Martin Miller's Gin with Gavin Maxwell

Martin Miller's gin is another ground breaker, and one I'm particularly fond of. It first saw the light of day in 1999 which was the same year I started working for Oddbins. One of the things I loved about being there was when we got new spirits to launch (in those days we would often be the first off licence to have them, and way ahead of supermarkets). I can't remember exactly when Martin Miller's hit the shelves, but I do remember trying it for the first time at a wine fair (neat, and it's still one of the few gins I find I could enjoy neat). I also remember the incentive scheme they ran to push sales. Every bottle sold was a point towards various prizes, sell 25 bottles and you got a magnum of Miller's. I got 3 magnums, one empty one is still doing duty as a toilet roll holder.

It's a great gin, and deserves a bit more shouting about then it gets. Martin Miller's was the first super premium gin to come along after Bombay Sapphire. The unique selling point was that after distillation the gin was shipped up to Iceland to have water added to bring it down to 40% abv, and then shipped back to the UK (hence the map on the bottle). The reason for this is that Iceland has the purest water in the world, and for whatever mysterious reason it apparently really does make a difference to the taste.

To drink it's quite citrusy, with the juniper coming in the middle of the palate, the finish is soft and clean, and there's a depth to the flavour that really underlines the quality of this gin. Of all the gins I've chosen for this project, this is the one that I'd urge people to try if they haven't already (and are inclined too. No hard sell here, I promise!). It's easy to find, it's not horribly expensive, and it's very, very, good.

It's the map on the label that puts me in mind of exploration and adventure, the shipping forecast, and a certain northern sense of romance. These are all things I associate with Gavin Maxwell's books, but in this case particularly 'Raven Seek Thy Brother' where he visits Iceland to research the possibility of farming Eider ducks for their down (predictably with Maxwell this was a failure, but it still made me want to go there - and one day I will).

I'm not clear if Maxwell was an alcoholic or not, it seems in questionable taste to pair his books with alcohol if he was. He certainly seems to have drunk a lot though that might have as much to do with the drinking culture of his time. Whatever the truth, amongst all the other things in his books there is a sense of martini drinking, a bottle of whisky stashed in the cabin of his shark fishing boats, or brandy in his club, along with a whiff of cigarette smoke, and fish oil, tar... A gin enjoyed responsibly is surely an appropriate accompaniment.

Harpoon At A Venture - Gavin Maxwall

Over the last couple of years I've periodically checked amazon for copies of 'Harpoon At A Venture' in the hope that someone somewhere would think to reprint it so that I could replace my much read and finally disintegrating copy. Earlier this year my wish was granted - Birlinn have just reprinted 'Harpoon at a Venture', even better a copy landed on my doorstep in a delightful and unexpected way.

I'm deeply attached to this book, I wrote about it here last year, and thought about it a lot more after reading Hebridean Sharker (also republished by Birlinn). 'Hebridean Sharker' is the book that Tex Geddes who had been part of Maxwell's crew wrote about his experience of shark fishing. Most of it takes place after his time with Maxwell and the two books compliment each other nicely. Geddes was a larger than life character and certainly a memorable element in 'Harpoon At A Venture', 'Hebridean Sharker' is full of great stories and is an entertaining book which in turn shows just how good a writer Maxwell was because 'Harpoon At A Venture' is in a different league.

I've read it many times over the years, each time finding and taking something different from it. At first I saw it basically as a tale of adventure, albeit one that ends badly, later it raised questions about conservation and the ethics of hunting, the last time I read it I thought far more about what it had to say for a generation of young men adjusting to peacetime. Maxwell was a prolific hunter during his lifetime with a youthful passion for shooting in an era where game bags reached near genocidal proportions, the impulse he acts on when he first sees a basking shark is to shoot at it (which he does, and eventually from this inauspicious beginning the idea of the shark fishery is born), even in 'Ring of Bright Water' he's having homicidal thoughts about killer whales, yet it wasn't until Maxwell's fishing operation that biologists got round to taking a really close look at basking sharks. 

