This Wounded Island by J.W. Böhm

Published 2020 by Probability Books; originally published in three volumes by the Institute of Liminal Studies; translated by Michael Randolph… Or was it?

Ummmm

I’m not quite certain I understood what this was… 

But I definitely liked it…

Suspicious – especially suspicious by the end of the book when a transcript of an interview with the supposed author’s collaborator (Helene Green) evoked more questions rather than it answered – that what I was reading was a lie, wasn’t real, was… err… like, not the text that the text claimed it was… I… Err…

Sorry…

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This Wounded Island purports to be one of many texts written by J.W. Böhm, a German academic and a member of the Institute for Liminal Landscape Studies.

According to the introduction to the book, Böhm was commissioned – with Green – to visit a mid-2010s England and report back on what is to be found there.

What he finds, of course, is a terrifying and confusing country in the midst of a bizarre malaise, an identity crisis, a slow yet irreversible decline, an explosion of misery and disinterest, yet a blunt hostility to any person or experience that offers the potential of distraction…

The book is a travelogue or memoir, then, with text vignettes – meeting people, seeing things, exploring, travelling, etc – juxtaposed with black and white photographs of urban and rural environments, with a focus on signs and graffiti, i.e.  language.

So far, it all seems to make a lot of sense. The feelings and the people (except for the reports of a separate person, known only as Smith, who is a mostly offstage presence on a similar fact-finding mission to Böhm and Green) and the places/locations encountered feel very real, very believable, very England.

Around this point, 100 or so pages in, there suddenly comes – from Smith – the introduction of the idea of a black box for the nation, like an aeroplane’s flight recorder… It seems this is, first of all, metaphorical, but it soon becomes apparent that Smith – and then, it seems, our supposedly real person narrator(!) believes in this as a literal thing. Metaphor being extended? Metaphor collapsing? Of course, this object doesn’t exist, but the discussion of it as possibly real made me a little suspicious…

I googled Böhm quickly looking for one of his other books mentioned in the text, but found nothing except blog reviews of This Wounded Island or the separate volumes it was initially published as…

I presumed I’d just messed up the title or the books were obscure or my English Google settings were filtering out German writing, and went back to This Wounded Island…

A little later I took a pause to look up The Institute of Liminal Landscape Studies and also got nothing, but thought this must definitely be a language thing, so didn’t dig deeper…

By the time I got to the end of the book, though, and reached a supposed Q&A with Green, read a biographical essay about the life and death – in England, while on this visit – about J.W. Böhm that it became undoubted that what I was reading was – to some extent – an utter fabrication.

Further search shows nothing but this book… There is no institute, there is no Böhm, though there is – alas, alas, alas, alas (at least alas while I’m stuck living in it for a bit, it can be as shit as it wants if I ever escape again) – a strange, unpleasant, inconsistent and difficult England…

It’s a great read. Though, like Audition by Pip Adam, did I like it a lot, was it good, or did I just agree with it a lot???

(((This blog post also comments on its reality or lack of it.)))

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Some of “Böhm”‘s observations:

“No matter where we went, there was a barely acknowledged sorrow that appeared to have permeated the very fabric of the land. […] Green wondered if the country had just given up on itself and that everybody was too busy watching television to notice what had happened.” p. 82

“nothing mattered and no one was listening […] Thought is the enemy, he then told me […] In an ideal world, I would, he said, given the option, prefer to not generate any thoughts at all. They just cause too much pain.” p. 340

“England had taken a long, hard look at its reflection, and then punched the mirror. / Here was a country that hated itself, but could not work out why.” p. ???

“It was clear that some people would only be happy if they lived in a world of grey averages where everyone was uniformly miserable, an innocuous equality of the worst kind.” p. ???

“On our way to Chelmsford we met a woman who informed us that she was so constantly overwhelmed by information that she now spent every waking minute of every day constantly reassessing the world around her and her own reactions to it, to the point where she had little time or energy for anything else. It was, she said, utterly exhausting, being bombarded with this inane drivel every single day, this endless barrage of trivia, but what choice was there, other than to live in a state of utter oblivion?” p. ???

“If our journey so far had shown us anything, it was that England was trying to forget something. Some people seemed determined to forget that they existed at all, as if this allowed them to remain in a state whereby they could deny the existence of something that was clearly at odds with what they wanted to be. / From what we had seen, or rather what we had not seen, this wounded island was buckling under the weight of its own dysphoria, and was doomed to live out its days haunted by uncertainty.” p. ???

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Whoever or whatever this book and its author is or was, I couldn’t help but recognise the England it depicted and the reaction to it, too…

This reaction prompted some of the most centrist and pointless writing and acts of my life at a similar time to the setting of this book, and it is this very impulse to denigrate this ego-inflated shit hole that seems committed to getting worse and worse and worse that keeps me from being creative or otherwise productive or, really, living, now I’m back here. God, I hate it here. It feels humiliating to see what it’s like and continue to live here…

What Böhm describes is what there is here.

I recently saw a Brummie accented man shout at a Yorkshireman to “speak English properly” and I felt that reaction in that moment and I just sighed. Just sighed. Just sighed. Just sighed. That same man then proceeded to complain to me and my pregnant lover at length about how awful his life was because he’d never been able to find love.

That’s the England of This Wounded Isle. It’s not necessarily malicious, but it’s a place that is absolutely not helping itself. It is moribund, it is uninspiring, it is a grey mediocrity that lives on, surviving onfresh attempts to cuddle up to the people and places that are doing exploitation better than we are now…

I liked This Wounded Island a lot, and became genuinely disappointed when I realised this book’dt author and its institutional home were fictionalised. I would read more Böhm, if it existed. Maybe it will.

Highly recommended, though not suitable for anyone who hasn’t grown out of “sensible” politics. Thank god I did.

There is no freedom in a capitalistic state. (I’m an anarchist now!)

Buy the book here (I think about as direct as possible but I don’t know).