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In 1930, as Europe descended into economic chaos and political authoritarianism, Sigmund Freud wrote his greatest reflection on the tensions between society and the individual: Civilization and Its Discontents. Imagine the mind, wrote Freud, and all its memories of pleasure, pain and trauma, as layered like the archaeological history of Rome, from its ancient origins through all its republican, imperial and Renaissance beauty and bloodiness.
Rob Cowen, a poet as well as a nature and travel writer renowned for his book Common Ground, has attempted to do something similar for 21st-century Britain in The North Road, a remarkable, post-Covid, post-Brexit state of the nation literary archaeology. But the subject of his excavation is not a great classical city, but a road, and one as initially prosaic as the A1, “Britain’s primary road — a 400-mile arterial link running between London and Edinburgh like a backbone through the country”.
In Cowen’s recreation, it becomes a “timeline running through the land”, mutating from an ancient trackway into a Roman road, a pilgrimage route, a turnpike, a coach road, a motorway that one lorry driver describes as “a disease you can’t get out of your blood”.
Just before the pandemic, realising he has spent most of his life as a northerner adrift in the Badlands of Thatcherite England but never living more than a few miles from the A1, Cowen signs up for a dig of Roman remains near Catterick. At a fork in the road, “lost in the flat spin of the now” after completing a book and starting a young family, he is brought back to life in the discovery of death: he unearths an ancient skull within earshot of the roar of the road’s traffic.
The discovery sends him digging through the layers just not of the A1’s history, but his own sense of who he is. It takes him to a family photograph taken in the 1920s of the Cowen family in a house on the Great North Road in Doncaster, built by his great-grandfather, John William Cowen, or Bill as he was known — a miner, boxer, footballer, fishmonger and self-made businessman whose life haunts the rest of Cowen’s book.
He travels back through his own history to the origins of the North Road in London’s Smithfield, digging through its layers of Roman, medieval and Victorian history to try to understand “how things end up the way they are, why we live the way we do”. He meets an old friend, an unnamed army veteran, and they track up the road from “the crush of history” in London to the “thin places”, the hinterland of warehouses, retail parks and scrublands in which they pitch tents and unpick the past and present of “beautiful, dark, ugly and shining” Britain.
Slowly, as Cowen travels up the country and back in time through a drunken, hallucinogenic May Day in Stevenage, reflections on TS Eliot in Little Gidding, Cromwell in Huntingdon and Newton in Grantham, he battles his own historical demons: a broken family from the 1980s that plunged him into drink and drugs and rock’n’roll, and the subsequent emotional disengagement that left him struggling with the arrival of parenthood.
Some of the most moving passages describe his parents and his great-grandfather Bill, engulfed in the Bentley Colliery disaster of 1931 that killed 45 people. The arrival of the Alpha variant of Covid-19, that “harrying plague of our age”, threatens to derail Cowen in pursuit of his final destination, Edinburgh, the termination of the country’s “Alpha One. God of roads”, on a particularly poignant last leg accompanied by his mother.
The North Road is many books in one, and a triumph in all its facets: a journey undertaken; an embodied metaphor of a road well-travelled; a painfully honest memoir of resilience and survival; and a moving account of the powerful legacy and overwhelming wonder of the family.
Cowen thinks as a punk and writes as a poet in prose that goes from lyrical to dark to frightening and hopeful, often on the same page. A book about a road that embraces history and memoir, it never descends into cliché, but reminds us that whatever our mistakes we “can alter the path and try another road”, both as individuals and as a nation.
It is a book that made me laugh and cry out loud; it made me think about myself, and about what it is to be alive here, now, in 21st-century Britain: what else could you ask of a great book?
The North Road by Rob Cowen Hutchinson Heinemann £22, 416 pages
Jerry Brotton is the author of ‘Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction’ (Allen Lane)
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