Over eight chapters, On Silbury Hill orbits and explores Thorpe's near-lifelong relationship with a manmade prehistoric mound, a flat-topped pudding dish of grassed-over chalk, whose origins and purpose are essentially mysterious. 
      Fittingly, the book is a gathering, a layering, and Thorpe is at any moment liable to range backwards and forwards across decades and millennia. "The point about Silbury Hill is that she has no point," he writes, and yet two centuries of curious shaft-sinking and tunnelling had left its structure in such a parlous state by the turn of the millennium, he wonders what any collapse might precipitate psychologically. "This is probably unhealthy. To be so dependent for your sanity on a great prehistoric lump of chalky earth!"
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