A Flat Place

Reviewed by Keith Jones

by Noreen Masud  (Hamish Hamilton: 2023) 

When Noreen visits the Suffolk Book League in March, I for one will be all the more intrigued for having read this book. It is constructed around her visits to four level landscapes in Britain, two of which are in East Anglia, and one, Orford Ness, just down the road. She does not employ lyrical or empurpled prose, though her sensitivity to colour and atmosphere is noticeable. But, generally she manages a ‘flat’ descriptive style suitable to her theme, though so handled that we are held and pleased by what she tells us. And that is the clue to the most important flat place she conveys to us, which is not the external landscape. It is her own condition.

Noreen had an unusual childhood in Pakistan, where her father was born and bred. Her mother was of Scottish ancestry. When her parents separated she came to Britain, and being studious and bright, studied English literature at university in preparation for an academic career. The incidents of her life leak out gradually. The central preoccupation is her own condition, to which she gives a medical label, complex PTSD, leading her often, as she describes, to ‘derealization’ which ‘makes the people and things around you seem unreal’. Her attraction to flat fields and landscapes is therapeutic. They link her with the memory of particular fields near her childhood home in Pakistan, and please her profoundly. What they mean to her is what this extraordinary book explores.

In each place these landscapes allow her to explore the elusive mystery of her life. She does not provide us with a narrative that reaches a conclusion or a verdict or a solution. Her ruminations on her experience, her probing of history and literature and memory are processes, into which we are allowed to go as we read. And in her company we discover grounds for hope, signs of reconciliation and healing. It is all reticently -- but searchingly -- done.