Books / book launch
Michael Malay publishes ‘Late Light’ – ‘a book about falling in love with vanishing things’
Michael Malay is a lecturer in English Literature and Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol.
Personally speaking, he is also an Indonesian Australian who has made a home for himself in England – in doing so noticing the echoes of his own life with those of the animals he studies professionally.
His new book Late Light is part memoir, part natural history, drawing on four so-called ‘unloved’ animals – eels, moths, crickets and mussels – to explore themes of migration, belonging and extinction through the lens of contemporary Britain.
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From the Mendips to Troopers Hill, St George’s Park to Severn Beach, landscapes familiar to Bristolians have inspired Malay in many and varied ways, and a number of them feature in the book.
Ahead of the official launch event at Bookhaus on July 11, Malay has kindly provided an extract of Late Light to Bristol24/7.
View of the River Avon, taken close to Hanham Lock – photo: Michael Malay
A glimpse of Severn Beach
Not far from the Severn Beach train station, you’ll find a ramp at the end of the main road. Climb it. This is the seawall of the village, and as you walk up you are often scoured by wind, which sweeps past in long relentless streams or short manic bursts. You are at one of the edges of England, meeting the winds as they arrive from the Atlantic, and before you is the rocky, muddy, salty, light-filled world of the Severn Estuary. Big sky, big water. Miles of mud.
Nothing is at rest here, even when the place seems still. At high tide, water comes barrelling up the estuary, squeezed into a roiling force by the narrowing banks of the Bristol Channel, and as the tide goes out, islands of mud begin to emerge from the water – small outcrops that gradually turn into vast mudflats. It’s a reliably smelly place – the sulphurous mud and rotting seaweed get right up your nose – but it’s also full of glorious sleights of hand. When the sun burnishes the water with the right sheen, the sheen of hammered gold, or of mackerel shoals turning beneath the sun, the estuary can look strangely insubstantial, less estuary than floating plane of light. Then the estuary seems to levitate above the seafloor, as if, at this time of light-dazzle, water were exempt from the laws governing mass. Always, though, the estuary’s pong brings you back to earth, rubbing salt and mud into your visions of another world.
Michael Malay
Severn Beach mud flats – photo: Siavash Minoukadeh
Late Light by Michael Malay is out now, published by Bonnier Books. The official launch event is at Bookhaus on July 11 at 6pm. Tickets are available at www.headfirstbristol.co.uk.
Main photo: Siavash Minoukadeh
Read more: Matt Gilbert publishes ‘Street Sailing’, a Bristol-inflected poetry collection
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