MAGIC, MERLIN AND A QUEST FOR PEACE
Wanderland Jini Reddy Bloomsbury Wildlife €23
Afew years ago, broke, bereaved and emotionally adrift, Jini Reddy decided to spend a year searching for magic. She had a hunch that the British landscape might help heal her heart and soul, if only she knew how to look and listen to it properly. This, she admits, makes her sound like a bit of a hippy, whereas actually she’s a London-based journalist who has never had the slightest desire to go to Stonehenge and shudders at the idea of naked bathing, herbal medicine and nose piercings.
In this funny, touching book, we follow Reddy as she attempts to track down ancient springs, labyrinths and even the magician Merlin.
At first she spends a lot of time tramping across Britain in heavy drizzle feeling slightly ridiculous. Her discomfort is only increased by the fact that she is of Indian heritage. Could it be that she is simply not able to tune in to a culture that is not entirely hers? ‘People I meet in the countryside often look at me a second longer than they need to,’ she explains, ‘a woman with coffee-coloured skin walking on her own.’
In time, though, something rather extraordinary happens. Reddy stops feeling so anxious about whether she’s doing things right and starts simply to trust her own judgment. Instead of feeling self-conscious about looking different, she starts talking to strangers. And, she finds that whichever road she chooses, it always turns out to take her where she wanted to go. Random strangers give her exactly the information she has been seeking. Once she stops sulking about the rain, she notices a rare double rainbow has appeared just in front of her. In fact, she says, ‘it’s like I’ve started a cosmic chain reaction’.
There are moments in this book where you could be forgiven for thinking that Reddy has a slightly over-romanticised view of the landscape and she never seems to understand why local people sound sceptical or bored when she turns up at tourist hotspots such as Lindisfarne (above, left) and Glastonbury and starts over-sharing about her search for magic.
But at the same time there is no doubting her sincerity and while the book ends without any big revelations, we are left with the cheering sense that Reddy really has made contact with something, probably deep within herself, that feels entirely new and quite special.