It is still the war element of the book that fascinates me at the moment however. I find it hard to imagine the impact 6 years of war must have had on young men, because really what would you do with yourself if you'd come out of that to find yourself 30, with no career, and a skill set that probably doesn't fit you for office life? Shark hunting suddenly begins to look like a logical answer. For Maxwell there is also a class issue which in turn I also find fascinating; the pre and post world war for younger sons of the landed gentry must have been very different places - much of the Soay venture looks like an attempt to maintain the role of an officer and a gentleman and was likely a reason that it failed. 

'Harpoon At A Venture' brings a time and place vividly to life, regardless of how you feel about hunting sharks it's a rewarding (I think important) read. This new edition has more pictures in it than my old copy which was an unexpected bonus. It's a book I can't recommend highly enough, it's my benchmark for nature writing (and in fact for all non fiction) and is one I know I'll read many more times over the years - perhaps eventually I'll be able to write about it in a way that does it justice. 

Revisiting Ring of Bright Water

When I wrote about 'Peking Picnic' a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the postal book group I'm in. Well my book was 'Ring of Bright Water' Simon was the last person to read it, and both book and accompanying notebook landed in my mailbox just before I went on holiday. 'Ring of Bright Water' has a special place in my heart, it's a book I've read many times over the years but it was really as a homesick teenager that it got under my skin. I already had a bit of an Otter obsession after close encounters with them in Shetland, 'Ring' was published in 1960 so in the late 80's it read as nostalgic but still quite recognisable. Re- reading it last year with another 25 odd years on the clock Maxwell's way of life and the world he led it in seems much further away - at least all of it's 60 odd years...

I will admit that I was nervous opening the notebook to see what everyone thought of this book - I'm aware it's not perfect, and knew when I sent it off that it was something I'd spent years fruitlessly trying to get the group to embrace - so as a group choice it was a bit of a gamble, and I would have hated it if nobody had liked it. Happily pretty much everybody did like it (huge relief) which is a great testament to Maxwell's writing.

Maxwell at his best really is a terrific writer, I have most of his books but am only really familiar with the Otter series - of which 'Ring' is by far the most appealing, his childhood memoir ('The House of Elrig' - worth searching out), and 'Harpoon at a Venture' which I consider to be his best book and desperately in need of being reprinted. His charisma jumps off the page in 'Ring' in a way that's made this book a lifelong friend, I suspect the man himself would have been considerably more difficult to get along with which is one reason I've never read his biography. A few of my book group friends had though and it was recommended a couple of times in the notebook. I know enough about Maxwell to know that 'Ring of Bright Water' is the varnished truth. There are omissions and occasional romancing - all of which makes for a better book - but perhaps it's time to read a little bit more about the man behind the book...

It's an irony that the success of 'Ring of Bright Water' contributed to the end of Maxwell's highland idyll, although my impression of Maxwell is that he'd always find a way to make a mess out of his life. Maybe that's part of the appeal of this book. The otter bit is emotional and funny - until it becomes tragic, the bits about the west highlands are classic British nature writing at it's best, but what I notice now is the window onto my grandfathers generation. Men who had grown up between wars, fought in the second one, and had to try and make sense of that post war world. Maxwell was ridiculously well connected with the privileges and introductions that went along with that, his life was fascinating and full of incident, but there is so much failure - he was part of a generation of gentlemen adventurers who seem long gone now.  

Ring of Bright Water - Gavin Maxwell

Little Toller Books have turned out to be a joyous discovery - and one more reason to be thankful for Gavin Maxwell. My original copy of 'Ring of Bright Water' started to fall apart last time I read it and is now kept for sentimental rather than practical reasons. For a while the only version in print was an abridged amalgamation of 'Ring of Bright Water' and its two sequels; 'The Rocks Remain', and 'Raven Seek Thy Brother', it's not a format that appeals to me so I was delighted to find Ring not only back in print, but in such a handsome form. The cover illustration is particularly apt - it's a detail from Winifred Nicholson's 'Bonnie Scotland' and I'm assuming it's a view from Maxwell's Camusfearna (she was a regular visitor and if I had an outrageous amount of money I would have loved to buy this) and I can't imagine anything capturing the spirit of the book better.

