Number 87 - Wrestliana - Toby Litt

 

Toby Litt is a bit of a literary chameleon. He never seems to write in the same genre twice. he also seems to be equally adept whether he's writing a science fiction epic Journey into Space, or chick-lit, or hard boiled crime. You're never quite sure what you're going to get from a Litt novel. His most recent two (Notes from a Young gentleman and Patience - both reviewed on this blog) were particularly experimental.

This one is very straightforward in prose style as it's a biography of his great great great Grandad - William Litt, a celebrated wrestler in Cumbria in the early 1800's and a slightly less celebrated writer and poet.

This being non-fiction, it doesn't fit into the A-Z he's been building with his other books.

In addition to telling us about his great etc grandfather, he tells us a lot about himself, his own family, and his process of learning about his ancestor - the effect this had on him as a person.

He explores the meaning of masculinity then and now, the importance of being a man and the meaning of fatherhood.

He starts by telling us about his own father, and how it was his father's wish for him to write this book.  One of my favorite lines in the book appears here when he describes his father as having reached the age where "standing up from a chair is a paragraph, not a sentence". That's quietly heartbreakng as well as incredibly evocative of the fragility of age.

William Litt won over 200 belts in Cumberland & Westmoreland wrestling and wrote one of the first sports manuals - a treatise on the sport of wrestling.  He was very likely a smuggler in his younger days, but after his success in the wrestling ring, he eventually fell foul of a local lord and emigrated to Canada where he died aged 62.

In the course of his research, Toby Litt faces up to his own insecurities. How does he compare as a man to his ancestor, even to his own father?  How do his talents as a father compare? And what does fatherhood mean?

Non-fiction is not normally my genre to read in - book 87 this year and this is the first pure non-fiction so far. But this was fascinating throughout, disarmingly honest and genuinely moving in places.  All the moreso for being true.

The Lowther family get mentioned frequently as playing pivotal roles in William's life.  This is particularly interesting to me because my own Great Grandfather was a lowther, quite possibly from Cumbria... I will admit that's not something to keep many people outside of my immediate family engrossed in the book, but it certainly helped me.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Toby's ancestor is a genuine character, and Toby himself comes across as a genuinely nice guy, somewhat in envy of old William's earlier exploits. It's clear that this book was a labour of love and that comes shining through the page.  What could have been the equivalent of someone gettng the photo album out is turned into an engrossing history of a remarkable man. Through the power of prose, Toby has wrestled his ancestor onto the page, and quite definitvely won this round.

This is available through Galley Beggar Press