Book of the Week: Radio 4
THERE are times when the radio can’t be just a background hum – you have to put down a book or a pen, or pull over and stop the car.
Maggie O’Farrell’s I am; I am; I am was a radio book of the week that refused to melt into a background lull.
Her true stories of near death experiences jagged the soul and left this listener listening through cupped fingers.
It was the “what might have been” – the sense of teetering on the tightrope edge of life.
The first, called simply Neck happened when she was just 18 and took a summer job out at a retreat in the wilderness.
It was, O’Farrell writes, “a day on which I nearly die”.
She goes for a walk and has a terrifying encounter with a stranger on a remote mountain path.
She has met him earlier on the path and he has lain in wait for her.
He has, she says: “The look of a man working something out, planning the logistics of a deed.”
She describes the “oceanic throb” of her pulse, her struggle to stay calm, to talk her way out, even as he slips the strap of a set of binoculars around her neck, inviting her to look at the birds.
“I knew what came next, I could smell it, I could almost see it there.”
She talks her way out of it, slips off the strap, chats about eider ducks and walks quickly saying her boss will be expecting her back and will come looking if she is late.
When she takes her story to the police station, it is dismissed – nothing has happened, they say.
Two weeks later, the police drive up to the retreat centre and she finds out that another young woman had gone hiking and been found strangled close by.
The police are silent as she describes how he looped that binocular strap around her neck.
It was just one of her 17 near misses – times when she nearly died.
O’Farrell writes beautifully – but this time, it is not fiction.
She writes to reassure her young daughter who, because of an immune disorder – has faced her own brushes with death.
I am; I am; I am is a spell binding book – it is full of dread and horror but written with the still, fixed gaze of the observer, the writer at one remove from what is unfolding before her eyes.
