Callum Robinson, Ingrained

November isn't the best time for me to read with the sensitivity that I mean always to bring to this activity. Still, book club continues, and so on to Callum Robinson's Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman. (It's not for a few months yet, but I didn't know when I'd get to it if not now, so.)

In brief, Ingrained wasn't the book I expected, and I'm sad about that. Before opening its pages, I didn't bother thinking about what I might expect, but probably I assumed it'd be more about the making of a craftsman.

The book's subtitle almost certainly embodied the book's concept, or at least its pitch to readers (and probably the publisher), but that's not what I got out of Ingrained. Instead, I enjoyed Robinson's semi-archaeological visits to woodyards and the sensory intimacy thereof (the stinks, the slivers, and so on), plus the dramatic tension around the collapse of his bespoke business and the urgent necessity of getting a storefront shop going, plus the occasional recollections of childhood (mis)adventures with tools and carpentry, all of which was good stuff.

But beneath and around all of those things, Ingrained is mostly the story of:

• how someone whose business focused on making gorgeous, unattainably expensive wooden objects for the obscenely wealthy
• found themselves screwed over by same, but
• managed to keep making payroll by rapidly stitching together a shop in Linlithgow in order to sell gorgeous, barely attainably expensive wooden objects, and
• who has since shut down the shop in order to ... well, resume mostly making gorgeous, once again unattainably expensive wooden objects.

Like I said, I haven't read this book with enough sensitivity. Robinson's studio makes beautiful things, utterly beautiful (though not as much as his father's), and I sympathize with the book's narrative of how Robinson wandered away from craft into management and was sad about the trajectory. 

It's just that I would've been a lot happier with the book promised by the subtitle, The Making of a Craftsman. If there'd been more craft, more wood, more tools, then I'd be more likely to say that the critical praise was well-founded. That's not the book that was delivered, though, so I feel unnecessarily truculent about the critical praise. 

In particular, I have to say that I've found a whole bunch of critics whose views on prose I now distinctly distrust. I'm sure that Robinson's editors had good reason for emphasizing the sentence fragment throughout (voice? authenticity? make the construction work visible, symbolically, like?), but their frequency drove me batty.

I enjoyed Robinson's turn of phrase just fine, and the sense of narrative works, and a'that, but Stephen Finch in The Scotsman, by way of example, what are you doing with "Robinson doesn’t just have a way with wood, he has a way with words too"? As a wildly talented woodworker himself, Finch is maybe the perfect reader for this book, but this doesn't make him a great proxy for the rest of us.

And John Vaillant, who I respect enormously, how can we possibly be meant to take your blurb seriously: "I didn't think it possible to blend the tones and sensibilities of James Herriot and Anthony Bourdain, but Callum Robinson has done it--in wood!" (Exclamation mark Vaillant's.) I mean, maybe Vaillant's cunningly saying that Robinson did these things in wood but NOT in words, but somehow I think that might've come up at some point in the editorial process. I've hated on blurbs before, and I've promised myself to stop, but this one kind of hurt.

Long story short: Robinson has given a compelling portrait of himself and his team, on both sides of this hinge in their history together, but Ingrained wasn't for me, and I'm not sure why so many critics seem to have felt that it very much was for them. Are there that few manly books falling into their laps?