Pursuit Read online

  PURSUIT

  PURSUIT

  THE BALVENIE STORIES

  COLLECTION

  Edited by Alex Preston

  First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019

  by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

  and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

  All pieces are copyright the individual contributors:

  Eley Williams © 2019, David Szalay © 2019, Kamila Shamsie © 2019,

  Max Porter © 2019, Sara Collins © 2019, Daisy Johnson © 2019,

  Tash Aw © 2019, Peter Frankopan © 2019, Yan Ge © 2019,

  Lawrence Osborne © 2019, Katharine Kilalea © 2019, Michael Donkor © 2019,

  Benjamin Markovits © 2019, Alex Preston © 2019, Sarah Churchwell © 2019

  The rights of the authors to be identified as the

  authors of these works have been asserted by them in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 901 9

  eISBN 978 1 83885 002 9

  Excerpt from ‘Captain Carpenter’ by John Crowe Ransom (Selected Poems, 1995) is reprinted here by kind permission of Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester, UK and by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 1924 by Penguin Random House LLC, copyright renewed 1952 by John Crowe Ransom. All rights reserved.

  Edited by Alex Preston

  Designed by Here Design

  CONTENT

  PREFACE

  Gemma Louise Paterson, The Balvenie Global Ambassador

  INTRODUCTION

  Alex Preston

  TIME AND TIME AGAIN

  Eley Williams

  WEST LAKE

  David Szalay

  ENDURANCE : ONE HUNDRED YEARS AND ONE DAY LATER

  Kamila Shamsie

  THE PART-TIME COUNTRYMAN

  Max Porter

  STATE OF EMERGENCY

  Sara Collins

  ARIADNE

  Daisy Johnson

  THE DEPARTURE

  Tash Aw

  PERSEVERANCE AND RESILIENCE IN THE KOLA PENINSULA

  Peter Frankopan

  NO TIME TO WRITE

  Yan Ge

  NEAR THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD

  Lawrence Osborne

  SO THAT’S WHAT YOU THINK A SOUL IS FOR

  Katharine Kilalea

  SUSTENANCE

  Michael Donkor

  ‘UNCLE’ BILL

  Benjamin Markovits

  THE MINING DISASTER

  Alex Preston

  REALMS OF GOLD

  Sarah Churchwell

  CONTRIBUTORS

  EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PREFACE

  Gemma Louise Paterson, The Balvenie Global Ambassador

  I TELL stories about whisky for a living. When I take people round The Balvenie Distillery, they’ll hear, in several chapters, how barley becomes malt whisky. They’ll meet an array of fascinating characters – the crafts-people who work here making casks, turning grain, firing the malt kiln, watching the stills and mending the copper, or tilling the earth and then sowing more barley. But it’s the final part of the whisky-making story that contains the most suspense – as we put the liquid into barrels and hand it back to nature, sometimes for decades. This is when the more complex flavours are created, as spirit and oak enter a dialogue. Minor characters play important roles here, too: the traces of sherry or bourbon each cask once held; the quirks that make every one different. Each cask is as unique as a snowflake, a fingerprint: the provenance of the tree, the porosity of the oak, and the craftsmanship of the cooper. As all these stories play out, they are shaped by The Balvenie malt master, David Stewart MBE, and his apprentice malt master, Kelsey McKechnie, who sample and nose the evolving liquids and select which casks to bottle and which to nurture longer. David and Kelsey are our editors, deciding which stories have found their happy ending and which must be kept for a later volume.

  The other whisky stories I tell are when I conduct a tasting. Each whisky has a unique flavour profile – its balance of sweet and honey over oak, delicate fruits and citrus over minerality, for example – and tell how each element makes itself known in every single sip. A whisky carries within it the story of its origins, a unique memoir involving, among other factors, what kind of casks it was matured in, where the barley came from, and was it peated to add a wisp of smoke? These sub-plots inspired a new range, The Balvenie Stories, whiskies that represent slight twists in the tale, the results of experiments such as toasting the barrel, or adding extra peat sourced from the Highlands to the kiln, or perhaps a sprig of heather. These fresh narratives are how we keep the whisky-making story evolving, how we pursue greatness in our craft.

  This idea of stories written in whisky inspired us to make a book. And chasing an ideal became its theme: determination, perseverance, resolve – Pursuit. What a book it has turned out to be! We’re proud so many great writers have contributed, and are inspired by the quality and range of the stories they’ve written.

  Finally, I’ll say that we always imagined these stories as the perfect accompaniment to a dram or two of The Balvenie, so I’ll raise a toast to everyone involved in creating the book you’re holding and hand over to Alex to introduce the stories you’re about to enjoy. Slàinte!

  INTRODUCTION

  Alex Preston

  WE read stories, the American novelist John Barth tells us, not principally to find out what happens next, but rather to answer ‘the essential question of identity – the personal, professional, cultural, even species-specific “Who Am I?”’ Stories help us to define ourselves, to record and interrogate our actions and motives, to understand backwards a life lived forwards. Our lives are shaped by stories, by the need to fashion frantic, random existence into something linear and comprehendible. Our quest for meaning in our lives is actually just the search for a story we can really believe in. There is something compulsive, even desperate, in our need to tell and to hear, to be heard. We are the stories we tell about ourselves.

