Guest review by Alison Layland: SARN HELEN, a Journey through Wales, Past, Present and Future, by Tom Bullough

"What a journey he takes us on! Far more than a travelogue, far more than nature writing, far more than a social history of Wales, this is a cry from the heart." 

Photograph by Trina Layland

Alison Layland is the author of two psychological thrillers: Someone Else’s Conflict, a compelling narrative of storytelling and the aftermath of war, and Riverflow, a story of family secrets and community tensions against a background of flooding and environmental protest. She also writes short stories and flash fiction; she won the short story competition at the National Eisteddfod in 2002, and her story Quirky Robbers is featured in the Honno crime anthology, Cast A Long Shadow. Her new novel, After the Clearances, a climate fiction novel set in 2050 Wales, will be published by Honno in July 2025.

When not writing, she is an environmental and social campaigner, who enjoys walking, crafting, growing and foraging around her home on the beautiful coast of Anglesey. More on Alison's website.

Until recently, serious consideration of the climate and nature crises was relatively rare in books aimed at a general readership. How wonderful, then, to see the trend changing as this passionate book was chosen as the overall winner of the Welsh Book of the Year 2024.

The titular Sarn Helen – Helen’s Causeway, a Roman road running the length of Wales from Neath in the south to Llandudno and the Great Orme in the north – is the thread that binds Tom Bullough’s insightful observations together. The author began his long-distance walk, which he undertook in sections over the period of almost a year, in 2020, following the first Covid lockdown – potent timing, since this zoonotic pandemic was yet another consequence of the damage people are doing, and have done, to the natural world. The precise route of Sarn Helen has been lost in places, but with a blend of detective work and guesswork, he managed to follow to its end. Like the conquering Romans who built the road, it has been superseded and overlaid by centuries of development – a fitting portent for the direction in which our modern society is heading.

And what a journey he takes us on! Far more than a travelogue, far more than nature writing, far more than a social history of Wales, this is a cry from the heart. The writing is immersive and each chapter is preceded by a wonderful illustration by renowned artist, Jackie Morris, who also provides the cover. Yet even here, there is a dark undercurrent, for we are told in the introduction that each of the fifteen beautiful species – birds, mammals, insects and plants – are among the 17% of species threatened with imminent national extinction. This sets the tone, for while describing the landscapes he walks through, their people and wildlife, in all their glory and diversity, Tom Bullough never lets us forget the threats they are facing, or the damage that has been done – from over-grazed uplands to the all-pervasive noise pollution of aeroplanes and other vehicles.

It’s often hard to strike the right balance when writing about the climate – too much doom and gloom and readers either despair or are driven to feel there’s nothing they can do so why bother? Too much optimism and it’s easy to give the impression that all’s well with the world. Sarn Helen strikes just the right balance. The author’s passion for the Welsh landscape and people, its wildlife, mythology and history, shines through, celebrating what is all around us, but never shying away from the what we have lost and still stand to lose, as well as the desperate need for change. Although the nature writing, conveyed with a vivid attention to detail, is beautiful, the book shows that, as in the wider world, the problems facing Wales are not all directly related to the climate and nature. He explores Wales’s social and industrial history in some depth, even looking back to mythological times and chronicling a fascination with the Celtic saints, whose world was much closer to nature and more respectful of the ecosystems around us than our own.

For some chapters, and sections of his walk, he is joined by poet and novelist Chris Meredith, with whom he discusses the industrial history of the Valleys and the impact of the post-industrial legacy on both landscape and people, and by writer and fellow activist Jay Griffiths, whose observations add companionable touches of spark and humour. Throughout, from the industrial to the agricultural, people are the key. Miners or farmers, saints or Roman conquerors, people are placed in the context of their landscape. Climate breakdown and nature depletion not only impact the natural world, but the people who live there – and it is the people who hold the key to the solutions.

These moments of companionship are full of relatable debate, humour and fascinating dialogue. The other interludes, however, are a stark clarion call: the travelogue is punctuated by interviews with experts – a climate scientist, an ecologist, a coastal scientist and a geographer – which add scientific context but also a terrifying intensity. Although they set out the problems facing Wales, and the wider world, clearly and objectively, the interviewees’ despair at the lack of action to halt climate change and nature depletion is pervasive and their emotions all the more hard-hitting coming from professionals in their respective fields.

A similar authenticity is added by the author’s own campaigning. While protesting with Extinction Rebellion in September 2020, he was arrested, and his journey along Sarn Helen is interrupted in April 2021 by a court hearing. The text of his speech to the court is deeply personal and moving – the more poignant today as environmental protesters are now banned by law from presenting such defences.

