For the non-religious reader, a search for the soul might seem quaint or deluded. The word “soul” needs, for most of us, to be approached with caution. But you do not have to be, as Ann Wroe is, a Catholic or a follower of any organised religion to be thankful for this brave, unfashionable and out of the ordinary book, which looks above and beyond pedestrian woes and has, as its starting point, a belief in the existence of the soul. Wroe is a superb biographer and a fine poet and recruits Shelley, a non-believer (whose life she has written), to help in her endeavour. He regarded it as ridiculous to reason that “that astonishing thing” – life – was, as she puts it, “merely physiological and mechanical”.
Wroe is admirably unflustered in tackling, early on, the physicist Steven Weinberg to remind us that, in spite of an infuriated disdain for those with religious belief, he arrived at a point where, although he came close, he could not explain creation. For almost two decades, Wroe has been the Economist’s obituarist and she uses this experience, too, to illuminate her quest. She concludes that the public reputation of a person seldom reveals their truest self and is always on the lookout for the telling details that give them away. She is even able to catch the essence of her friends in this manner, noting that one of them is “best evoked by a tennis racket thrown on an unmade bed” (intriguing that material things should contribute to the soul searching). She then goes on to qualify what she has discovered about obituaries by admitting to the “presumption” of trying to catch a life at all.
One of the fascinating questions to which the book gives rise is about the extent to which imagination itself is a presumption. Wroe is a compulsive imaginer. She supplies lives to people glimpsed on trains. To an apple tree, she ascribes astonishment “at its own dropped fruit”. Before her son is born, she has already dreamed of him as a dark-haired adult who, somewhat outlandishly given his unborn status, is supplied by her subconscious with a tall black hat and an antique bicycle. You are left pondering, too, the question of whether poetry attributes more human feeling to things than they should be asked to carry. Wherever possible, Wroe likes to go the extra fanciful mile – in and out of dreams.
She is more relaxed writing about others than about herself but her book lets us into an inner life that is glorious, intense and occasionally baffling. At one point, she jokes that, when travelling on London buses and observing a sign that reads “Stand clear of inward opening doors”, she is inclined to take this personally. But from our point of view, what matters is not to fret too much about her sense of direction but to stay with her for the extraordinary ride. And as to the doors – they swing inwards and outwards as we read on. The outward is as important as what happens within.
The book would serve well as a spiritual companion piece to Annie Ernaux’s secular mini-masterpiece, Exteriors (1993), about the ways in which our identity spills into the lives of people randomly encountered. Wroe weaves her more elaborate glimpses of strangers into the narrative alongside accounts of quirky notables (some of whose obituaries she has written) such as Aretha Franklin – queen of soul – Marcel Marceau and “Bip”, his poignant, clowning alter ego, and the remarkable Baba Amte, who, in 1949, after accidentally touching a leper started an ashram for them.
Wroe has a sure gift for threading literary quotations like shining beads on a string – Rilke, Rumi and Shelley feature prominently – and Wordsworth and Bob Marley find themselves unexpectedly and snugly in the same paragraph. The connected intelligence of her inquiry is a delight. Throughout, she celebrates (although she does not quote him) Louis MacNeice’s sense of life (from the poem Snow) as “incorrigibly plural”.
She knows herself well and is not offering her response to the world as a prescription for others. Her text is underpinned by her own thoughtful poetry (although not all of it would survive lifted out of the text). Poetry, as she knows, does not always come when called. She tells a sympathetic story of attending a north London meditation group and being asked to write a poem in its garden. She ends up scrutinising small, green unripe pears, unable to produce a word.
She has something of WS Sebald’s nomadic erudition and is open to hauntings. At all times, she keeps faith with the possibility of encountering the sublime and this sometimes leads her into trouble: her account of chasing a red balloon, seeing it as a “messenger” and pursuing it as if her life depended upon it has an unacknowledged absurdity to it. More relatably, she describes the Sussex coast during the pandemic and listening to a busking saxophonist, satisfying the common hunger for music of that time. In a sunshine-yellow cafe in Portugal, she is overtaken by ecstatic disturbance, watching a scallop shell of clouds while her friends go on chatting unawares. Reading this, I felt like one of those friends – curious – but not altogether able to follow her or share.
In the end, this book matters not so much in the tracking down of the soul (which anyway refuses to be netted by words) but in the honouring of life itself. She writes decisively about death and how often it seems too brief an event to win in any competition against life. She gives a wonderful description of her brother scything in a churchyard – an ungrim reaper – and recalls how, after the death of her husband, she suddenly saw that life has “far more power and moment” than she had realised before. Lifescapes encourages us to take a deep breath, contemplate life more keenly and acknowledge the miraculous if – and when – we find it.
Lifescapes: A Biographer’s Search for the Soul by Ann Wroe is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
