Book Review: A book of migrations: some passages in Ireland

Abstract

focusing on three indices of progress in this respect: food and eating; sex and procreation; dying and death. This is followed by a chapter that examines the relationship between the individual and other people, especially the ways in which individuals balance involvement and detachment even when they are in familiar company. The two final chapters consider escape through two of the most powerful sets of imaginative constructions – visions of heaven and hell. Hell is at once the more vivid, the expression of cruelty and violence. Tuan does not dwell on the detail of the grotesque or pornographic, but notes how such thinking can tempt us into first picturing and then acting out evil. By contrast, heaven is far harder to picture. Using examples from a wide range of theologies and moral philosophies, Tuan shows how imagination constantly works to enchant and re-enchant the world. The imagery of heaven is altogether more insipid than its polar opposite. Hell is the world of our worst imaginings; heaven passes our understanding. Perhaps the nearest that we will come to knowing heaven on this earth is to strive to understand what it means to be Good. Taken as a whole, this is an ambitious but somewhat self-conscious book. The publisher’s blurb speaks of Escapism as ‘the capstone of a celebrated career’, and there seems throughout an understandable wish to address important issues in the human condition. Yet there is a limit to the number of threads that can be woven into a text that, without its extensive footnotes, is scarcely 200 pages long. Too many thoughts are prematurely truncated when the author decides to follow a sequence of loosely related paths in quick succession. For my taste, I would have liked to have seen fuller discussion of utopianism – that most profound but often doomed urge to escape the limitations of the present – and more attention paid to the expression of escapism in landscape which, curiously, only intermittently flits into the narrative. Having made these points, however, there remains much to enjoy in Tuan’s erudite style, depth of scholarship, and ability to trace interconnections between apparently disparate areas. There are few geographers, or anyone else for that matter, who can match Tuan’s ability to ask searching questions about the relationships between culture and landscape. It is to be profoundly hoped that the forecast is wrong, and that this does not prove to be his final academic book.