'Handiwork' by Sara Baume

Sara Baume has now written three lovely books, each characterised by carefulness, tenderness and a calm attention to the natural world.

Spill Simmer Falter Wither (the title being a play on the seasons’ names) told the story of a loner and a dog in a seaside town; it was really moving. A Line Made by Walking was my sort of book, though I recognise that some readers might be impatient with its kind of narration: quiet, indirect, at times Sebaldian.

Now comes handiwork from Tramp Press, another book full of under-stated pleasures. Baume tells the story (if that is the right word) of her creation at home of an art installation over the course of a year. The narrative (if that is the right word) is fragmentary, sometimes with just one very short paragraph on a page, punctuated by fourteen photographs: images of a model bird from a series, usually cupped by a hand.

A while into the book you start to realise it is also a book about the author’s grief for her father, a maker of things (a process which eventually gave him the cancer which killed him). His style (if that is the right word) was for things ‘scratch-built’:

Machinery, furniture, gates, paths, customised polytunnels and greenhouses, as well dozens of items that were unclassifiable. They were old and new, rusted and freshly painted, broken and fixed and refixed - they were made from part of things he had made previously, and sundered and remade.

His daughter, however, harks back to her grandfather, more artistic and interested in decoration, both in her art-work and in her creative writing. These processes are attempts to hold things together, to make things which last in the face of the inevitable entropy of everything, the most raw instance of which is her father’s death. To counteract this, making is a form of attention and ‘flow’. Here we might think of Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi’s definition:

A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

Creating something is a using of time (for her father, labour was his pleasure, or perhaps his sanctuary) and though set in 2018, handiwork could have been about pandemic ‘lockdown’: quiet days, repetitive activity, just the writer and her partner:

In the state of flow, I am concentrating on solely upon the microcosm of my eyes and hands, the tools and materials and burgeoning object on the table in front of me. I am making a sequence of small decisions almost unconsciously …. For a brief, brilliant moment at the peak of flow, my thoughts will reach no further than the limits of my object and time passes faster because I forget to check what time it is.

That place, their house, is evoked with great sensitivity, almost a living character itself, and while Sara and Mark seem almost pinned down there, the book is like a telephone wire punctuated by birds who fly extraordinary distances (images of flow at its instinctual purest). Some of the paragraphs on these creatures are perfect tiny narratives in their own right, like the story of the Northern wheatear on pages 10 and 203.

There is a lot in this book which cheeringly and delightfully runs against the current of modern life:

What we all shared - me, my dad, his dad - was a suspicion of modern life, a loathing of fashion, a disappointment with the new technologies and a preference for the ad hoc contraptions of the past - anything that can be disassembled and reassembled with hands and tools, based upon the principles of common sense. Each in our own time, we lived and live in consonance with nostalgia for a former time.

By the end, as well as her installation, packed up in cardboard and discarded materials from the local shops, she has created something beautiful from the oldest materials: paper, pen, a mind.

My dad, who never read the novel I wrote, but as soon as it was published - as soon as it had been embodied between covers; as soon as it took up a small portion of physical space in the world - came to an understanding that I had achieved something.

As she has here.