Overview

Can you be a pilgrim without leaving your life behind? How does it feel to approach everyday places with the same reverence as grand cathedrals? And how are we changed by even the smallest of journeys? James Attlee asks these questions and more in his thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of a pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew: the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Attlee's Cowley has little to do with the dreaming spires of his city. Leaving tourism and student life aside, Attlee instead presents a vital and delightfully motley collection of places, people, languages, and cultures. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, from halal shops to Brazilian art dealers to reggae clubs to quiet churchyards, Attlee celebrates the appealing and homegrown eclecticism that so often comes under attack from predatory developers. Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Isolarion is at once a charming road movie, a battle cry raised against creeping homogenisation, and a love song to the gloriously messy real life of the city he calls home.

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9781911508908

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Reviews

'The attraction, for Attlee, is that the Cowley Road 'is both unique and nothing special'; the resulting book is unique and very special . . . Residents of East Oxford can be proud to have this eccentric advocate and eloquent explorer in their midst.' Geoff Dyer, The Guardian ----'A new Oxford that no guide book has yet captured.' Richard B. Woodward, New York Times ----'Attlee proves that good travel writing is not about where you go, or how you go there, but the way that you look at the world that you pass through.' Sunday Telegraph ----'Isolarion, despite its title, is about engagement. Attlee shows the hidden beauty of the plural society.' Financial Times ----'Attlee captures the essence of this city better than any tour bus ever could.' Paul Kingsnorth, The Independent ----'A vivid account of daily life, fluid and unsettling, in a modern British town with powerful allegorical reflections on the connections between past and present, time and space, and high culture and the hard-scrabble world that sustains it. Oxford may be the city of lost causes, and this book is indeed ambitious; it could easily sound sententious or twee. But it works, gloriously.' The Economist ----'I have written much about the streets of Oxford myself, but seldom so perceptively or interestingly . . . Anyone who can drag Lucretius, Susanna, Bathsheba, and St. Jerome into a Cowley Road porn shop deserves our attention and admiration.' Colin Dexter, OBE ----'I have never read a better book about Oxford - its oddities and eccentricities. The peripatetic local form of James Attlee's delightful book makes it a storehouse of information as well as a joy to read for its wit and humour.' John Bayley ----'The fish-out-of water travelogue is a staple of the bookstore, but Attlee . . . has set himself a different task: to be the fish, and to give a detailed description of the properties of the water. . . Attlee's reading is deep and wide and engagingly circuitous, and this book frequently provides the delights of discovery that make any adventure worth undertaking.' Rebecca Mead, Bookforum----'All the messy glories of Cowley Road - pubs and porn shops alike - come to life in this work, which becomes a meditation on home and the nature of pilgrimage.' National Geographic Traveler----'A force for good when it comes to resisting the drive and the dismal dialect of modernisation . . . To stiffen the sinews for the rearguard action every Oxonian should buy this book.' Eric Christiansen, The Spectator ----'In an age in which air travel opens up the world, and holidays are to escape the mundane, Attlee encourages us to look at the riches on our doorstep . . . The end of our journey as humankind is not known, but Isolarion provides an invaluable guide to how to progress along the way.' Elizabeth Garner, London Times ----'The vignettes, like marks on a painting by a pointillist, eventually coalesce to become a beautiful work of art.' Sydney Morning Herald ----'It's now a familiar story of the local versus the global; the tide of increasing uniformity as chains proliferate and streets succumb to banal prescriptions . . . But Attlee tells the story vividly and well, and it's a book that anyone concerned for the future of their own town's Cowley Road could read with profit.' Andrew Mead, Architect's Journal

Author Information

James Attlee is the author of Guernica: Painting the End of the World; Station to Station, shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2017 and Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, among other titles. His digital fiction The Cartographer’s Confession won the New Media Writing Prize in 2018.

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