ISOLARION: A Different Oxford Journey by James Attlee

Chicago UP £12 pp256

The climate of the times dictates that people who charge around in fast cars and aeroplanes are beginning to look slightly ridiculous, and in literature there’s a new parochialism, a mood of I-like-it-here. An early landmark was The Rings of Saturn, in which WG Sebald generated 300 pages of rarefied thoughts from a short walk along the Suffolk coast. In Isolarion, James Attlee meditates upon a location apparently much less promising: the Cowley Road in Oxford.

An isolarion is a type of 15th-century map presenting an area in close detail. Cowley Road is where Oxonians go to do things not mentioned in the Oxford scenes of Brideshead Revisited: to get drunk on lager, buy pornographic DVDs, be tattooed, eat an Indian (or Chinese, Thai or African) meal, buy kosher meat, experience new-age flotation therapy. Attlee lives on Cowley Road, and he saw in this battered thoroughfare the chance to make his own “postmodern” pilgrimage to “explore more deeply”, substituting thought for distance.

Here in microcosm is how his book works. In chapter three, he notes the name of a street off Cowley Road: Circus Street. The owner of the plot named it after Newsome’s Alhambra Circus, which often visited Oxford. Its Moorish name reflected a romantic interest in Islam among mid-19th-century scholars (two ferociously learned but elegant pages on this), and this fascination with Moorish motifs survives in the Kazbar, a cafe-bar on Cowley Road designed to invoke a North African souk. This “idealised” version of North Africa coexists with a more authentic manifestation in the form of the North African cafe over the road. We then double back to circuses and Attlee’s memory of having worked in one: “The thing that struck me most was the size of the elephant droppings, their perfect spherical shape, and the ease with which they could be flicked across the ground with a broom.”

As with Sebald’s book, I often found myself thinking: “Hang on a minute. How did we get on to this?” But seldom in a spirit of irritation, because the writing is so good: dildos of varying sizes are racked against the wall in a sex shop “like Kalashnikovs for sale on an Afghan market stall”. Attlee comes across as a charming daydreamer, with a mind ever open to serendipity: “I have a theory that the discarded newspaper often contains more interesting news than the one purchased in the normal way.”

He has picked an awkward time to talk up multiculturalism, but this is not the Cowley Road as Coke ad. A Hindu shopkeeper, asked his opinion of lights that have been hung to mark the end of Ramadan, chunters: “They’re not bad . . . I would like it if they would also put up decorations for Diwali.” Attlee’s Cowley Road is not so much upliftingly harmonious as commendably busy and the book is partly a paean to small businesses. In fact, occasionally, his interviews with the shopkeepers reminded me of local-paper advertorials: “So your commissions can be quite diverse?” he asks a Cowley Road jeweller, rather exhaustingly.

But this is excusable because Attlee knows that the cappuccino tide is rising: that the developers and “the ‘retail concepts’ that suffocate the earth with an impenetrable skin of similitude” are waiting. Cowley Road has in its time accommodated a leper hospital and a workhouse. It has provided a refuge for the picturesque rejects of Oxford, but perhaps not for much longer. “The drunks and derelicts that still make the street their home in the face of these advances begin to look like heroes. Like the Arctic polar bear, they find their natural territory melting beneath their feet.” This fine book was conceived as a pilgrimage; unfortunately it may soon come to read like a memorial.

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