Invisible Lines

Boundaries and Belts that Define the World

Maxim Sansom

Profile Books 2023

Hb, 404pp, £22 ISBN 9781800814998

Maxim Sansom is a cultural geographer who specialises in the geography of religions and beliefs. This breezy book of 30 short essays on dividing lines, borders and demarcated zones includes fortean-adjacent subjects such as the Bible Belt in the US and the religious zones created by Orthodox Jews, but starts out on a bigger, planetary scale.

There are early essays on the “Wallace Line”, drawn by Alfred Russel Wallace between the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean to mark out where evolution diverges between the flora and fauna of Asia and Australia, and on Tornado Alley in the States, and the Malaria Belt in tropical latitudes. For the more culturally constructed borders and zones that organise human meaning on a planetary scale, there are informative essays on the origin of international time zones, a product of having to standardise railway timetables in the 19th century, and the wayward line the International Date Line has to take down the Pacific to minimise confusion among near neighbours. Essays on the origin of the Green Belt, and the strange rewilding of the zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant – at least until war put the exclusion zone back into deadly geopolitics again – are also great capsule pieces.

For forteans, there are sadly no ley lines, magic circles or Bermuda triangles, but the essays on religious zones may be of interest. There’s a detailed description of the Jewish eruv that encircles much of the island of Manhattan – a zone that has to be physically marked out to show where orthodox Jews are allowed to travel on the

Sabbath because it is defined as “private” not public. Things get more complex in Brooklyn, where several overlapping and competing eruvim serve different communities (and different rabbis check weekly that the line is physically continuous).

There’s a strong essay on the blurry borders of the Bible Belt in the States, a term first used by HL Mencken about the American South, but with borders expanding all the time. It is coupled with a discussion of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra, a Muslim territory that exercises sharia law amidst the highly polytheistic archipelago of Indonesia, and a treatment of the strict exclusion zone around North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Islands, which acts to preserve the tiny, undisturbed culture that has often violently repelled any incursion from outsiders, a policy backed up by Indian law. An American Christian missionary who travelled illegally to the island in 2016 and was killed by the indigenous people resulted in no prosecutions.

A book with a fitful fortean focus, then, but worth filleting for informative essays into several curious territories.

Roger Luckhurst

★★★

Mystery Animals of Suffolk

Matt Salusbury

Slack-jawed Amazement 2023 (see bitternbooks.co.uk)

Pb, 348pp, £15, ISBN 9781915721099

One of Britain’s least populated counties, Suffolk is mostly rural, from the inland heaths and Forestry Commission plantations to the coastal woodlands and bird-haunted marshes. It has a feeling of a slightly forgotten place, shrouded in secrets. It has, indeed, had more than its fair share; extensive areas are still offlimits military training areas. Orford Ness, now a National Trust nature reserve, was once a top-secret military test site with many of its own mysteries; then, of course, there is Rendlesham Forest and its fabled UFO encounter.

So, if there was ever a county likely to harbour a rich history of mystery animals, Suffolk is it, and FT stalwart Matt Salusbury, who has strong connections to the county, is definitely the man to document them. As a result, Mystery Animals of Suffolk is a cut above the usual local mysteries book. Meticulous, detailed research, a fine grasp of place and folklore, and an open-minded but sceptical awareness of the fortean combine to produce a penetrating and satisfying exploration of Suffolk’s peculiar creatures.

Taking a very wide definition of “animal”, Salusbury writes of imps, fairies, a merman and headless horses, as well as woodwose, a sea monster seen by the novelist H Rider Haggard’s family, the Shug Monkey, and that Suffolk favourite, Black Shuck.

As well as providing excellent coverage of both the historical and borderline mythical creatures of the county, he does not neglect more recent entities, with a whole section on the county’s mystery big cats. This includes a diversion into other feline curiosities – Suffolk is particularly rich in mummified cats – and also covers known escaped exotics.

Well written, compendious and backed up by an excellent index and bibliography, this is an example of how a regional cryptozoology book ought to be written. Ian Simmons

★★★★★