Actions speak louder than words – or do they? In the case of Sarn Helen, Tom Bullough’s beautifully crafted words are as potent as many actions, in that they will hopefully inspire anyone who reads them, firstly, to love and value the world around them, and then to do all they can to try and put a stop to the damage that modern society is causing.

Sarn Helen by Tom Bullough, with illustrations by Jackie Morris, is published by Granta, 2023

Alison Layland's Riverflow is reviewed here by Linda Newbery.

A VOICE IN THE NIGHT by Simon Mason, reviewed by Adèle Geras

" ... a nuanced rivalry which veers from irritation to anger to wonderfully complicated friendship which neither man would actually describe as such, but which is nevertheless real and touching."

Adèle Geras has written many books for children and young adults and seven novels for adults, the latest of which (under the pseudonym Hope Adams) is Dangerous Women, published by Michael Joseph. She lives in Cambridge.

For anyone who does not know him, Simon Mason is, as well as a wonderful writer, a friend of this blog. He was our special guest recently and we are fans of his work.

On one level, Mason might be said to write quite a traditional sort of crime story. His Wilkins and Wilkins series (I'm calling them that. I haven't seen them described so in newspapers) contains two cops, contrasted in many ways, solving crimes in a particular area. There are the accustomed wisecracks, of course, but in addition this pair share both a surname and initials. They started work on the same day but the differences between them couldn't be greater. Of course, these lead to much comedy along the way but also create a nuanced rivalry which veers from irritation to anger to wonderfully complicated friendship which neither man would actually describe as such, but which is nevertheless real and touching. On the cover of A Voice in the Night, Mick Herron calls them "crime fiction's most entertaining double act in decades" and he's right.

Ray Wilkins is very handsome, Black, sharply dressed and a graduate. Ryan Wilkins is skinny as a rake, wears dreadful clothes (a lime green puffa jacket features in this book) and comes from a decaying estate. His father was abusive. His late wife died of a drug overdose. He's no beauty but has a fine line in repartee and huge charm, at least for me. He's what would definitely be called "poor white trash" in the USA. But he has a superb instinct for people, and can deal with them in a way most other policemen cannot. He lives with his sister, Jade, who works at the Co-op. Most importantly of all, he's father to little Ryan who is easily the most wonderful toddler I can remember in recent fiction. The relationship between father and son is what lifts these novels up out of the general run of crime books. It's movingly described and often provides another dimension to whatever is going on in the police action.

This novel is the fourth in the series. I am a believer in starting series with Book 1, but it's not strictly necessary. What you miss starting with Book 4 is the history: what's gone on between Ryan and his son, between Ryan and Ray, between Ryan and his police chiefs, between the police and a nice assortment of low-life living and committing crime around Oxford. My advice: you ought to buy all four books at once ...

This one is terrific. The body of a linguistics professor is found still dressed in his pyjamas, dripping wet and lying on the lawn in front of a hotel. There's also been a security guard stabbed to death during an armed robbery. On top of all that, there's a new female officer in charge of things at the station and charged with clearing up these matters. DCS Wainwright is much more than she at first appears, and very interesting.

Meanwhile, back home, Jade and little Ryan are threatened by a gang whom Ryan has met before. Michael, the chief young yobbo, is superbly described. Even villains in Mason's book are portrayed in a three-dimensional way.

Just over half way through the book, something happens that was like a sledgehammer to the heart. I'm not saying another word. But be assured, in the end we reach a solution. Mason even manages to pull off that wonderful trick of a surprise as the last thing we read ... a rare event in fiction. I hope lots of people get to know Ray and Ryan before the inevitable TV adaptation, because (and I am not sure why I've left this till the end) one of the glories of these novels is the way they're written. Oxford and the countryside around it come subtly to life and every sentence is elegant and perfectly judged. Mason's prose is not show-offish or mannered but simply elegant and suited in every way to the story he's telling.

A Voice in the Night is published by riverrun.

Simon Mason's feature for our 8th birthday last July: on the crime fiction of Peter Temple.

Guest review by Mary Hoffman: THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY by Amor Towles

 

"It is impossible to describe the last, climactic, section without giving spoilers so I will just say it is unexpected and you will race through those pages and, if you are like me, immediately want to re-read them."

