To The River is going with the flow

To the River: A Journey beneath the Surface

When a particular place assumes a significance as intense, and sometimes as complicated as any central human relationship, that place can be all consuming. For Olivia Laing in her arrestingly beautiful book, that place became a small river in Sussex. During one recent, sweltering, mid-summer week she walked the length of the River Ouse from source to mouth.

At the beginning she was floundering after the collapse of a long love affair. Feeling profoundly displaced from assumed certainties, she sought to rebalance herself through the space, solitude, beauty and the watery balm of a river she had known only in part for many years. As she explored the river's path, so her confusion was at times both intensified and ultimately relieved by the altering landscape around her. The river is threaded through her narrative like an explorer's guide-rope through a deep forest, the engulfing shifts in lightness, dark, density and openness reflecting Laing's changing emotions as they fluctuated from despair and tiredness to exhilaration and ultimately trust.

Woven into the meanders of To The River is the historical story of this modest waterway where "the landscape hereabouts has been shaped by centuries of man's activities". The history of the Ouse from infancy to maturity demonstrates that "rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads". The ghosts who lie beneath those banks include soldiers of the ferocious 13th-century Battles of the Barons, 19th-century dinosaur hunters whose excavations were led by a Brighton doctor, and most recently the fearful flooding of the river in 2000 that caused dreadful damage to the lovely Sussex town of Lewes.

At the heart of the book are the writers who have added shape to Olivia Laing's life, among them Homer, Shakespeare, TS Eliot and Iris Murdoch.

Laing does not seek to romanticise. The classic and magical riverside story of childhood, The Wind in the Willows was written before the tragic death of Kenneth Grahame's young son. The resulting deluge of grief suffered by Grahame prevented him from writing again. Iris Murdoch's own death from Alzheimer's was preceded by her startling book The Sea, The Sea.

But the story of the Ouse will forever be bound up with the writing and the death of the novelist Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in its murky waters one cold March day 60 years ago. Laing's passages about the beauty and precision of Woolf's prose are echoed in her own use of language for the landscape through which she travels. A hedgerow resembles "a botanist's sweetshop", offering "beetroot-pink hedge woundwort, agrimony, meadowsweet and the silver-leaved tormentil that can both stem the flow of blood and dye leather red". The ever-constant glint of the river is at times "pleated" and "enamelled", while it alternately "dandles", "mangles" and "riffles".

This is an uplifting book, which not only develops into a work of considerable richness, but as the river reaches the open sea, expresses its message of hope with increasing lyricism and uncluttered simplicity.