The most eccentric obituary that Ann Wroe has written for The Economist was of a carp called Benson, which lurked in a lake near Peterborough and was caught – and briefly cuddled – by anglers more than 50 times, before dying of a surfeit of tiger nuts. “In her glory days, she reminded some of Marilyn Monroe, some of Raquel Welch,” wrote Wroe of the fish, while thinking enviously how much easier it was to be an angler than to be an obituarist like her, “catching souls” week after week in only 1,000 words.
Wroe is a full-blooded Romantic: the membrane between her and the world is very thin. For her weekly obituary, which she has contributed since 2003, she can put herself in anyone’s shoes, whether they are an alien abductee, a “bunga bunga” statesman, Osama bin Laden or the inventor of vanilla frosting. When writing her 2007 book Being Shelley, she found herself holding forth at parties on the rights of man. In acting terms, she is pure Method.
Most of her eight books to date have been on famous people about whom we know frustratingly little, such as Pontius Pilate, St Francis and Orpheus, subjects that tempt her “like a field of virgin snow”. I prefer her second book, A Fool and His Money (1995), which (conversely) was about people who are not famous – the inhabitants of a 14th-century French town – but about whom we can know a marvellously unexpected amount, thanks to a gossipy trove of documents she found in a library. What all her books have in common is that they are sophisticated reflections on what is the truest story we can tell about any given life – this business of “soul catching”.
So it is with Wroe’s newest, Lifescapes: A Biographer’s Search for the Soul, which feels like the culmination of all she has done so far. It is the closest thing she has written to a memoir, but remains studded with rich chunks of other people’s lives, drawing on her many Economist obituaries. “I have tried many ways of ambushing life, in long form or short, from a quick haiku to doorstop biographies,” she tells us. Only one thing is certain: “Life always gets away.”
Lifescapes is about the thrill of that chase: trying to pin down her own life, her life as a life-catcher, other people’s lives, and life itself. Digressions and sub-themes include, but are not limited to: the sea, Covid-19, birds, clarinets, dreams, blood, breath, landscapes (inner and outer), death and God. For the avoidance of doubt, this is a book about everything, and in lesser hands, it would be a mess. But although Wroe walks the precipice, and her glissando trains of thought may induce the occasional “huh?”, the result is a controlled, full-colour, far-out kaleidoscope.