Mary Hoffman’s first book, a YA novel, was published in 1975. Since then she has written 125 books, mainly for children and teenagers but also a couple of adult novels under pseudonyms. After graduating in English Literature from Cambridge and spending a couple of years studying Linguistics at UCL, Mary wrote courses for the Open University for five years but then went freelance. Mary’s books have been translated into 31 languages and have won prizes; she also runs the popular History Girls blog. Mary lives in West Oxfordshire with her husband. They are currently catless but not for long. In 2025 her big book for children about food, Food for All, is published by Otter-Barry Books and the new Writers Review Publishing is reissuing her adult novel, David: the Unauthorised Autobiography, the story of the model for Michelangelo’s famous statue in Florence.

The thing about Amor Towles is that, like so many excellent novelists writing currently, all his books are different. I came across him first when my Book Club chose his A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) as its title for the month’s discussion. It was one of those rare novels which everyone in the group loved, including me.

I then sought out Rules of Civility (2011) which was unrecognisable as by the same author, even though it was good in a different way. Gentleman was the very unusual story of a Russian aristocrat five years after the 1917’s revolution who, as an alternative to execution, is confined to lifelong house arrest in the Hotel Metropol. He has lost his liberty but, thanks to some clever sleight of hand, not his fortune.

Civility has more of a Scott Fitzgerald feel, though set in the late ‘30s in Manhattan. And then, five years later, came The Lincoln Highway, quite different again.

The novel begins when Emmett Watson, aged eighteen is released from Salina, a work farm for juvenile offenders, after involuntarily causing the death of a contemporary who was taunting and provoking him. The Warden of the detention centre drives him “home” to his father’s farm in Nebraska. But what is home? Emmett’s mother disappeared years ago, his father has died and the bank is foreclosing on the farm.

What makes it home is Emmett’s little brother Billy, who has a plan for what they should do next – set off in Emmett’s car to drive to California and find their mother. We don’t know if this would have worked because it is disrupted before it begins. Two other inmates from Salina have stowed away in the Warden’s boot and these two complete the quartet that go on the weirdest road trip ever.

There is Duchess, a charming but unreliable teenager who turns out to have an alarming approach to restorative justice, and a very rich boy who has just reached his majority, who has problems concentrating. Together they, but mainly Duchess, persuade Emmett that they need to head east before they hit the Lincoln Highway west. Duchess has scores to settle and Woolly has an inheritance to collect.

The four boys don’t always stay together, largely due to the unpredictability and hazy morality of Duchess, whose approach to justice is somewhat haphazard. This gives Towles the opportunity to develop adventures which used to be called “picaresque.” A large cast of characters encounter our heroes together and severally. Emmett is completely focussed on getting his car, “borrowed” by Duchess, back, Billy keeps the main goal of finding their mother at the forefront of his mind but is distracted by comparing the people he meets with his Compendium of Heroes, a book he treasures in his backpack.

Duchess and Woolly are harder to read. They are both traumatised and we have to read on to find out how and why. The book is organised into ten sections, maddeningly beginning at 10 and counting down to 1, even though the story travels forward in a linear direction. In each section there are parts told from the points of view of the four main characters and some minor ones, though only Duchess’s are in the first person. Paradoxically, he is the character whose motives and actions are hardest to decipher.

He appears to be on a campaign of retribution, rather than justice, of which the confrontation with the father who abandoned him as a child should be the climax. But Towles swerves their actual meeting. We know it has happened and perhaps Emmett has guessed what form it took but a lot is left to the reader to infer.

At the end, the four boys are together again in Woolly’s family’s mansion by a lake in the Adirondacks. It is impossible to describe the last, climactic, section without giving spoilers so I will just say it is unexpected and you will want to race through those pages and, if you are like me, immediately want to re-read them.

It is full of memorable characters, especially Duchess and Billy, though it feels sometimes as if the author is deliberately creating them to be idiosyncratic. That and what I can only feel is a plot hole at the end, in spite of several re-readings, make it not quite the masterpiece thar A Gentleman in Moscow is but I applaud Towles’ determination to write something completely different. By my reckoning the next novel should be out next year; I can’t wait.

The Lincoln Highway is published by Penguin.  

Mary has also reviewed A Gentleman in Moscow.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Q & A with Màiri Kidd on her new novel THE SPECIMENS

 

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"Sometimes it can seem that books set in Scotland face extra challenges south of the Border and I do hope it reaches readers outside Scotland too – I don’t think it’s a country-bound story, much of what it has to say about power and agency (or lack thereof) is really universal."

