Brian MooneyFrontier Country: A Walk Around Essex Borders: A Walk Around the Essex Borders

There was once a lecturer who used to begin by saying to his audience " Essex is often referred to as flat and boring. Not so, ladies and gentlemen, not so. Essex is slightly undulating and boring." Well, not so, again. This little gem of a book proves that London's much-maligned backyard is still, as Norden declared in 1594, "most Fatt, frutefull and full of profitable things." Norden was talking mainly about the farming. Brian Mooney talks about pretty much everything that he and his companion encounter in the course of their five hundred mile trek round the perimeters of the county - plaques, pubs, tractors, bridges, churches, beach huts and even a three-storey pill-box.Twenty years ago the American novelist Paul Theroux, a long-time British resident, suddenly realised that London wasn't Britain but rather a sort of inland Venice without the lagoons, a great trading republic which faced outwards to the world rather than inwards to its national hinterland. Theroux decided to discover the rest of Britain and, being a writer, to get a book out of the experience. But how, he asked himself, does one write about the most written-about country in the world ? To choose a route, he decided, was to choose a perspective - and the more arbitrary the choice of route the more serendipitous the outcome was likely to be. So Theroux decided to walk right round the rim of the United Kingdom ; the result was The Kingdom by the Sea - a book in which Britain's great industrial cities and wild uplands are pretty much ignored and fishermen, beachcombers, holidaymakers, seaside landladies and the retired figure rather prominently.So, perhaps, it is with Mooney and Harris. While Iain Sinclair can relish a circuit of the M25 and Edward Platt can create 'Leadville' - a semi-surreal string of semis strung along the planning-blighted A40 at Hanger Lane - Mooney and Harris eschew the A12 which bisects Essex and thus spare us the doubtful delights of Chelmsford, which Dickens once excoriated as the stupidest town in England. (He had been stuck there for five days).This picaresque-with-a-purpose begins riskily at Waltham Abbey. Riskily because the first of the twenty-one sequential walks - 26 miles ending at Barking - passes through the unappealing south Essex shoreline which has been disparagingly dubbed G.L-on-Sea - i.e. London's industrial wastepipe. But the author rises to the challenge in a style which blends informality with authority and opinion with solid and invariably fascinating information; but 'prenez garde' as Churchill used to say before speaking French in public - this is a writer who uses (quite correctly, of course) words like 'palimpsest', 'patination' and 'champaign' (meaning a wide expanse of open country) to describe what can be seen along the A13. He also seems determined single-handedly to rescue the colon from disuse.Jon Harris is credited as Illustrator and is usually referred to simply as 'Harris' - a convention which recalls the character of that name in Three Men in a Boat and thus confirms the air of battiness and intrepidity which their enterprise conjures up. Harris's illustrative style is, moreover, as distinctively individual as Mooney's authorial voice. The stunning county map which serves as the book's frontispiece is almost a book in itself, looking like the Monopoly Board after Hobbits have revised it to represent The Shire. Reading it is like reading a page of Gabriel Garcia Marquez - one marvels at the intricacy and the sly humour and then has to re-read it all again because it is so dense, so rich, so allusive. Harris combines the elegiac rurality of the Northumbrian engraver Thomas Bewick with the puckishness of Tolkien and the resulting maps and sketches make an ideal counterpoint to the text. Harris proves to be, moreover, far more than a merely biddable recorder of the visual but serves as both the author's sardonic interlocutor and his Freudian super-ego as well - it is Harris who constantly ensures that the temptation to take short-cuts is just as constantly reisted and that their intended route is strictly adhered to.I thought I knew my native county pretty well but I live more or less in the middle of it and Frontier Country has shown me just how much more I have to learn and to see. Five Stars ? You bet!Given the task Mooney and Harris set for themselves I do not see how it could have been done better. It's also incredibly cheap, too, for a book that would make a wonderful gift - or self-indulgence. Norfolk Next ? Suffolk Soon ?