I've read 'Ring of Bright Water' any number of times and each time it's a slightly different book, undoubtedly because each time I'm a different person so there were surprises. Memory associates it exclusively with otters and the small patch of the highlands Maxwell came to call home but the otters don't appear until half way through, the whole first half of the book is an evocation of Camusfearna (really Sandaig, but Maxwell wanted to protect his privacy and the place he writes about has become so much a place of fable that his name for it seems more appropriate than a specific geographical location).

The way he tells it he was casually handed the keys to his spirtual home by a friend from university days whilst he (Maxwell) was attempting to earn a living as a portrait painter after the failure of the Soay project. It's love from the beginning and so begins a new phase of life, the chance find of a barrel top from the shark fishery leads to the writing of 'Harpoon at a Venture' and the death of his dog Jonnie leads to the search for a new animal companion. On a trip amongst the marsh Arabs of Iraq with Wilfred Thesiger he buys an otter cub, she doesn't live long but just before he leaves the country he acquires another - it's the beginning of an obsession which will last for the rest of his life. The otter section of the book is both funny and heartbreaking. Mijbil the otter who barely makes it back to the UK alive is with him for a year and a day before his untimely end.  

The grief that colours the whole book is at it's rawest re-living that year and its aftermath. Mijbil was an otter sub species previously unknown to science and so is named after his owner - as Maxwell says "he belonged to the only race of living creature that was ever likely to bear my name", he's aware that the love he lavished on that beast makes him slightly ridiculous but he's prepared to expose himself to it anyway. 

There are a hundred things I could say about this book, but as I've been told the quotes I chose from 'Harpoon at a Venture' were stomach churning I'll leave the last words to Maxwell to redress the balance and because they sum up how I feel about the book as a whole.

"It is October, and I have been for six unbroken months at Camusfearna. the stags are roaring on the slopes of Skye across the Sound, and yesterday the wild swans passed flying southwards low over a lead-grey sea. The ring of tide-wrack round the bay is piled high with fallen leaves borne down the burn, and before a chill sea wind they are blown racing and scurrying up the sands. the summer, with its wild roses and smooth blue seas lapping white island beaches, is over; the flower of the heather is dead and the scarlet rowan berries fallen. Beyond are the brief twilight days of winter, when the waterfall will thunder white over flat rocks whose surface was hot to bare feet under summer suns, and the cold, salt-wet wind will rattle the windows and moan in the chimney. This year I shall not be there to see and hear these things; home is for me as yet a fortress from which to essay raid and foray, an embattled position behind whose walls one may retire to lick new wounds and plan fresh journeys to further horizons. yet while there is time there is the certainty of return."

Harpoon At A Venture - Gavin Maxwell

On Thursday I was in London for the  Penguin bloggers evening. This is a rare treat for me, train fares are prohibitive, and work hours have to be negotiated but this particular evening was to tempting to miss. One of the unexpected highlights was a conversation with Robert Macfarlane*, I liked 'The Wild Places' which I read long enough ago to not remember much about, and am quietly excited about his new book 'The Old Ways' (and only partly because I managed to grab a proof copy). What was really exciting though was finding that we were both very enthusiastic about Maxwell's 'Harpoon At A Venture', I've never met anyone else who's ever read it, much less loved it before and yet this is a book that deserves classic status quite as much as (if not more than) 'Ring of Bright Water'.