Màiri Kidd is Director at the Saltire Society and was formerly Head of Literature, Languages and Publishing at Creative Scotland and Managing Director of Barrington Stoke, a prize-winning publisher. A fluent Gaelic speaker, she has an MA in Celtic Studies from Edinburgh University. As CEO of Stòrlann, the National Gaelic Education Resource Agency, she worked with Scottish Government, Bòrd na Gàidhlig and local authorities. Mairi is a contributor to BBC Radio nan Gàidheal’s books coverage and writes for broadcast, including Gaelic comedy series FUNC. The Specimens is her first novel for adults.

Up the close and down the stair, meet the women of Burke and Hare ...

Edinburgh, 1828. Two women - one rich, one poor - must navigate life against a frenzied backdrop of medical discovery, mob mayhem, and murder.

The home Helen shares in the slums of the Old Town with her lover William Burke could hardly be more different from Susan's dreams of an affluent existence as the wife of Robert Knox, one of the foremost anatomists of the day. But as people begin disappearing, these two very different women face an impossible choice. Should they protect what lives they have or tell the truth about what they know?

This is the story of the notorious serial killings of Burke and Hare, told for the first time through the eyes of two very different women, whose stories explore the depths of the human heart in a perilous, vulnerable world.

WR: Firstly, congratulations - this is a compelling read which I finished within three days. And the book is very handsomely produced by Black & White Publishing, with its striking cover. I certainly learned more about the exploits of Burke and Hare than I'd known previously, and looked up more details after finishing. You've written widely on folklore and feminism but I believe this is your first novel for adults. What was the impulsion behind it - was this something you'd been thinking about for some while?

Màiri: Thank you!

The motivation for writing about the Burke and Hare case was originally to give (fictional) voice to the voiceless. I have previously sought to do this by writing non-fiction and short fiction about Scotland’s ‘witches’, who have a lot in common with the Burke and Hare victims - mostly women, generally poor and powerless, and their bodies were destroyed after death. In both cases, also, there’s a general perception that the facts are well known and well understood whereas in truth, many people hold serious misconceptions about the witches and about Burke and Hare, and so there’s a lot to explore. I did flirt with the idea of working in short format and with non-fiction but Black and White encouraged me to write it as a novel and I’m glad they did.

WR: I was astonished to read in the Acknowledgments that you drafted the novel in just a few months, alongside your full-time job and a position on the board of MG Alba (the BBC's partner in delivering media services through Gaelic). Had you already done much of the plotting and research before that?

Màiri: First off, I should perhaps say I don’t recommend this as a way of working - there were various reasons behind the short turnaround, but of course it wasn’t ideal. Needs must, though, and I had to find a way to make it work to my benefit. I told myself if would be as though I were living the plot in real time – the killings happened over about a year – and the fact I was often working at night certainly helped with the dark atmosphere I wanted.

I hadn’t plotted the book at all before I began – all I had written was one of the victims’ narratives as a short story. I knew the basics of the story because I grew up here and it is very widely known, and I plotted it very strictly to help make best use of the writing time (I did deviate a bit from my outline in the end, but not much). In terms of research, I was lucky in that I wanted to know the facts but thereafter rather to avoid reading other people’s analyses of the whys and wherefores so I could make up my own mind. That saved some time…

WR: Your novel covers a span of nine years, not including the prologue and epilogue, and is told from the viewpoints of several characters - mainly Helen, the lover of William Burke, and Susan, the wife of anatomist Robert Knox. How did you decide on this structure? Was it difficult to contain so much information within the frame of the novel?

Màiri: I am a big fan of Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper and wished that a treatment of that sort might be possible for the Burke and Hare crimes, but it just isn’t. The killings happened around sixty years earlier, before universal registration, the victims were often itinerant, and their remains were destroyed. It’s unlikely that we will ever know more than we do, and it’s not enough for a book. I hit, then, on the idea of writing about the women in Burke and Hare’s lives as a means of telling the story. Helen MacDougall immediately presented as a medium for the ‘action’, and as I began to read more about the case, I discovered that Knox the anatomist – Burke and Hare’s ‘client’ – had a wife no one knew existed because (as one of the few who knew her understood) she wasn’t of an appropriate social standing. From this I began to think in terms of a two-hander with victims’ stories interwoven throughout.

The greatest challenge I found I faced wasn’t the volume of information – the women don’t have all the information at any point in the book – but rather creating a twin plot. That took some tweaking of timelines so that the set pieces of Helen’s and Susan’s stories could work as one novel, and there were times I struggled with that. I had a lot of pieces of paper on my desk with dates and times for different happenings and I scratched my head a great deal.

