Our Island Stories: Ten Walks through Rural Britain and its Hidden History of Empire, Corinne Fowler, Penguin, £10.99.

Near the beginning of Our Island Stories, while strolling along the banks of the Thames in picturesque Berkshire, Corinne Fowler and Sathnam Sanghera argue over which of them has received the most abuse in the culture wars. Fowler has suffered worse, says Sanghera, presumably because she’s a woman – but, comes Fowler’s retort, she is at least white, and ‘opposition to his work focused relentlessly on his racial identity’. It’s like a bad rom-com for the ‘intersectional’ age: ‘You hang up / No, you hang up.’ As this is Fowler’s book, not Sanghera’s, she gets the last word; and the introduction closes with the rousing line that his ‘philosophical attitude expresses the triumph of courage and openness over fear and intimidation’.

Our Island Stories is a provocative title, implying confrontation with H.E. Marshall’s classic 1905 children’s history of Britain. No confrontation comes. Nor, in fact, is the book principally preoccupied with its stated subject, the complex interplay between the British countryside and colonialism – which Fowler, an avid outdoorswoman, proposes to explore in a series of country walks, accompanied by various public figures (all, it is emphasised, from an ethnic-minority background).

Really, as Fowler’s conversation with Sanghera makes plain, this is a book about the ‘culture wars’, and Fowler’s part in them. That much is already clear from the acknowledgements, which drip with even more treacle than is customary: ‘To those colleagues, family and close friends who help me to survive Britain’s culture wars: you know who you are and I’m there for you too.’ For page after page, Fowler and her walking-companions regale one another with ever shriller tales of ‘the culture war into which our work has plunged us’. Here, at least, we have something approaching an active construction: it is, in theory, ‘our work’ that is doing the ‘plunging’.

Elsewhere, though, Fowler – rather like the great commander of the enemy legions, Nigel Biggar – prefers to retreat to passive-voice. Describing the controversy over the 2020 National Trust’s report into colonialism and slavery, which she co-authored, she reaches again for the ‘plunge’ verb: ‘I, my co-authors, and the Trust itself were plunged into a culture war, with influential media figures and even politicians portraying us as public enemies.’ When not being ‘plunged’ into the ‘culture war’, she haplessly ‘finds herself’ in it; the ‘culture war’ is low-status, and only ever waged by the other side.

‘Even politicians’ have criticised her: Fowler likes to dwell on this point. She decries the so-called ‘Common Sense Group’ of Conservative MPs for demanding that funders withdraw from one of her projects, ‘a child-led history and writing project steered by historians’. Now, those funders were spending public money. Her incredulity and indignation that elected representatives might wish to scrutinise the spending of public money – that they might especially object to spending public money ‘on what they called “political projects”’ – is typical of a clerisy that has perhaps grown used to fattening itself up on taxpayer feed with no questions asked.

Fowler has every right to insist that this project of hers was not really ‘political’; but it remains a legitimate question, exactly the sort that MPs should be asking. She does not help her case by eliding this type of responsible probing, by officials with the authority to do so, with some of the nastier abuse that she has doubtless received.

Such criticism from politicians might, of course, be uncomfortable; but if a theme in Our Island Stories can be identified, other than ‘the culture wars’, it is of the virtue of discomfort. The book – like Sanghera’s, which she praises on similar grounds – sets out to reflect on ‘uncomfortable truths’. One virtue of the National Trust inquiry was precisely that it was uncomfortable for so many people – uncomfortable and therefore good.

She adduces in her defence two mighty authorities: Priyamvada Gopal, who says ‘history is not a comfort blanket’, and David Olusoga, who says ‘history doesn’t care very much about our feelings… country houses are not a soft play area’.

There is, it seems to me, a strange machismo at play, albeit one couched in fashionable mental-health-speak (‘Britain needs therapy!’, says one of Fowler’s walking-companions, and presumably the therapy envisaged is of a suitably ‘uncomfortable’ kind). The measure for ‘good history’, it is implied, is not that it solves problems, or answers questions, or establishes the truth of how things were per se. The measure for ‘good history’ is that it provokes discomfort.

The countryside, too, is a place for discomfort: the bad kind, as apparently is widely experienced by ethnic minorities (this is a favourite topic of the Guardian); and the good kind, as ought to be experienced by white Britons when they find themselves, on country walks, confronted by the ghosts of empire.

There is a funny moment when Fowler tells her friends that she’s about to visit Jura, and they innocently ask about whisky. What fools! – of course the Jura trip is about matters grave and serious. There, she and her walking companion – this time an SNP councillor named Graham Campbell – tut when they visit a village shop and find bottles of local rum, whose bottles ‘make no mention of any historical link to Jamaica’.

Our Island Stories, like others in its genre, subscribes to the logic of the hairshirt: that all earthly goods are tainted with sin, that morality exists only through discomfort.

The school history curriculum also ought to be more ‘uncomfortable’. Fowler provides us with the new and updated laundry-list of things they don’t teach you at school: ‘few pupils learn about the Virginia Company’. True, empire and slavery are on the curriculum, and have been now for some time. Still, never to be satisfied, Fowler mentions that Miranda Kaufmann, the author of Black Tudors, has suggested that ‘we need history lessons about the long campaign to include colonial history in the curriculum’: how meta.

One might question the efficacy of her and her companions’ proposals. Somewhere along the Cumbrian coast, the poet Peter Kalu describes performing one of his poems to schoolchildren. ‘It was about a boomerang, reversing in mid-flight and coming back to smack you in the face’ – ‘a metaphor for colonialism’, you see, ‘which returns with its consequences (looted museum objects, controversial statues, repressed histories)’. The metaphor, alas, went over the children’s heads. They were ‘more interested in the boom, boom, boomerang of his main refrain’.

Twice in the book – and here I really did feel some discomfort – characters speculate that it’s the legacy of empire that drove their relatives into severe mental illness. When one ‘succumbed to the strain of responding to racism’, she ‘ended up in Denbigh’s psychiatric hospital’ – Fowler glosses this as ‘ironic’, for the tenuous reason that ‘Denbigh was also the name of the Jamaican sugar plantation belonging to Richard Pennant, the owner of Penrhyn Castle near Bangor’.

Then, in a later chapter, another character suggests that her mother’s schizophrenia ‘expresses slavery’s disturbing intergenerational and psychological legacy’.

A good interlocutor might here, at the very least, have raised an eyebrow. For a book about history and nature, both realms in which people have traditionally sought escape from themselves, it is extraordinarily introspective, and self-consciously so. It might take for its motto something Fowler says of one of her walking-companions: ‘for him, history is not just academic: he feels it personally’.

There is a motif of the characters ‘not being loved’ by the countryside: ‘Though Louisa loved the countryside, she felt it didn’t love her’; though Charlotte Williams, who advises the devolved Welsh government on education policy, ‘felt disowned by Wales, she had no intention of disowning it’.

This strikes me as a profoundly narcissistic way of relating to the natural world; and Our Island Stories shows better than any book, save perhaps those by Sanghera, that what I have elsewhere named the ‘imperial miasma’ genre goes hand-in-hand with history in this confessional, introspective, narcissistic mode.

‘Dialogue and openness’, Fowler muses, ‘is the antidote to the culture war’: but her book contains no constructive dialogue whatsoever, making us privy only to an echo chamber, and a rather boring one at that. Perhaps, for the sequel, she ought to go on country walks with Nigel Biggar, or Niall Ferguson, or Douglas Murray. Now that’s a book I’d want to read.