posted on 23 Jan 2022

The White Road by Edmund de Waal

The subtitle of this book is “(a) journey into obsession” which turns out to be a phrase that is just about the perfect encapsulation of the tone and spirit that lies behind De Waal’s mix of history, travel, personal memoir and professional technical expertise.

De Waal really is obsessed with porcelain – which is a phrase you might be tempted to use casually and colloquially about a man who is one of the world's leading ceramic artists. But actually, what this book lays out before us isn’t just the story of a powerful professional interest, it really is an all-consuming passion. He’s a man on a mission to trace back the roots, origins and early days of this “white gold” – for him this is an emotional, spiritual and physical pilgrimage.

De Waal’s hugely successful and popular earlier book, The Hare With Amber Eyes, was reviewed here on this site back in 2016 and reviewer, Alun Severn noted that  ‘at times it seems de Waal’s research and travel and background reading will spin out of control and overwhelm him’  and it turns out that this is a phrase that could equally well be applied to this book. In fact, by the time you’ve finished the 400 pages you’ll maybe think, as I do, that unlike the earlier book, The White Road actually fails to control the avalanche of research, speculation and repetitive detail that comes at the reader in what is at times an almost staccato, epigrammatic form.

But, having said all that, de Waal’s persona and mastery of prose writing actually makes the book congenial and, in large sections, compulsive reading. It's true that the book lacks editorial discipline and can be a baggy monster at times but  anyone who understands what it is to have an obsessive interest in anything will immediately tune into de Waal’s. You'll find yourself identifying with his drive to unpick detail and lay his hands on samples of this magical white porcelain - items that somehow embody notions of absolute ‘purity’.

When it comes to summarising the content of the book, I can’t really do much better than to reproduce the book’s own blurb from the Penguin edition:

“A handful of clay from a Chinese hillside carries a promise: that mixed with the right materials, it might survive the fire of the kiln, and fuse into porcelain - translucent, luminous, white.
Acclaimed writer and potter Edmund de Waal sets out on a quest - a journey that begins in the dusty city of Jingdezhen in China and travels on to Venice, Versailles, Dublin, Dresden, the Appalachian Mountains of South Carolina and the hills of Cornwall to tell the history of porcelain. Along the way, he meets the witnesses to its creation; those who were inspired, made rich or heartsick by it, and the many whose livelihoods, minds and bodies were broken by this obsession. It spans a thousand years and reaches into some of the most tragic moments of recent times.

In these intimate and compelling encounters with the people and landscapes who made porcelain, Edmund de Waal enriches his understanding of this rare material, the 'white gold' he has worked with for decades.”

In truth, fascinating though the story of porcelain is, I suspect that unless you are intimately involved with the production of the pottery or collecting some of the finer pieces, it’s really going to be the history, the people and the places that de Waal conjures up as he indulges his obsession that will really grab you. Who knew, for example, just how important porcelain was to the Nazis or what a driven and ruthless entrepreneur Josiah Wedgewood was?

The book is an eccentricity and like all eccentrics de Waal somehow manages to make a subject that on face value shouldn’t grab my attention into a page-turner that you're prepared to forgive for all its manifest weaknesses and its tendency to outstay its welcome.

Paperback editions are available and affordable but the hardback is a lovely production and well worth the slightly extra cost.

 

Terry Potter

January 2022