  Stories give us something to strive for. Whether it’s the quantum physicist pursuing unified field theory, the master distiller perfecting her blend, or the free diver seeking to plumb the lonely depths of the oceans, the grandest feats of human achievement – the acts of genius, inspiration and gritty endeavour that push our species forward – all take place within the context of stories. Our most brilliant and heroic accomplishments form part of a greater collective narrative: a universal story about individual application and sacrifice leading to societal benefit, a tale of odds overcome, dreams pursued, fears mastered, of breakthroughs and epiphanies and moments of sublime triumph.

  Last year, just as I was beginning to think about putting this collection together, I was invited to Turkey to swim the Hellespont. This notorious stretch of water, which divides Europe and Asia, is not only one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes; it also has currents of extraordinary ferocity, sitting as it does just where the Black Sea, through the neck of the Bosphorus, disgorges itself into the Aegean. The Hellespont has a long history in literature and legend. Ovid told of Leander, who was drowned swimming to visit his lover, Hero. The poet Byron made two attempts to traverse it, turning back once, then completing the crossing in May 1810. After his success, he wrote to his mother, ‘I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on a
ny kind of glory, poetical, political or rhetorical.’

  I’d never been much of a swimmer as a kid, but then in my teens I read a book that changed my life – Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur, a paean to the mystical allure of swimming, a history of extraordinary acts of endurance and endeavour by swimmers fabled and forgotten. I loved the book so much that I wrote to Sprawson, and we began a correspondence. I also started to swim. A few years ago, I heard from a mutual friend that Charles, who was in his early seventies, had had a fall. I went to visit him in hospital in west London, where I found him in a terrible state. He’d been battered by a series of illnesses, and had just been diagnosed with the initial stages of vascular dementia. He was largely coherent, but gave the sense of someone who’d been caught by surprise by the dark twist his life had taken.

  Charles swam the Hellespont with his daughter in the early 1990s; I undertook my own crossing more than a quarter of a century later in honour of him. As I set off into the turbid, fast-flowing waters last summer, I thought of Charles, who’d been moved from the hospital to a nursing home, and who would likely never see his beloved Mediterranean again. The swim itself was gruelling, occasionally horrifying, ultimately magnificent. I was followed by a flotilla of support boats, while over to my right, past the jaws of the Dardanelles, vast tankers idled as they waited for me to cross. Beyond these floating cities, towards Greece, I could just make out the ancient site of Troy. Nearer were the beaches of Gallipoli, where so many had been brave, so many died. This was a landscape dense with history. What kept me going over the seven kilometres I swam that day, the first three against a current of powerful and insidious intensity, were stories. The story of a great writer laid low by fate, the story of the authors and heroes who’d made the swim before, the proximity of tragedy, the possibility of failure, the thrill of success. As I came into the harbour of Çanakkale, just over an hour after I’d set out, there were TV crews and newspaper reporters, a small but gratifyingly enthusiastic crowd. The surge of joy I felt on completing the swim caught me by surprise. I recognised the addictive tug it asserted on me.

  That evening, contemplating my return home, I remembered something that Charles had said to me before I set out. Whatever his life had in store for him, he’d mused, no one would ever be able to take away the fact that he had conquered the Hellespont. It was one of the central chapters in the story of his life, as it was to become one of mine. In writing of it, I add my voice to all those other voices – Charles’s included – who have told of the depths and the currents, the jellyfish and sharks, the fear and its mastery. It is one of the stories that makes me who I am, part of the infinite and glorious tapestry of stories that tells us who we are as a species. And this is what the collection you’re about to read is all about: a celebration of endeavour that is itself a work of noble endeavour. Our literature remains one of our grandest achievements and there are some extraordinary contributions here.

  I’m enormously proud of all of the stories in this collection, which have taken the brief – tales of human endeavour with a twist – and interpreted them in such vivid, different and powerfully affecting ways. The stories range wildly across time and space, lacing between fact and fiction, from the epic to the intimate. They share an essential truth, though: a well-lived life is about perseverance, single-mindedness and the dogged pursuit of the things we care about, notwithstanding the possibility of failure.

  These are stories from a host of the most exciting voices in contemporary literature, which will entertain, inspire and challenge. Some, like Kamila Shamsie’s voyage to Antarctica in the footsteps of Shackleton or Peter Frankopan’s tale of life in the gulag, tell us about the dangerous edges of human experience. Others, like Tash Aw’s story about a young boy’s relationship with his father, or Max Porter’s tale of the daily grind, are about a different kind of endeavour, a different breed of courage. All of the stories here will leave you knowing more about the human condition, about the pain of failure and the joy of success, about why we sacrifice the best parts of our lives in pursuit of our dreams.

  TIME AND TIME AGAIN

  Eley Williams

  How well the skilful gard’ner drew

  Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new;

  Where from above the milder sun

  Does through a fragrant zodiac run;

  And, as it works, th’ industrious bee

  Computes its time as well as we.

