On October 27th, 26er Martin Lee’s non-fiction book Between is published by Zer0 Books. Here, Martin gives us a sneak preview of the origins of the book, and what readers can expect.
I grew up in Nottingham. Geographically, it meant we were defined by what we weren’t. We weren’t part of the South, the seat of power and money and all things posh. Nor were we part of the North, which stood for either gritty industry or majestic nature. By contrast, we had none of that. We were Midlanders, in the middle, in between. What did that mean?
One day when I was ten, in my last year of primary school, our teacher, Mr. Brown, who managed to be both avuncular and terrifying simultaneously, doubled down on this curious middle-ground status we occupied by asking everyone in the class whether we pronounced the word ‘scone’ to rhyme with gone or stone. There was a split in the class, and, highly satisfied with this outcome, Mr. Brown announced that he’d been doing an experiment with us. According to him, people above the River Trent pronounced it to rhyme with gone, and below the River Trent to rhyme with stone. Because the River Trent ran right through the middle of the city, we were like the scone pronunciation borderland. You would expect a pronunciation split in this particular part of the country. Finally! Some meaning and drama to living where we did.
Sadly, this sensation didn’t survive internet fact checking decades later, but the seed of intrigue with borderland states that I already had was watered and has grown over time to exist in the form of the book I’ve now written. In fact, the more time I spent looking into borderlands, the more it occurred to me that a major characteristic of modern life is transacting a lot of ill-defined states that lack stability or clear definition. The rise and rise of the word ‘liminal’ is testimony to that. As a result, one contention in the book is that we are living in The Age of Between.
It became a hard job to stop writing about different types of ‘betweeens’, because when you start looking, they are everywhere, but I’ve ended up limiting myself to a few main themes. They include the rise of liminality – why it has grown the way it has, and why it is such a feature of contemporary culture; the betweens of the self (the space between you and non-you); the space between people (such as personal relationships and the modern fixation with boundaries); geographical borders and borders in nature. I also spend time looking at writers and their relationship to liminal spaces and the borderlands in general. My sense is that of all professions, writers have arguably the best intuitive connection to borderland sensibilities, and I look at a few writers who have captured that perfectly.
If that sounds interesting, it’s available to pre-order now from Waterstones online and Amazon, and for ease, those links are below. There’s also a link to my Substack, which will continue to explore new angles around betweenish thinking.
– Martin Lee
Links:
https://www.waterstones.com/author/martin-lee/493737