BOOKS, RADIO AND TV
Discarded everyday detritus tells many stories about our collective past
What to read and listen to this month.
BOOK
RAG AND BONE
BY LISA WOOLLETT, JOHN MURRAY, £16.99 (HB)
Beachcombing in Cornwall and mudlarking by the Thames, Lisa Woollett meditates on what survives of us for posterity, and how the everyday detritus of our lives fits into the bigger historical picture.
Each new object sets off a train of thought and opens up a new path into history: a piece of a clay tobacco pipe takes us back to the slave trade, a farthing from 1942 takes us to the London slums. This is both an intimate family history and a broader social history of refuse collecting, reusing and recycling, prompting “wayward conversations” with relatives as Woollett traces the generations who came before her: a dustman grandfather, a scavenger great-grandfather. Surreal humour punctuates the writing: as Woollett grubs away at the edge of the Thames, glamorous couples pick their way down to the water’s edge in their finery to have their wedding photos taken.
Yet as debris from the human and non-human natural world mingle on the seashore, a more urgent narrative takes hold: the toll of our modern addiction to plastics. By the end of the book, much of Woollett’s delight has given way to horror as the discussion turns, inexorably, to our overuse of the Earth’s resources, over-production, wastefulness, insatiable consumption. As she makes her way to the shore “through drifts of microplastics”, the mood turns from excitement to exhaustion: “There was just so much waste”.
More than personal memoir, this is a powerful book that has much to say about the present and future state of our world. Eleanor Barraclough, historian