WR: The selling of dead bodies will come as no surprise to the majority of readers, who will know what's going on behind the scenes at Tanners Close and Dr Knox's surgical theatre for some while before either of the women, Helen or Susan, begins to suspect. Yet there's still plenty of tension as events unfold - was this something you felt you needed to address?

Màiri: I think that was my greatest concern as I worked – how can one sustain tension when the ‘end’ is known to almost every reader? My ‘solution’ was to try to use that foreknowledge to create a sense of dread in Susan and Helen’s stories as the reader knows more than they do. In the stories of the victims, I wanted to focus on their lives, so their ends arrive very quickly and aren’t really the point at all. That was my tribute to The Five.

WR: As we enter into the relationship between Helen MacDougal and William Burke, Helen having been treated with horrible brutality by her late husband, we see that William can be kind, tender, considerate and even conscience-stricken, and sense that his fate could have turned out very differently. Did this come from your research, or was it your wish to differentiate between him and the apparently far more callous William Hare?

Màiri: This is something a lot of readers have asked me about – they struggle with the idea that Burke might have been likeable at times. I think he must have been, because he was able to earn the trust of some of the victims, and indeed one poor woman was handed into his care by a policeman, presumably on the understanding she’d sleep off the alcohol she’d drunk in the lodging house. His relationship with Helen was of long standing and seems to have held some level of genuine affection.

Fundamentally, I understood Burke as weak, uncontrolled, violent, self-pitying but broadly ‘normal’ – he wasn’t a psychopath, he felt remorse as far as we can tell, being dependent on alcohol and opium to sleep during the killings. The motivations of people without empathy don’t interest me, but the actions of people who should know better do.

Perhaps, too, there is some bias in me – when we learned the story as children, of course we learned that Hare turned on Burke in the end, and got off Scot free. That has rankled ever after in the Scottish mind, I think!

WR: The reader is encouraged to sympathise with Helen, who wants to see the best in her lover - but do you think she is too forgiving, to the point of complicity?

Màiri: I think ‘my’ Helen does something many of us will recognise – put kindly, seeing the best in people, or less kindly, turning a blind eye to significant concerns. People are terribly torn in their loyalties when loved ones do awful things – just look at the partners of perpetrators in the Pélicot case in France who have refused to accept the wrongdoing of their partners.

The level to which the real Helen was complicit is unclear and I had to make a call on that for the book. In my early reading around the case, I was struck by the fact that the Hares wanted William Burke to kill Helen, and Burke took Helen out of Edinburgh for a time, presumably to keep her safe. They seem to have left the Hares’ house thereafter. That doesn’t really speak to me of a fully complicit member of the ‘gang’. Again, though, I recognise my own biases! Helen was described by one commentator as a female ‘of the degraded sort’ and that perhaps made me pity her. Society definitely viewed people in that way, had no ambition for them and accordingly offered no safety net, creating the conditions for people without a strong moral compass to be motivated and able to do awful things, or to turn a blind eye.

WR: Susan, Dr Knox's (supposed) wife, is largely your own creation, and in her way she is just as much a 'specimen' as the bodies procured by Burke and Hare - kept in close confinement, repeatedly pregnant and used shockingly as the object of observation and experimentation. You cleverly use the device of the dolls' house and its miniatures both to emphasise her infantilisation by Knox and to link her story with Helen's, and later to reach a kind of resolution. How did this idea come to you?

Màiri: The idea of miniatures came to me in part because the plot links to a set of miniature coffins found on Edinburgh’s city centre volcano Arthur’s Seat in the early 1830s and which are traditionally associated with the killings. Recent research has suggested that the coffins were made with cobblers’ tools and that suggested a plot thread to me.

More broadly, the idea of collecting is key to the novel. During the period in which it is set, the real-life Knox manoeuvred his way into a role as curator of the Surgeon’s Hall Museum where – much later – Burke’s own skeleton would join the collection. The ethics of retention and display of medical specimens are the crux of the case and remain controversial into the present day. Interestingly, there is a tendency today to view the Burke and Hare story as though it was all about ‘medical progress’, whereas doctors like Knox were in it as much for profit and social advancement as the good of humanity.

Outside museums, ‘cabinets of curiosities’ were all the rage at the time, and the feminine equivalent was the baby house. I didn’t see Susan’s house as being infantilising – these were costly women’s treasures – but she does see it as a symbol of her imprisonment, only gradually realising she can use it to form a new allegiance.

