Most people know the North Road of this book’s title as the London-to-Edinburgh A1. But, as Rob Cowen writes, A1 is a cipher for a 400-mile multiplicity of roads – a historically diverse bundle that includes ancient trackways, a Roman road, the “Old North Road” and the “Great North Road” (the name generally applied to what became the A1 in the road-numbering scheme of the 1920s). This collective forms, as Cowen has it, our primary road – the “backbone” of Britain.
As a frequent shuttler between north and south, I prefer the North Road to its rival, the bland, homogenous M1. It has verges and laybys, eccentric pit-stops where the coffee is not necessarily Costa, and a scruffy, improvised air, suggesting something organically arisen from the landscape. But whereas I have merely driven along the road, Cowen has communed with its ghosts.
As with his acclaimed book of 2015, Common Ground (a meditation on a sliver of landscape near his Yorkshire home), Cowen takes a psycho-geographical approach, combined with history, fiction and autobiography. In this “exercise in awareness”, he treats the road as a metaphor for many things: time, the unity or disunity of Britain, the course of a human life – often his own, because “What do we see when we look at a road? We see us, of course. The road is human lifeline, laid out.”
The book was born 10 years ago when Cowen joined an archaeological dig near Catterick. A Roman cemetery was being investigated on land where the A1 was about to be widened, to create a stretch of its motorway-ised variant: the A1(M). He unearthed a skull, which “gave the uncanny experience of turning away, as if straining to escape the light falling over it for the first time in two millennia”. Feeling the “ghosts rise”, Cowen began the periodic road walks from which he has made his book.
Much of the North Road’s history is baleful. The Roman road beyond York followed a “trail of blood” as the natives were suppressed. Farther south, on “the Roman line of the Old North Road”, stands Huntingdon, birthplace of Oliver Cromwell and therefore a fulcrum of the civil war. Cromwell’s HQ was at the Falcon tavern on Huntingdon high street, and Cowen is allowed to enter the private upstairs room from where Cromwell would address his mustered army. He finds a distorted space of “odd, heavy pressures… You can almost sense the massed rabble in their Venetian red coats and bandoliers”. Emerging, he photographs the room from the square below. Studying the result, he seems to see “a figure looking down”. We see it too, in the reproduced image.
When Cowen visits the Cromwell museum over the road, the curator says: “A very interesting time to be alive, don’t you think?” and, since this is 2017, it’s unclear whether he is referring to the civil war or the post-Brexit limbo, symbolised for Cowen by the hinterland of the A1 near Huntingdon, with its “barren fields, skeletal grasses shivering under skies of grey”.
Another divisive resident of the road was Margaret Thatcher, who grew up above her alderman father’s grocery shop, on the A1 at Grantham, Lincolnshire. She was less influenced by the give-and-take of the road below than in the local scene: the pieties of her strict Methodist father who always “flatly refused credit” and nurtured a “hatred of collective society”. As Cowen puts it, her policies resulted in the “tipping” of Britain towards the south, the road becoming “a line linking divided nations”.
Then again, it was also a sort of social ladder climbed by Cowen’s great-grandfather, Bill, whose entrepreneurial skills and charisma took him from being a Doncaster coalminer to a friend and neighbour of Richard Burton’s in Hampstead. As the book’s presiding ghost, he keeps cropping up – an emanation of the road’s energy.
It’s true that, since the North Road is the primary road, almost anyone in Britain has a story related to it, but Cowen has “blood ties to the highway”. Near Hatfield, he unexpectedly encounters “a manicured rhododendron bank” – a memorial to victims of the Hatfield train crash of 2000. These included the father of one of his closest friends. The devastation of his chum’s family, and the apparent fragmentation of his own after his parents’ divorce, triggered a depressive spiral of drink and drugs. Cowen was fixated on the arbitrariness of the accident. Why attempt anything if such an event might be lying in wait? He found “the road back” with the aid of that bereaved friend and a psychologist.
This is a beautifully written book, often giving the purely visual pleasure of a road movie. An “early milk haze morning” near Water Newton, for example. One of Cowen’s fictional outbreaks could easily be a road movie in the bleary tradition of Chris Petit’s Radio On. It concerns a computer repair man doomed to recall a lost love affair as his company sends him up and down the road by phone alerts. “The calendar shows service checks only for tomorrow. Four offices in Retford. A system check at Worksop Asda.” In the dark mornings he looks out of hotel windows and sees the road, “a finger-smear of gold traced through the tarry dark”.
The book’s payoff is outrageous yet completely logical: Cowen keeps going north, beyond the road’s ragged terminus in Edinburgh, for reasons involving his mother and self-discovery. After all, one lesson of this lyrical, entrancing book is that the road doesn’t end until you do.
The Night in Venice by AJ Martin is published by W&N
The North Road by Rob Cowen is published by Hutchinson Heineman (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
