Half-poetry, half-prose, half-Belgian – and not half bad

Patrick McGuinness’s prose trembles on the edge of poetry, occasionally indeed tipping gently over into it. This is thoroughly characteristic of a book that does sometimes feel as though it might be an abandoned sequence of poems, reconfigured in often spell-binding prose. The title itself is poetic: who the ‘other people’ are and which ‘countries’ they come from is never wholly clear.

However, perhaps this cavil is unjustified. Poetry, after all, inhabits a literary space in which fact and fiction merge or dissolve into one another, as they do in (or are made to by) memory, so the subtitle hints at what is to follow, which is an attempt to describe the act of remembering.

The object of the book is to be found in the dedication, which is to McGuinness’s children, ‘so that they know where they come from’. With no extended English family to speak of, the author finds his roots in the Belgian soil of his mother. But while his children in some sense may ‘come from’ Belgium, they are Welsh-speaking, and live in Caernarfon. Their presumably Welsh mother may have other ideas about their provenance.

McGuinness is a poet and an academic and clever. It would be a shame if his book were bypassed by potential readers put off by a title and subtitle that tell us so little about its subject, which is the author’s relationship, as governed by memory, with the town of Bouillon in Belgium. Lying in Wallonia, close to the borders with France and Luxembourg, this is where McGuinness spent his long childhood holidays, back from boarding school in England (his parents, whose work is never explicitly given, worked for the diplomatic corps or perhaps the British Council).

There is no narrative; the book instead consists of numerous memories, or ‘rooms’ never more than four pages long, by which a picture is assembled of the town McGuinness clearly loves.