When Luke Turner’s memoir begins, his relationship of five years has just ended. He’s unhappy in all the usual ways about this, not least because it has effectively left him homeless. But the break-up is also a reverberation: a sadness that loops back to other hurts and fissures in his life in a way that fills him with fear for his emotional future. What is needed, at least in the short term, is a means of soothing himself, and so it is that he sets out to explore Epping Forest, on the eastern edge of London, a place he has known since childhood. Nature, he understands, is both a calmer of nerves – all that dappled light and frothing greenery – and a realm in which a person might find a sense of perspective. Oblivious to our woes, it reminds us of our tiny place in the scheme of things, and thus makes us stronger, more easeful. Like the seasons, all things pass in the end.
But here’s the surprise: in its depths, he finds no peace. Even as Turner is fascinated by Epping, his mind unravels, anxiety and loneliness his closest companions. The forest is a place of “vulgar chaos”, its pollarded trees quite grotesque; at moments, the ancient trunks seem to be moving, “boiling up out of the ground like lava”. He visits at night, wondering (bizarrely) if this will help, but things only darken, the grim stories he has read of its history causing his mind to “slip”. A thrush sounds “deranged”. A muntjac deer peers at him from beneath “tiny devil horns”. He breathes in, not fresh air, but so much “muck”. You would think him a boy in a particularly malevolent fairytale were it not for his regular, and somewhat bathetic, references to his other constant companion, his trusty mobile phone.
Why is he so unhappy? Why does his mind resist the balm that has worked for so many others? Bit by bit, we find out. Turner, who is bisexual, has long struggled “against the binary rules of heteronormative love”, and thanks to experiences in his childhood, he is also prey to “hardwired” sexual compulsions: “risky sex” is a part of him. He finds it difficult to form long-lasting relationships, and is frequently worn out by the nagging weight of these desires, their endless itch. Such impulses – the most insignificant trigger can set the “sourness” coursing through his body – are the opposite of liberation. Afterwards, he sinks into self-hatred, “rotten with emptiness and disgust”. This has nothing to do with sin, for all that he is the son of a Methodist minister. Casual sex is not, for him, cold because of “the gaze of holy judgment”. Rather, it is because when he looks in the mirror, he sees only an “icy ghost” staring back.
In this cultural moment, it comes as something of a relief to read a book that is nuanced about what we might loosely term bad sexual behaviour. If Turner regards himself as a victim of abuse – his second sexual experience, with a much older man, took place in a public lavatory when he was just 14 – he is also brave enough, or honest enough, to want to explore the role played by his nascent desires in what happened to him (“I had wanted it,” he writes). Even in the grip of his compulsions, his body, lusted after by men he meets on the internet, makes him feel powerful. In what he calls “furtive queer worlds”, he finds sexual agency, something he writes about with bracing frankness.
And he’s engaging on religious faith, too. As I read, I assumed that he would, with utmost predictability, come to reject his family’s devout Methodism (his mother spoke in tongues when he was a boy). But no. His love for churches and hymns and what he regards as his parents’ exceptional grace is abiding. Methodism is, for him, countercultural – a radical, inclusive force for good – and he won’t allow what it once taught him about sin to make him blind to this.
Set against these things, however, are his book’s flaws, which are not small, and which made me wonder about some of the lavish advance praise Out of the Woods has received. Turner’s obvious sincerity is surely no excuse either for the badness of some of his sentences (“My detachment from naive ideas of countryside as a place of sylvan respite and the romantic pastoral versus an embrace of the urban was rather wonderfully reflected in Bruce Robinson’s homoerotic Withnail and I,” he writes at one point), or their undergraduate earnestness. There is, to take one example, something wearying about the way that he uses the word “gender” as a verb. I don’t only mean that it is unpoetic to the point of ugliness; in context, it’s facile, too. Nor should his emotional turmoil be allowed to exonerate him from the charge that his book often feels so contingent, even haphazard. It is, for instance, not at all clear which of the many forest excursions he describes were made only in the service of writing his memoir (several, I think), and as a result, the feeling grows that he doesn’t know where his narrative is going, or precisely what it is that he wants to say.
Above all, it’s not enough for a writer, having revealed that they Googled something on the spot (as he does the Teufelsberg, a hill in another forest he visits, the Grunewald in Berlin), then to repeat, seemingly almost verbatim, what they found online. This hasn’t only to do with laziness, or even with the appearance of laziness. It’s to do with the breaking of a spell. More than once Turner would almost have me in his grasp, only to lose me entirely with something just like this. At these moments, his book would seem so put together: a mere assemblage of parts where there should have been a living, breathing, unified whole.
• Out of the Woods by Luke Turner is published by W&N (£16.99). To order a copy for £12.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
