The last time I sat down with Peter Ackroyd to talk about the idea of England was over a very long dinner, involving, at his cheerfully belligerent insistence, four bottles of wine, bookended by several rounds of whisky and brandy. That evening, 25 years ago, ended with the biographer of Charles Dickens and William Blake lying flat out on the cobble stones outside a restaurant in London’s Charterhouse Square, disputing the material reality of the moon, while repeating a demand to “take me home Timmy and tuck me up”, an invitation I declined.
When I arrived to resume that conversation a quarter of a century on, last Tuesday, Ackroyd recalled our previous encounter with a bit of a wince. “I think we did this before in my drinking days,” he suggested, by way of hello. He runs through one or two recollections of that night as if from a former life, including his memory of trying to tell my fortune (“something once happened to you near a river…”). Ackroyd is now 74 and looks far trimmer and brighter-eyed than I remember. It is, he says, seven years since he gave up the drink (even a decade ago he was suggesting that he was down to two bottles of wine a night). “In the end I just got tired of it,” he says. “And also, it wasn’t good for my health. I mean, I was drinking far too much; it was like Niagara Falls.” He misses nothing about that previous life, he says, with half a smile and half a grimace. “Not least because it caused immense embarrassment and frequent physical pain.”
As a student, I religiously ate a large banana before every paper of my finals; as a journalist, I won’t write a piece, or even head out to do an interview, without having first had a slice of toast. Such an attachment to regular meals is, admittedly, connected in part to the fact that I am – let us use the chic French word – a migraineur. Headaches are more likely when my blood sugar is low. Mostly, though, it’s because I listened to mother. How can a person think clearly, let alone run a country, on an empty stomach?
For what is cutlery, in the end, but a system of control, imposing distance not only between diner and dish but between diner and self?
But this book is not simply a dirtbag adventure narrative. Instead, it is a literary journey and a wide-ranging meditation on questions of travel in the 21st century. When so much of the world is accessible, in person or online, what does it mean to walk across an unfamiliar landscape? “The walking,” writes Caswell, “never gets easier, but you get better.” Places like Iceland are becoming overtraveled, but Iceland Summer takes readers to places they have never been. Julia Oldham’s illustrations evoke contemporary graphic novels so that the beauty of the place, the imagery, and the narrative are rendered in casual, comic tones. Icelandic place names and family names cascade through the prose, which makes the journey both outlandish and hilarious.