Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ – Nancy Campbell’s partner suffered a stroke. Campbell’s life then became a hell of hospital visits, supporting and fearing for the brilliant Anna, an intellectual who worked with virus analysts in Moscow, reduced by brain insult and aphasia to a kind of infancy.
Thunderstone is the story of Campbell’s response to this crisis. Her diary extracts jump from Anna’s stroke in 2019 and her slow healing, to Campbell’s own new life, which begins when Anna is strong enough to be encouraged to move on, from June to September 2021.
Campbell is a poet and travel writer, with many friends and contacts. (I met her in 2018 at a nature writing conference in Munich, hosted by Robert Macfarlane, and she once stayed in my flat when I was away, sending by way of thanks an enormous kipper through the post, and bulbs for my son to plant.) But writing has granted her no home, little money and the responsibility for many books. At the hospital coffee machine she meets Sven, who helps her get set up in a caravan in a patch of nettles between a canal and a railway line east of Oxford.
If you have seen or read Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem you will recognise this world and its characters, with an Oxford twist. There is the Assassin, a former ‘paramilitary’ and ‘sort of’ Buddhist, who harbours a gun, a Land Rover and strong feelings for the Oxford comma. Sven is a dab hand with a car battery, being a former biochemistry scholar at CalTech. Aislin is another Oxford genius, according to Sven, who studied physiology before abandoning western medicine for gardening and herbalism.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in