I've been talking about 'Harpoon At A Venture' a bit recently which made me realise it's years since I last read it and a re-visit was long overdue. When I first found this book I was in my early teens and read it as a straight adventure story, one that was particularly attractive because it was set on the west coast. Reading it this time I was surprised by how big a role the war and it's aftermath play. It all starts in an air raid in 1940, the battle of Britain is at it's height and Maxwell is stationed with 2 other officers and 200 men near the Blackwall tunnel and East India Docks. They think their moment has come one night but the bomb fails to explode, out in the crisp autumn dawn after the all clear he finds the bomb in a churchyard where he realises the crypt is being used as a shelter, opening the doors he's "hit by a stifling wave of air so noisome that I retched even at its first impact. The temperature was that of a Kew hothouse, the stench indescribable...One hundred and twelve people had been in that airless crypt for seven hours." The people in the crypt, which has become a cesspit during its occupation, are in no hurry to be disturbed, nothing has ever made the blitz seem more horrible or real to me than that description (much of which I've left out). 

Later on, after a disconcerting (for the reader) encounter with a naked guardsman in the showers, Maxwell and a friend daydream about buying Hebridean islands after the war as suitably clean and fresh alternatives to the rubble and filth of London. It's an idea that stays with him and as the war ends he negotiates to buy Soay. This is where the problems begin, for Maxwell realises from the beginning that a life of quiet retirement won't do - peacetime is dull - Soay needs a project. A chance encounter with a basking shark seems to give the answer, and it's a mark of how good a story teller Maxwell is that when you find his reaction to the shark is to shoot 300 rounds into it you're still with him. This is the start of a mission to kill a shark (the 300 rounds don't do it) and the birth of the shark fishery plan.

What follows is a chase that the sharks win again and again, until finally they succeed and catch one. For Maxwell and his crew it seems to be as much about the thrill of the chase as the catch which is perhaps why in planning terms they mess up again and again. By the time 'Harpoon At A Venture' was written he can admit that failure was almost guaranteed from the beginning of an under capitalised scheme where nobody had a clue what they were doing. It took 5 years for that to really become clear during which time Maxwell lost everything (though almost miraculously it seems he managed to protect the investment of others.)

There are echo's of that first dockland scene - a beach on Scalpay is transformed into a charnel house of dismembered sharks, the sea red with blood but this is as nothing to the contamination of Soay. The factory fails to work efficiently, the harbour fills with scum and carrion - none of the clean escapism planned in 1940, and worst of all a brine tank is tainted. Unfortunately it contained 16 tonnes of shark flesh.

 "For a wave of air so noisome, so active, and evil, it is difficult to find comparison...Ammonia, dense, suffocating, and almost visible...the smell of the Blackwall crypt seven years before was no more than a pale presage of what my illusory Island of Avalon had to offer me now... It was alive, heaving, seething, an obscene sea such as Brueghel might have conceived, alive as the sanctuary of Beelzebub himself, with a million million grubs, twisting, turning, writhing, as though beneath that surface layer of putrescence were the struggling bodies of all the wounded but resurrected dragons that we had attacked and that had escaped us." 

Despite the business failure though there is success of a sort here, it comes in the form of high adventure, life and death struggles with both the sharks and the elements, and escape from austerity Britain. There is a heartbreaking letter from a boy of 22 who finds himself trapped in a marriage to a woman he neither loves or is loved by - he's willing to throw his life savings into the shark venture in return for a job and escape.

As a piece of nature writing it's worth remembering that almost nothing was known about Basking Sharks before the Soay project - scientifically something important came out of this mess. the Hebrides in all there stark, stripped back beauty, and especially its seas are alive on the page. There are continual observations of birds and beasts of every sort, meticulous and poetic at the same time. There is also the conundrum of how to live in and off a landscape without destroying it - a question we still have no satisfactory answer for. It's a tremendous book whichever way you look at it and badly needs to be bought back into print - not least because my copy has now started to fall apart and wants replacing.

*I wish I'd taken notes when I talked to him although that would probably have been a bit off putting... A lot of books were mentioned some of which I remember, some of which I can't quite bring to mind, all sounded interesting and would have born further investigation. Still, the list I have is quite long enough to be going on with and will inevitably lead to yet more books so all is not lost. 

