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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Going away to come home again

5/6/2017

7 Comments

 
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One of the themes of my second novel, Underneath, is the complex relationship between homecoming and travel, a topic explored in my recent guest post, The passion for travel and the concept of home. Although, as reflected in a recent post on my two accidental visits to Bangladesh, I’m nostalgic for my youthful travelling, these days I much prefer to stay at home and do my travelling in my head.

The theme of going away and coming home again resonates strongly in my reading and writing, as outlined in my post Creation Myths. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I began writing my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, after a long distance walk away from where I grew up. In the opening chapter of that novel, Diana recalls two trips abroad as a teenager, both heavily laden with conflict:

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I’m sandwiched between my parents in the back seat of a taxi, crawling along the Corniche with the Nile to our left. I’m fifteen years old and this is my first and only foray out of Europe.

We’ve wound down the windows but there’s not even the promise of a breeze. The driver hits the horn with the heel of his hand. Every time he does it my mother flinches and he hits the horn almost as much as he curses other drivers, which is practically all the time.


My father fans his face with a tourist map of Cairo. “It’s not too late to change your mind,” he tells me. “We won’t think any less of you if you do.”

My mother breaks off from rummaging through her patent leather handbag. “Honestly, Leonard, you certainly choose your moments.”

I try not to squirm on the tacky plastic seat. I’ve heard the quiver in my mother’s voice often enough, but I’ve never heard her call my father by his Christian name.

Our driver waves his fist and growls in throaty Arabic as he pulls past a camel cart weighed down with builder’s rubble. My eyes prickle, but I save my tears for later; crying is my mother’s prerogative after all.

                             ########################


When I was thirteen, my mother took me to Lourdes. “Don’t let on what we’ve come for,” she whispered as we boarded the coach.

So many people, so many queues, ever anxious of joining the wrong one. Lining up for breakfast in the hotel. Lining up again at the stalls near the grotto to buy holy water and souvenirs. Joining up with pilgrims and penitents of every nationality to process by candlelight through the night-time streets. Waiting to be dipped head-to-toe in the water, one queue for the able-bodied and another for the cripples.

“What have we come for?” I said.

“A miracle of course,” said my mother. “Why else would I bring you?”


I’ve collected some quotations from other novels about how our motivation to travel might reflect our concept of home.
Dawnay Price, a scientist a hundred years before Darwin, tells us in Song of the Sea Maid (p67):

It is the yearning the travel, for discovery, to follow those creatures of the sea, to leave the soiled city behind and see new places. Perhaps my early life on the streets, my years following in an institution, without an object to call my own – excepting my brother’s note – is it any wonder I have a nomadic soul?… Maybe it is born inside us, this yearning to be footsore, and in others resides the overwhelming need for a bolt-hole. But now that I have a home, I cannot take it for granted. I do not wish it gone, only to wait for me while I go on my adventures and then come back to it, like a patient wife.


Nolan in Marc Bojanowski’s
Journeyman seems addicted to an itinerant life (p51-52):

  • Let me ask you something, she says. How long are you going to keep this up?
  • Thinking about the war?
  • That will never go away. I’m talking about the roaming.
Nolan can feel the warmth of the fire against the back of his hand. The comfort and luxury of the moment, of a safe home. He watches the mark on his jeans dry and fade.
  • I don’t know.
  • Don’t you want a family?
  • Sometimes I think about that, sure.
Raising her hand, palm up ushering him gently:
  • And what do you think?
  • I don’t know if I could bring someone into all of this.

Alex, the young narrator from
The Lauras by Sara Taylor beautifully captures feeling of “itchy feet” (p296):

It wasn’t until I spent a day in the mountains, wandering for the sake of forward motion alone, that I realised that what I felt was a sort of anti-homesickness, a sick-of-home homesickness, that home for me was a place I was going to, rather than a place I could occupy. Nature or nurture, something I had been born with or something that had grown with every step and mile, it didn’t matter which. I had my mother’s restlessness.


Finally, a traveller is one of seven point of view characters in
Night of Fire by Colin Thubron (p306, 320):

His ex-wife had joked acidly that he never saw a horizon without aching to surmount it. He was still a child, she said. Travel was his vice, his addiction. Or else he was trying to escape something. If he kept moving, that inner demon could not keep pace with him, or have time to breathe.


But to him it felt different. To stay at home was to escape. To travel was to undergo reality … Travel became a compulsion, a subtle liberation. Nothing exceeded the intoxication of his solitude and anonymity in a place far away from anything familiar, or the sense that just out of reach, beyond the next frontier, awaited something revelatory.


… his later passion for travel was not a desire to experience novelty at all, but a hunt to recover what he had lost: a pilgrimage whose origins he had forgotten.