WR: I found that one of the most moving chapters was the one from Abigail's point of view - a fictional character we accompany through a hard but successful day of trading that ends in her fateful encounter with Margaret and William Hare. These details of working life lived on the edge of poverty give the novel such colour and texture. The story of Burke and Hare has been recounted many times, but is yours the first to tell it entirely from the point of view of women?

Màiri: Generally the focus is on the murderers although I understand that one Victorian melodrama focused on one of the known victims - Mary Paterson, or, The Fatal Error by David Pae, originally serialised in the Dundee Courier. I don’t think anyone else has ever thought much about Susan, who really fascinated me. How could a man have a secret wife and seven children in a small place like Edinburgh?

WR: Having worked as publisher and editor, how did it feel to be sitting on the other side of the desk as an author?

Màiri: It is quite strange but I am lucky in that my publishers are very understanding and let me be involved in things like the briefs for covers. I hope that having experience on both sides of the desk means that I am not too hard to work with from my publishers’ perspective! I have of course learned immense amounts from working with so many authors I admire over the years (including one Linda Newbery – I think back very fondly on working with your books for Barrington Stoke, including the unusual experience of commissioning an embroidery for the book jacket of Tilly’s Promise!)

WR: (Ah, thank you ... I was so delighted with that cover!) What has been the response to the novel so far? It would make an excellent TV drama or film ... 

Màiri: The response has been very kind. It has been reviewed very positively in the most amazing places, and the Scottish press and booksellers in particular have been really generous. Sometimes it can seem that books set in Scotland face extra challenges south of the Border and I do hope it reaches readers outside Scotland too – I don’t think it’s a country-bound story, much of what it has to say about power and agency (or lack thereof) is really universal. I am also enough of a publisher to know that books must be positioned and its beautiful jacket says ‘women’s fiction’ to me, so I have been especially pleased when it has been reviewed by male readers like Teddy Jamieson in The Herald who have said it spoke to them too.

WR: Finally - will you be writing more historical fiction?

Màiri: I am just finishing the first draft of my next book and yes, it is historical. It hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t say an awful lot except that it is about a group of people who are generally incredibly well documented, but not for the period about which I am writing. It is set largely north of the Border but links to an iconic work of literature most people do not associate with Scotland at all…

WR: Well, that's an intriguing note to end on! Thanks so much, Màiri, for answering our questions and we hope The Specimens will reach many more appreciative readers.

The Specimens is published by Black & White Publishing.

Guest review by Laura Parker: THE PLACE OF TIDES by James Rebanks

 

"This experience has caused Rebanks to dig much deeper as a writer. His enforced time out has him reaching for greater profundity while maintaining a simple, thoughtful style."

Photograph: Kitty Parker

Laura Parker is the author of no books (yet), but she is working on one about drystone walls, and has written a growing collection of articles published by Country Life magazine. Her work covers animals and the art and history of the countryside. She has also been published in Little Toller’s The Clearing, an online journal in which writers explore and celebrate the landscape we live in, as well as in Scottish Field and Scottish daily The Courier. Find out more on Laura's website.

James Rebanks made his name with two books: one about his life as a shepherd in Cumbria (A Shepherd’s Life) and the other on the changing face of agriculture over three generations (English Pastoral). So he was right to warn his 150,000 X-followers that his next book would be different.

The Place of Tides takes him to Fjaerøy, a Norwegian island just below the Arctic Circle where he sheds his modern existence: no internet, barely any phone, limited power, no running water. For seventy days.

It is his account of ten weeks spent in the company of Anna, a woman of seventy determined to continue an age-old way of existence that she herself took up only later in life. Anna harvests down from eider ducks, gathering a material used for centuries for luxurious warmth, and continuing a tradition which has provided a living for the women of this fishing community since Viking times. It is a way of life that is dying out, not just because of cheaper and more abundant alternatives, but because the ducks themselves are getting scarcer.

Highlighting the fine balance between human intervention and nature, the ‘duck women’ build shelters for the birds as they come ashore to lay their eggs, and protect them from predators such as sea eagles and mink (the latter introduced by humans). In earning the trust of the ducks, their protectors take their reward at the end of the season by gathering the down the birds use to line the nests.

