SOLITUDE:
Memories, people, places
By Terry Waite
SPCK. 165 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978 0 281 078 820
The author’s name should ensure a wide readership. Added to that, it’s highly readable. What more could you want?
The contents are what Martin Bell OBE calls ‘wide ranging’. The Australian outback takes up nearly a third of the book: Nevil Shute country 70 years on, with its vast spaces, memorable characters, ready humour, and some crude language (which Shute somehow managed to avoid).
We zoom next into Salt Lake City for encounters less clearly linked with the overall theme. But this chapter relates the different kind of solitude known to idealistic spy George Blake. Like other sections on the intelligence services, this raises another ‘language’ issue, where so many bear lonely burdens of secrets and lies. Younger readers may wonder who the Committee of 100 were; reminders would have helped.
The author’s broad sympathies touch briefly on such unconnected celebrities as Myra Hindley and Svetlana Stalin; rather longer on prisoner-of-war Harold Lock. During some very detailed interviews we might ask: ‘Why is he telling us this?’ Passing glimpses of churches include those full of chatter and no space for silence. The text is enriched by several colour-plates and five pages of verse, Waite’s own Songs of Solitude.
Of the significant gaps, one is entirely understandable: we can read elsewhere of the years of solitary incarceration in Beirut, so no need to repeat it here. Like John McCarthy and Brian Keenan, Waite surely has licence to speak out after those dark years. But secondly, perhaps for similar reasons, he seems drawn to high-profile examples, with less to say to those whose solitude is more mundane: bereavement, singleness, separation, job loss. His moving chapter on hospices is more accessible.
Most revealing: given this title from a globally-recognised churchman, don’t we long to touch base with solitude in, say, the Psalms or the Gospels? Instead of Scripture, for a clinching quotation or summary he instinctively settles for Shakespeare, Rilke, or the appalling Koestler.
