Take a trip to Orkney with Amy Liptrot

I was buying books for the kids at Waterstones. The three I picked out were all in the buy one, get one half price range so I felt driven to buy one for myself as well. It makes no sense, of course, when viewed rationally but the combination of a tease and books always leaves me a dribbling mass of irrationality.

I picked up Amy Liptrot’s Wainwright Prize-winning The Outrun. I’m a sucker for some of the new nature writing — and especially when it centres on Scotland.

In this case, the book is about Orkney and Liptrot’s return there after a decade of descending into alcoholism in London. The word addiction is mentioned once in the blurb on the book’s back cover but I skimmed over it. I was drawn by the mention of Orkney rather than recovery.

I’ve heard many hundreds of tales of addiction over the past few years and another drunkalogue was not what I was looking for. In fact, if I had taken more notice of recommendations by Will Self and Olivia Laing I might very well have put the books down.

Which would have been a pity. I have loved it thus far. I am over two thirds of the way through it and I will slip it in my bag for my overnight business trip away tomorrow. I have all the nature writing I could hope for here and the wonderful descriptions of her life on Orkney but beyond that she has managed to weave into that story her struggles with sobriety without turning the book into a recovery diary.

Perhaps only another addict can fully appreciate that side of the story but the fact that the book has sold well and won prizes surely indicates that Liptrot has successfully woven the two parts of her tale into a satisfying whole.

I spent only a few nights on Orkney but I’m already looking to return to those big skies and the views and the seas and the sense of being further north than people have a right to be.

Here are a couple of short quotations from what is a pivotal chapter in the book. Liptrot has decided to stay for the summer and takes a role with the RSPB counting corncrakes — a bird species in serious decline.

I have driven all of Orkney’s roads and traversed its tracks, grooved its geography into my mind, its contour lines onto my skin, making it more difficult to leave again.

This is the first inclination that her home is reaching past her natural desire to leave once again for the bright lights of the city. And, later in the chapter, this becomes even more clear as she finds new forms of night life chasing the sounds of the birds through the barely dark summer nights.

This is a different kind of nightlife. The life I had in the city — parties and clubs — is no longer there for me but these never-nights, marking off the grid references and following maps in the mist, they are my own. I’ve found no corncrakes tonight but dawn is coming, I’ve got a flask of coffee and I can hear seals.

What I especially like about that last sentence is that it captures perfectly the way the most mundane things can deliver a sense of comforting wonder to the recovering addict so used to chaos and chasing highs and despising anything considered normal.

So, if Orkney or nature writing or even stories of recovery are your thing, I suggest getting a copy of The Outrun and curling up in front of the fire and reading it while the nights remain cold and dark.