Rebanks discovers there is more to his stay than deploying his farming skills through raking seaweed or repairing shelters. Bewildered, he struggles to contain his impatience as the two women (Anna has brought a friend, Imogen) settle down indoors to knit for their first two weeks on the island. Rebanks is left unmoored, reflecting on the frenetic existence he has left behind, along with his wife and four children. He resolves to be a better husband and father. There are still eight weeks to go.

So far, so satisfying to a nature book reader: being taken to a remote frontier world, guided to closely examine a new habitat – there are many intricate observations of the wildlife and weather on the island – and to be made aware of a diminishing natural resource.

Unexpectedly, it is the deepening human relationships that become the heart of this book. Anna turns out to be different from Rebanks’s first arresting sight of her, a tiny but fierce ‘half-wild’ woman standing proud on the shoreline. She is older, frailer, at first unable to work. Constantly trying to be respectful of her world, Rebanks is frequently unsure how to proceed, a Gulliver in a strange land.

“I had sensed I ought to make myself much smaller, working to their commands, relinquishing responsibility.”

He realises, for the first time in his life, that he is in a place entirely run by women. By ‘paying attention’, he begins to see how men treat women, and he cringes. He also learns a great deal from Anna’s attitude to her work.

“Rarely have I seen anyone so absorbed in each living moment .. This way of living demanded a loss of self, a surrendering to the rocks, rain, wind and tides.”

Amid the poignancy – this is Anna’s last season – there are lessons for him, and for us.

“In this radically pared-back life she had found peace and meaning. She was the waves, the light, and the terns rising and falling on the bay. She was the guardian of this place … powerless against the scale of the natural forces at work and against the issues affecting the oceans, yet fierce in her determination to try.”

This experience has caused Rebanks to dig much deeper as a writer. His enforced time out has him reaching for greater profundity while maintaining a simple, thoughtful style.

Rebanks and the women leave the island with a harvest amounting to 2kg of down, which must then be painstakingly cleaned. It is barely enough to make two quilts. But both he and his readers have gleaned so much more about our threatened world.

The Place of Tides is published by Allen Lane.

See also: James Rebanks' English Pastoral reviewed by Judith Allnatt

Guest review by Graeme Fife: YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE by Dr Benji Waterhouse

"Waterhouse’s exposé of life on a very fragile front line is to be praised and read." 

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press. 

He gave the little wealth he had

To build a House for Fools and Mad:

And shew’d by one satyric Touch,

No nation wanted it so much.

On the death of Dr Swift, by Jonathan Swift

O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven.

King Lear

The old word for mental hospital was asylum (Latin form of the Greek for ‘refuge, safe haven’) and ‘loonies’ came from lunatics, those deluded people who raked at the moon’s reflection in a pond hoping to dredge up some silver, otherwise ‘moonrakers’. ‘Mentally disturbed’ is more sensitive if not so catchy.

Some time in 1903, a visitor arrived at an asylum in London and asked the official at the front desk if the clock on the wall was right. A man sweeping the floor of the entrance hall intervened: ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t be in here if it was right.’ That man was Dan Leno, celebrated music hall comedian and pantomime dame, known as ‘the King’s jester’ who had recently suffered a breakdown and was, temporarily, confined in an institution also known as a ‘bedlam’ that contraction of the Bethlehem named for St Mary near Elephant and Castle, a mental institution which charged visitors a fee to come in to watch the antics of the poor deranged inmates.

A young woman I knew in my teens used to say ‘I’m mad,’ giggling at some unconventional, frivolous, even childish thing she had just done. We may know what she meant but it’s not what she said and madness is no laughing matter. Somehow the apparent absurdity of reviewing a book, even so good a book as this, about mentally unbalanced people is a touch daft but, curiously, when I had been through a particularly stressful period for reasons needless to dilate on, reading this book uplifted me because Waterhouse is honest, compassionate and understanding and (I find) very funny. Not about the patients, no no, but in making jokes at his own expense, his failures and misreadings, and the sheer craziness of the system in which he and many others have to operate, the pressures and the impediments to efficiency, the lack of funds and facilities merely to take care of the very ill and needy.

The very words loony – which he clinically disavows – and concomitant loony bin betray our own reserve and shying away from mental illness and it’s an affliction which should give us all pause, every one of us. For that reason alone, read this book. I resist anyone telling me ‘this is funny’ because tastes differ. However, what Waterhouse does and with singular good humour – who knows how, given what his working life demands of him? -is to lay bare the plight of the many people whose reason fragments leaving them adrift and deluded by crazy ideas and with some difficulty I hold off from mentioning even one; better no spoilers, though some of the predicaments he describes stretch credibility taut to breaking.

