Stones of Aran: Labyrinth

Stones of Aran #2

by Tim Robinson, John Elder (Introduction)

"Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran is one of the most striking and original literary undertakings of our time. Robinson’s ambition is to find out both what it is to know a landscape, know it as extensively and intimately as possible, and what it takes to make that knowledge, the sense of the landscape itself, come alive in writing. It is a project that draws on the legacies of Thoreau and Joyce, to which Robinson brings his own polymathic gifts as cartographer, mathematician, historian, and, above all, shaper of words.

In Pilgrimage Robinson walked the entire coast of Airann, largest of the Aran islands. In Labyrinth he turns in to the island’s interior. These two books—parts of an inseparable whole that can, for all that, be read quite separately from each other—constitute a vast polyphonic composition, at once encyclopedic and lyrical, scientific and surprisingly personal. Exploring the illimitable complexity and bounty contained in the seemingly limited confines of a single island, Robinson invites us to look without and within and to see the wonder of the world." Back cover comments.

Genres: Ireland, Travel, History, Nature, Nonfiction, Geography, Irish Literature

674 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Timothy Robinson (1935 – 2020) was an English writer, artist and cartographer. A native of Yorkshire, Robinson studied maths at Cambridge and then worked for many years as a visual artist in Istanbul, Vienna and London, among other places. In 1972 he moved to the Aran Islands, and in 1984 he settled in Roundstone, Connemara. In 1986 his first book, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, was published to great acclaim. The second volume of Stones of Aran, subtitled Labyrinth, appeared in 1995. His last work was the Connemara trilogy. He died of Covid-19 in 2020.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading this back to back with Pilgrimage, it's clear that this is a very different book. While Robinson's method is the same - walk the landscape looking for everything it can tell him in terms of place names, botany, geology, oral tradition - he is different. He says at the outset that he's writing this at a distance of ten years from all the explorations and notes he made for it, and he's writing it from somewhere other than Aran. In the mid 1980s he and Mairead moved to Connemara so he could work on his explorations of that landscape - you can see the pull of Connemara developing in him as he walks Aran, mention recurs of the view of the Connemara coastline from Aran - so he is trying to write himself back into the hours he spent exploring Aran's interior, after writing a book about Connemara.
The other difference in this book has to do with people. There just weren't that many people in the first book. In this book there are people everywhere, because they live in the interior. And of course, people being people, some are more pleasant, likable, decent than others. This causes subtle changes in the flavor of the experience of Aran. When Robinson was alone with the rocks and the sea and history, the only relationship on display was his with the landscape. In this book, he and Mairead and their neighbors are more present. It was still a great pleasure to read, just different.
So, a book written in the early 1990s, about work done in the early 1980s, read in 2021 just after both Robinson and his wife died of COVID in London (having had to leave Connemara at last because of aging and ill health) - written by a ghost, about ghosts (both the people and the actual place because we know the Aran of today is by no means the Aran of the 1980s). At least I'm not a ghost - yet.

[Liam Wurtz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was a marathon for sure. I felt my eyes glazing over every once and a while as I got through the next biography of yet another O'Flaherty or Fitzpatrick and was often lost as Robinson's explorations of placenames and people take the same rambling, meandering scatter-plot pathways as his Connemara books. Still it contained a lot of the same joys and smiles as his other books for me, and I come out of this duology with a much clearer (and accurate, I optimistically hope) idea of the physical, spiritual and social forms of the Island in my head than I started with. I appreciated his final admission of defeat, humbly bowing before the distinct and uncontainable subjectivity of the land and its people which he writes about.

[Kim Zinkowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A. I really liked this book...sent to Nick...returned. Would like to read the first volume: Pilgrimage.

[Christ-pher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drops off a bit from the intensity of Pilgrimage, though, still, some passages astound. I suppose the interior of the island is just more sprawling...