Six of the Best

Last weekend Nancy Pearl did a top ten list of neglected classics (in The Guardian) ripe for BBC adaptation. It’s a nice list composed in equal measures of books I love, authors I love, and books I now want because of the good company they’re clearly keeping but... One of the books on the list is F. M Mayor’s ‘The Rector’s Daughter’ which is an amazing moving and eventually heartbreaking book which I can’t help but think would make for miserable television (girl leads loveless and disappointing life with remarkable grace and stoicism than dies) I think it’s a bit subtle for television. All of which started me making my own list of neglected books I’d love to see in glorious Technicolor on a Sunday Evening.

The rules (there have to be rules) were that I had to be able to imagine watching instead of reading, that there shouldn’t already be filmed versions (I broke this immediately), and that the lesser known works of better known authors probably shouldn’t be included (which meant ruling out Wilkie Collins and Trollope amongst others). This all turned out to be a bit tougher than I thought (damn all self imposed rules) but here’s my list of books, ten wasn’t a rule I felt I needed to pay much attention to.

It starts with Gavin Maxwell, there’s already a film version of ‘Ring of Bright Water’ but it doesn’t do justice to either Maxwell or this particular book. Think about it – fast cars, sharks, arctic exploration, brushes with the Mafia, aristocratic connections, confused sexuality, witches, amazing scenery, and of course otters – and that’s just for starters. I could see this being a properly exciting bio pic probably in 6 parts or more and based on all his books (for no good reason I’m picturing Daniel Craig hunting sharks possibly, and for entirely artistic reasons, without a shirt).

Now that the token man has had his mention... Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ is definitely begging for the Sunday night slot, any sensation novel I’ve read would be a good fit, but why this particular book isn’t much better known baffles me; plenty of sex and attempted murder with the chance for some lavish costumes – it’s what I pay my licence fee for.

I would also dearly love to see what E M Delafield’s Provincial Lady books would look like, possibly in a superior sitcom format. All that genteel bitching over the tea cups and pawning of the family diamond to keep up appearances, I’m sure it could be a winner or would it be better suited to radio? Hmmm.

Mrs Oliphant is another TV friendly writer who deserves to be as widely loved as Trollope at the very least. ‘Miss Marjoribanks’ is the only Carlingford chronicle I’ve read so far (though this is soon to change) and I would love to watch it – like a racier ‘Cranford’ with a few good female roles and a nicely caddish villain, a bit of romance, some tragedy, and a heroine who could give Emma a run for her money.

Elizabeth Bowen's ‘The Last September’ has already been made into a film, it’s got an impressive cast and I’ve only just found out about it via Google; the trailer looks rubbish . It took me two attempts to get into this book and I know that Simon Stuck-in-a-book isn’t much of a fan but stay with me on this one because it could be great to watch. The relationship between the Irish, English, and Anglo Irish is ripe for exploration – all those themes of loyalty, belonging, tradition, class, conflict, and then throw in a bit of coming of age drama and romance (but not to heavy on the romance please – there are other things in the world that matter) and bob’s your uncle – a thought provoking feast for the eye.

Angela Carter’s ‘Night’s at the Circus’ would be a belter to watch as well – hopefully ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ will be such a success that those who decide will be looking around for another Victorian set drama featuring brothels (and would be happy to include a winged woman flying through the air with the greatest of ease). ‘The Company of Wolves’ wasn’t a flop - now I’m thinking about it I’d love to watch it again - and I think the world is ready to see more Carter. I love her writing but admit that not so many of her books would be just right for anything but a very specialised audience (I really wouldn’t want to watch ‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman’ for example) but ‘Nights at the Circus’ would be a treat.

Making this list has been far harder than I imagined. It turns out that I have a lot of books I haven’t read (I sort of knew that) and so can’t comment on, and a lot of books which are already on film in one form or another whether I knew it or not. I don’t consciously go out looking for tie in novels, more often than not the book comes before the film but I’m clearly more in tune with semi popular culture than I imagined. Now all I want to know is what would make it onto your list?