The most powerful story in Edmund de Waal’s The White Road comes at its end, in a sort of coda. It is a brief account of the rise of Allach, the German porcelain factory that was Himmler’s pet project. Allach, which turned out the figurines so beloved of the Third Reich – think bears, stags, alsatians and models of Frederick the Great on horseback – had its start in a Munich suburb. But as the war wore on and craftsmen were lost to the front, production moved to the camp at Dachau, a place where “workers” were in plentiful supply. “White porcelain is the embodiment of the German soul,” said the first Allach catalogue, a Nazi-approved credo that ensured its survival even in the darkest of times. When supplies of coal could no longer be found for the Dachau crematorium, still the Allach kilns remained red hot and glowing.
De Waal, a celebrated ceramic artist whose massed spectral vessels can be found in, among other places, the Victoria & Albert Museum, offers up this history as a kind of warning: an obsession with white, he suggests, can be a dangerous thing, even an appalling one. In his own case, however, such a passion is (more or less) benign. For him, it has to do with new beginnings, with creativity itself. Hunched at his wheel, moving white clay between his fingers, he is “trying to still a small part of the world, make an inside space”. It has always been this way. Aged five, he refused a teacher’s offer of a coloured glaze for his very first chubby pot. Dipping it instead into milky white, he thus marked his earliest “attempt to bring something into focus”.
The White Road has a subtitle: A Pilgrimage of Sorts. Like his 2010 bestseller, The Hare With Amber Eyes, it combines travel and memoir with a certain spirit of inquiry regarding the making and collecting of beautiful objects. This time, though, his focus is only on porcelain, and its component parts (it comprises two substances, petuntse, or porcelain stone, and kaolin, a kind of clay). His journey begins in Jingdezhen in south-east China, the porcelain capital of the ancient world, and once the keeper of all its secrets: for 500 years, no one in the west knew how it was made (one European writer, in particularly creative mode, suggested that its main ingredients were “eggshells and the shells of umbilical fish” that had been pounded to dust, mixed with water, shaped into vases – and then buried underground for a century). From here, he takes us to Dresden, Germany, where in the 18th century a young mathematician and philosopher, Walther Tschirnhaus, cracked its code, a discovery that enabled the establishment of the Meissen factory; and finally, a little later in the same century, to Plymouth, where William Cookworthy, a young Quaker chemist, patented its magical recipe.
In synopsis, this all sounds fascinating – assuming, of course, that the reader has an interest in pots and how they are made (I very much do). But summaries, like movie pitches, can be misleading. On the page, The White Road is an agonising read, and I struggled to finish it. Some of this may have to do with De Waal’s fashionable use of the present tense, which he deploys whether he is in 21st-century Jingdezhen or 19th-century Stoke-on-Trent. The contrived urgency of the present is only rarely for me, and while I could just about tolerate it in the first person, and even the third, when he began to use it in the second person, imagining his way into another person’s head, something in me recoiled. (“You are killed trying to escape,” he writes of the prisoners at Dachau. “You are killed as an example. You are killed in the quarries and on the plantation. You are killed because you are too slow marching home. You are killed through typhoid. You are killed by a kapo. You are killed because you despair.”)
In the main, though, my dismay had to do not with grammar, but with his reflexive verbosity. Sprawling and digressive, The White Road’s affected little paragraphs – sometimes, they’re little more than a single floating line – are, I’m guessing, supposed to be suggestive of porcelain itself, shards rather than screeds. However, this pseudo-fragility, the feeling that everything he writes is modestly provisional, even apt to be broken, is sabotaged repeatedly by De Waal’s deep and abiding self-involvement, a presumption that has him convinced the reader needs always to see his workings, even to hear the worries he feels about his new book at three o’clock in the morning. It is as if he believes he is the only writer in the world ever to stick a plan of his book on a wall, to wake up feeling jittery at the thought of pages and how they might be filled. “Rain all night,” begins an early chapter. “And a party. Possibly a party? Not one I’d been invited to.” There follows an anxious disquisition on a talk he has given to some Chinese students, which in turn shades into yet more fretting, this time about all the lectures he has given since his last book was published. Why did no one edit this, and passages like it? Perhaps the esteem born of a surprise bestseller got in the way.
The White Road is published by Chatto & Windus (£20). Click here to order it for £16
