Saved by visions of the vine
February 11, 2007 - scotsman.com
WHEN leading British poet and writer Henry Shukman was working on his first full-length novel, he got monumentally stuck. For 20 years he had been working on his exquisite debut, The Lost City, returning to the manuscript every now and then only to shelve it when he came up against another problem. The closer he got to the novel's climax, the more its ambitious plot - which roams through England, the jungles of Belize and the cloud forest of north-eastern Peru - eluded him.
Then a friend persuaded Shukman to try the world's most powerful hallucinogen, the Amazonian vine ayahuasca. The drug is legal in New Mexico, where the writer and his family have lived for the past two years, and it was the book's saviour.
"It's a really potent, mind-bending drug and I took it with about 40 other people and a Peruvian shaman," says Shukman, who wrote his first book when he was 19, followed by Travels With My Trombone, a memoir based on a year working as a musician in the Caribbean. His first poetry collection, the delightful In Dr No's Garden, won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was a book of the year in The Times and The Guardian. "You take ayahuasca as part of a formal ceremony. It lasts all night and it's incredibly powerful and scary. Every moment seemed to last forever which, considering each one was filled with nausea, was pretty terrifying."
But after that "gruelling, ghastly night" of vomiting and terror, Shukman came back down to earth with a peculiarly clear vision. The next day he got up and, as though The Lost City was an Ordnance Survey map, plotted out the entire novel on a single sheet of paper. "Suddenly it was all clear to me what I needed to do," he says. "I'm very grateful to the drug."
For those who have been waiting patiently for Shukman's first novel ever since his 2005 novella Sandstorm, The Lost City does not disappoint. A big, hearty work that is both gripping and intensely moving, Shukman's breathtaking, lyrical prose propels a pacy plot which, at its most visceral, becomes cinematic in its scope. On the strength of the writing alone, this is a contender for book of the year.
Jackson Small is invalided out of the army at the impressionable age of 20. Traumatised by the violent death of his fellow soldier and (we soon discover) lover Connolly in the jungles of Belize, Jackson returns to England unable to cope, "thrown back into the world with half his severance pay".
We meet him in Peru's Caballo Muerto, "a strip of desert so barren not even cactuses grew". Inspired by Connolly's fascination with a place he claimed to have once seen called La Joya, a mythical ancient city hidden in the cloud forest of Peru, Jackson is here both to search for this vanished empire and lose himself in his grief.
"He's both broken and brave," says Shukman. "He came to me when I was teaching in southern New Mexico, an area of desert. One morning I woke up with an image of this guy and I just started writing. There is something so archetypal about the journey as a locus of a character's education for a character and it's a kind of mini Anglo-tradition of writing about Latin America. On the other hand you could call it corny. Maybe it all goes back to reading Huck Finn when I was 13 and adoring it."
The echoes of a Conradian geographical and psychological journey into the heart of darkness are also obvious but Shukman is adept at blending genres and this is also a tale of political intrigue, espionage and, ultimately, a love story. Aside from Conrad and Twain, there are allusions to Boy's Own adventures, Graham Greene and, Shukman adds, some Tintin too.
The terrifying scenes towards the end of the book when Jackson's search ends in the Peruvian cloud forest, show Shukman's prose at its most rich. "Like a man in the desert longing for water, he yearned for more light," he writes, while a storm sounds out "as if the giants had decided to slide down their beanstalks and lie for the night on the forest canopy". As Jackson's mind starts to disintegrate, the writing becomes ever more visceral, as stripped back and exquisitely crafted as lines of poetry: "Dark again. A giant moth with wings of velvet. He could feel it adjust its footing on his skin. Cool little feet."
Shukman wrote some of these passages 10 years ago and he has another two novels, one of which he is working on now, that have been kicking around for as long. So why does it take him so long to finish them? "I just lost heart," he confesses, adding that he finally finished The Lost City in 2005 after writing every day in a friend's shed, tucked away in the remote hills outside Santa Fe. "It's a shame really because I could have finished it years ago. I've definitely had problems with self-confidence. I had a deep sense of inadequacy as a writer and it took me a long time to realise it. Part of the reason is also that I do what I do with poems. I write one on a scrap of paper then put it in a file and wait. Hours, days, weeks or years later I take it out, look at it again, rewrite, then put it away. Procrastination can be a painful thing and a horrendous way to work. It's very nice to have this novel finished."
It was two decades ago that Shukman first became fascinated by Peru. When he was 18 his father, an Oxford don, sent him to Buenos Aires on his gap year and on a backpacking trip up the Andes, Shukman discovered the Chachapoyan region in Peru. He knew one day he would write about it. "It's so transitional, right between mountains and jungle, and it really is true that there are undiscovered ruins in that part of the world," he says. "It's the nature of the cloud forest that is so strange, so beautiful and so mysterious. I haven't been back there since but it left an indelible impression on me."
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