  How could such sweet and wholesome hours

  Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!

  — FROM ANDREW MARVELL’S THE GARDEN

  I RECOGNISED him from the care home. The nurse’s name was Amir and he blinked in the beam of my torch. I tried to keep my adrenaline in check and held my voice low. When I spoke I sounded more surprised than angry. ‘What are you doing?’

  He swept a thumb across his forehead. It left a faint trail of mud above his eye. Maybe it was manure, compost, topsoil. Honestly, I’ve no idea what the difference is. Not a green finger in my body, or whatever the phrase is.

  ‘I’m gardening,’ said Amir. Somewhere in the trees beyond the fence in the darkness an owl hooted and we both jumped.

  ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning.’ I cast my torch about. Trowels, little pots and bulbs, a watering can.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, glancing at his feet. ‘I thought it must be.’

  ‘Gardening?’ I repeated. Amir didn’t say anything so I went on: ‘I just happened to be watching the CCTV and you popped up.’ I tried to maintain an even tone. ‘I thought you were breaking in.’

  I could see Amir was abashed. He did not put down his tools, however. ‘This is the first time you’ve noticed in three years,’ he said.

  ‘Three years?’ He twiddled with his spade handle as I spluttered. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t come out with the dog!’ I stood a little straighter and tried to muster an air of authority. I had to raise my voice over the owl. ‘We could have woken residents and you’d be hauled before management. Did you say you’ve been doing this for three years? After work, between shifts? You’ve been coming here?’

  Amir was still in his work trousers, the same dark blue uniform that all nurses and members of staff wear at the care home. I’m the only one who gets a black uniform with the word SECURITY stitched over the breast-pocket.

  ‘Please,’ Amir said. ‘It’s only gardening. Please don’t tell. It’s a favour to someone.’

  I looked around the plot. I never really came out to this part of the grounds. There were neat little beds planted in careful rows.

  ‘It’s only gardening,’ Amir said again. ‘I can – look, can I meet you tomorrow and maybe explain?’

  ‘Surely they have contractors,’ I said. ‘Ground staff . . . this feels like trespassing.’ I coughed. ‘It is trespassing.’

  ‘This is special work,’ said Amir. He stepped carefully around the plant-bed. ‘Please. I can explain tomorrow.’

  I tried to seem steely. I had heard about Amir. He was highly regarded amongst the care home staff. I put what I hoped was a kindly hand on his shoulder and I could feel the damp of sweat through his shirt. He must have been at work out here for hours.

  ‘Meet me tomorrow?’ he asked again. I kept my torch on his face and he did not drop his gaze.

  We met in my office, Amir bouncing in through the door looking fresh as a daisy. This was disarming: I had thought he might be contrite or about to tell me that he had handed in his notice.

  ‘Have you met Mr Waverley?’ Amir asked by way of greeting.

  ‘Is he on the staff?’ The name did ring a bell. I collected myself and gestured at my CCTV monitor. ‘Amir. What were you playing at last night?’

  ‘He’s a resident,’ Amir said. ‘Mr Waverley. I want you to see him.’ He literally tugged at my sleeve.

  I said, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t want to get you in trouble and we all have different ways of dealing with stress, but I can’t have you up at all hours doing secret “gardening”. I
t’s not right. I could lose my job and you certainly could. I really should be taking this issue higher up.’

  ‘Don’t say it like that,’ Amir said, miming the air-quotes that I had carved through the air with my fingers. ‘It is gardening.’

  ‘Whatever.’ I put unconvinced fervour on the word. ‘Amir, I can’t turn a blind eye.’

  ‘I was replanting the pimpernels,’ Amir said.

  I stared at him.

  ‘They prefer soils in the pH range 5.5 to 8.0,’ he clarified.

  ‘I really don’t care,’ I said.

  Amir looked hurt. ‘Will you come meet him? Mr Waverley?’

  I pretended to check my schedule.

  Mr Waverley was sitting in one of the comfier chairs in the care home’s conservatory. I recognised him vaguely from the corridors and from communal meal times: a soft-spoken, polite gentleman with a thick white head of hair and a strong jaw. As we approached, Amir gave him a little wave. I said my hellos and Mr Waverley fished a hand into his wallet. I’m used to this. A lot of the residents like to show me pictures of their family or loved ones in well-thumbed photographs.

  ‘This is me in Belize.’ Mr Waverley proffered the photograph. It showed a handsome man wearing a stained shirt and khaki shorts. He must have been in his thirties. The photo showed him squatting in a shallow riverbank, grinning. I handed the picture back.

  ‘Did you see what’s in his hand there?’ Amir asked. I squinted.

  ‘Dactylorhiza waverlii,’ Mr Waverley intoned. He seemed to relish every syllable. ‘Nice little orange one there.’

  ‘He has an orchid named after him!’ Amir said. He hovered by Mr Waverley’s elbow, a look of excitement on his face. ‘He discovered it and they named it after him! Can you imagine?’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said. It was. I wished I had looked more carefully at the photograph but Mr Waverley had folded it back up and repocketed it.