The Marshes by Samuel Wright and Josh Lustig – review

‘Brooding and mysterious’: An image from the book. Photograph: Josh Lustig

The Marshes are the wildest chunk of Hackney.

They are the inner-city equivalent of The Outback.

Part of a green lung in the valley of the River Lea, they have always been a hit among melancholics.

The literary tradition surrounding them is continued by Samuel Wright, a teacher whose fiction has attracted accolades – he won the Society of Authors’ Tom-Gallon Trust award last month and has been shortlisted for other prizes.

His stories have been published alongside images by photographer Josh Lustig in an amazing collaboration that evokes the special nature of the land that inspired it.

The Marshes are of course part of a the Lee Valley Regional Park, which extends to Hertfordshire, but The Marshes focuses on the Hackney, Walthamstow and Leyton bits where dumped exhaust pipes are entwined with weeds and railway tracks flank horses.

It’s a rare sort of place that reminds us even in a world as high tech as ours there are places just beyond our front doors that are not completely knowable.

Lustig’s black and white photographs are brooding and mysterious, and Wright’s stories are tender and allusive, with the merest hint of the sinister.

The main story, ‘Best Friend’, which has also been published by Galley Beggar Press as an ebook (priced £1), uses the relationship between two schoolboys as a vehicle for portraying wildness.

It is a running theme. In another story, ‘So Many Places to Sit Here’, Wright’s narrator speaks of finding condoms discarded in vegetation and says: “I imagine slim skinned teenagers rutting like dogs with mud on the backs of their jeans and leaves spiked on their stilettos. Robert told me it wasn’t nature, but I don’t know where he got that from. He said nature was wild. I said, what was wilder than a gang-fuck behind a bush?”

This bewitching book is itself an object to cherish.

Like some rare plant there are only 300 copies in existence, and it has been beautifully printed and lovingly hand bound and contains, among other surprises, a little page of letterpress type printed in Stepney.

Lustig rightly says the tactile and intimate feel could not be replicated online.

Like The Marshes themselves, The Marshes will not be digitised.

The Marshes by Samuel Wright and Josh Lustig is published by Tartaruga Press. ISBN 978-0-9576446-0-1. RRP £22.