Ian Jack’s latest collection, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain, gathers together a series of articles and essays that range far and wide, both emotionally and geographically.  From a light question on the reason young girls love dolphins so much to a deep and emotional response to the Hatfield Rail crash, each of the pieces takes a modern topic or set-piece and draws it back to try and answer the question of what came before.

This book, it must be said, is not an exercise in nostalgia. There is no golden age in the past, and no assumption that all things would be better if only they were they way they used to be. Instead, there is an acknowledgement of the illusions of empire, superiority, and isolation that have all but disappeared in the modern digital age.  Jack does not elevate these illusions, but he does highlight their loss as he describes a world that has nearly disappeared from living memory.

This is a very personal collection and begins with a car-journey with Jack’s mother in “The White Elephant”.  Both a meditation on the changes to the British way of life and on the personal nature of memory, Jack writes of the disappearance of his mother’s childhood home and many of the buildings that featured in both of their memories:

In any case the likelihood of my imagination matching my mother’s keen memory is remote. We all have a slide show of our lives locked inside us, private scenery that nobody else will ever see, every verbalisation of its images distorting them or in some other way failing their rich significance to the rememberer.

This essay serves well to set the theme of the rest of the book.  This is a collection less about the greater history of Britain (although there is a lot of it discussed) than about the personal history of its people and the similarities of people the world over and throughout history. There are connections between football fans in Sheffield and holy pilgrims in India, between stoic survivors of London’s Blitz and the heart and singing of Kathleen Ferrier, and between the detritus of his parent’s lives and the tale of one of the musicians lost on the Titanic.

Many of the essays begin with an event, a time where the world, or at least Britain, stopped and looked for a cause – whether it was the breaking of a rail in Hatfield or the sinking of the Titanic.  In each of those cases, Jack takes the event and traces a thread backwards, towards the past because:

‘What was it like before?’ is a question I may be too fond of asking. Then again, the present always depends on the past, which makes the past a necessary subject of any reporter’s enquiry.

Sometimes, this search for the “before” leads Jack to the edges of the former British Empire. In other pieces, he travels back to its most private heart, to India, to the American colonies, to a London and a time where there were two entrances onto the bus.  In this collection, Jack is at the forefront in many of the pieces; we visit his dentist, get to know his mother, father, and grandmother, learn of his daughter’s love of dolphins, and see the coast of Scotland in all of its misty glory. Some of the pieces have never been published before, and others have been reworked. Although he certainly does not cover the past in glory and makes an effort to see the reality of life as it was no matter the place or the era, Jack acknowledges the power of myth and history in each of the essays.  After all,

But myths can be helpful – their point isn’t their trueness – and to imagine that you are part of some resilient tradition – that you are resilient simply because of where you live – may help rather than harm you, so long as you don’t buy it completely, remembering that you are only flesh and blood.

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