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In my novel, Underneath, the narrator, Steve, talks about travelling for “the thrill of coming home” and then feels embarrassed about a homecoming that, given the dynamics of his particular family, actually felt quite lonely. Late in the novel, visiting his mother in a care home, he confronts his inner homelessness while his mother sleeps in her room in a care home (p225-6):

I remembered coming home for Christmas from university and later, in my twenties, trekking halfway across the world with my rucksack crammed with ethnic tat. The mounting excitement as I got closer, and the holding back from walking through the door. The emptiness of my reception and the sinking shame of having hoped for more.

I didn’t expect you to hover behind the door with a garland of marigolds, but you could at least have taken pause to acknowledge I was home. It was like you couldn’t bear for me to affect the slightest alteration in your routine. It wasn’t as if my arrival was interrupting anything important. Yet you’d make me wait till the end of your programme before you’d deign to say hello. Wait till you’d finished your phone call before you’d stir yourself to go and put the kettle on.

What do you think the passion for travel says about the concept of home and can you add any examples of fictional explorations of that theme?


Over at the Carrot Ranch Charli Mills is bemoaning the “friends” who can’t distinguish hitting the road as a result of homelessness from an itinerant lifestyle with a home to go back to. Nevertheless, she’s soliciting stories about feeling content. I hope I’m not rubbing salt into the wounds by building mine around the pleasure of returning home from travelling:

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The traveller returns

No more lumpy mattresses in airless dormitories resonant with other people’s snores. No more restaurants serving chicken as a vegetarian meal. No more conducting conversations with a two-year-old’s vocabulary. It’s time to go home.

Home to a choice of more than three outfits. Home to friends for whom neither your accent nor your humour needs translation. Home to shelves of books you never thought you’d miss.

Enough of novelty and adventure. The old familiar everything thrills you now. Rain and roses, the Bobbies in their uniforms, traffic on the left side of the road. No excitement, no effort. Content.

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The Underneath blog tour continues until the launch party on June 10th. Do check out the other guest posts and conversations on the tour to date:
Five questions with Cornflakegirl’s Musings
Fictionalising the Mentally Disordered Offender
Brave and subversive, like gazing upon the surface of a pond
The passion for travel and the concept of home
Author Interview: Chat About Books
You don’t know until you try!
Child, lover, jailer: The three faces of Steve
Compassion for the Criminal, Condemnation of the Crime
Q&A with Rachel Poli
Victims, villains and vulnerability
The Child in the Clothes of the Criminal
Review and author Q&A
On genre hopping – or not
The house with a cellar and the dual meaning of Underneath
Review and Q&A
Family dynamics: Steve’s mother and sisters
 

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
7 Comments
Liz Hartmann link
6/6/2017 08:26:40 pm

So sweet...reminds me of that Paul Simon song: "Homeward Bound"

Reply
Annecdotist
7/6/2017 09:55:13 am

Glad you thought so, Liz. In the days of cassette tapes used to play a compilation in the car with going away songs on one side and homecoming songs on the other. It was all very cheesy, and I’m sure Paul Simon was among those accompanying me home.

Reply
Irene Waters link
7/6/2017 07:13:43 am

I don't have any fictional examples to add but you have made me wonder what I consider home. Apart from family (and I come from a family that still calls Scotland "the old country") coming home to me is the smell of a familiar country. Having said that I can relate to your flash although rarely do I desire the homecoming but rather have it forced upon me.

Reply
Annecdotist
7/6/2017 09:52:19 am

Thanks for that comment, Irene. Interesting that for you it’s about smell.
You’ve reminded me that I always used to get really upset about coming home from Scotland in a way that I didn’t about returning from abroad. I understand now about my “unfinished business” there but, since I now so rarely leave home even for one night, I haven’t been back to check whether or not that knowledge will have changed my reaction or not.

Reply
Charli Mills
14/6/2017 09:13:51 pm

Anne, I like how you wove quotes from your reading and from your own books to explore the home and travel dynamic. It made me want to read Sugar & Snails again! I love reading books with many layers and to glean something new or different each reading. That restlessness can often arise from wanting but not quite finding the expectation of home. Interesting how authors explore the tension thus created. I've come to like my hidey-hole in the RV with windows on three sides of my desk so I can see the changing view. Getting ready to move on again and the anxiety is rising, yet I'm not really wanting to stay in this Kansas humidity in an old campground over run with cats. But the moving on creates its own tension between what has become familiar and what is yet to come.

Reply
Annecdotist
15/6/2017 05:29:56 pm

Thanks, Charli, and I’m glad your RV office feels like home, despite the mixed feelings about moving on.
I think I’m fascinated by this issue because I’ve done such a complete turnaround in my attitude to travel, it’s almost as if I’ve had a personality transplant.

Reply
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23/10/2017 08:23:51 pm

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