No wonder that doctors resort to gallows humour, as do soldiers faced with imminent threat of death. Sometimes patients, too. Consider the poet Christopher Smart’s unwitting humour in the poem Jubilate Deo, possibly written inside Saint Luke’s asylum:

I will now consider my cat Jeffrey.

Waterhouse reins in, reserving his humour as a softer cushion for his continuing anguish, transferred from those he has to treat; the threat – sometimes carried out - of violence, the self-defence training which has to be part of his capabilities.

Even the Old Testament, not an obvious source of material for a stand-up comedian chimes in with the notion, in Proverbs, chapter 17, v 22: ‘A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.’ So there.

Care, consideration, cash…no such thing as a nostrum but these would all help and Waterhouse’s exposé of life on a very fragile front line is to be praised and read. We of sound mind need it and should be thankful. The weird jump-cut cinema of dreams is the most imbalance that most of us have to contend with.

You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here is published by Penguin.

More of Graeme's choices:

Thebes - the Forgotten City of Ancient Greece by Paul Cartledge

Emperor of Rome - Ruling the Ancient World by Mary Beard

Guest review by Caroline Pitcher: ABSOLUTELY & FOREVER by Rose Tremain

 

"How to capture and lock away this feeling? She would write it as fiction and experience it afresh. Luckily for her readers, this is what Rose Tremain has been doing ever since."

For Caroline Pitcher, writing is like living lots of lives. Mariana and the Merchild, written by Caroline and illustrated by Jackie Morris, is published by Otter-Barry books. Recently Graffeg have brought out new editions of Caroline's Lord of the Forest, illustrated by Jackie Morris and The Winter Dragon, illustrated by Sophy Williams. Now Caroline is dreaming further life stories from her favourite novel, Mine.

Fifteen-year-old Marianne falls for eighteen-year-old Simon with his dark flop of hair, with the kind of love that Simone de Beauvoir says `takes up all thoughts, all instants, it is obsessive, tyrannical.’ Certainly it dominates Marianne’s life `absolutely & forever.’

I have read many moving, lyrical and beautiful novels by Rose Tremain and loved them all, especially The Road Home, Music and Silence, Sacred Country, The Colour, and Merivel (which has possibly the filthiest scene I’ve read in any novel.) She writes about different times, settings and characters, usually at a good length. This is where Absolutely & Forever is different. It is short. On holiday, how would I cope, without one of her beautifully written worlds waiting for me for more than one day?

Well, Absolutely & Forever is a mesmerising coming-of-age story that stayed in my thoughts for the remainder of the stay, and beyond. It is set among the upper-middle classes `when England was still known as England and not as the You Kay.’ Disgrace afflicts families who fear losing their apparent status. Marianne sounds isolated, with little connection with Mummy (Lavender) or Daddy. Daddy’s face quite puce and stupid-looking from the gin and Mummy complaining that the lumpy grass hurt her ankles. Her boarding school was no retreat. Each morning a thermometer, tasting of disgusting Dettol, was shoved into your mouth by one of the three matrons. The girls sniff yesterday’s knickers before putting them on. Her friend says that parents hate their children because they know that they’re the past and we’re the future.

Marianne’s self-esteem is low, yet her narrative voice is ironic and witty. I had much sympathy for her and enjoyed the spot-on timely settings, of the King’s Road, brimful of creatures in tiny little slanty boxes for skirts and lone guys like gazelles in velvet trews and snakeskin boots. Marianne never quite fits in, despite eating a lot of spaghetti Milanese, getting fat and acne-ridden, drinking red wine and sleeping with well-known photographer Julius Templeman, who humiliates her, saying, `I never told you before, Marianne, but you are actually a lousy fuck.’

Her focussed friend Pet, too blunt and Scottish for Marianne’s parents, is at the brand-new University of Essex in a high grey tower, taking a course which is a `Study of Everything.’ I enjoyed these scenes, especially as I studied at the new University of Warwick a while later. Does this count as historical fiction?

There are excellent characters, such as freckled orange-haired Hugo Forster-Pellisier, his parents Jocelyn and Felicity, as I remembered I had to call them, in their Station Wagon. Hugo is funny and kind and Marianne likes his comforting todger, but she still dreams of Simon. She sees the future as `a life of boredom and shame.’

We read vivid accounts of Paris, a department store in Newbury, a wedding, working as an agony aunt on a magazine, horses, and the beginnings of a writer’s life. No more from me now, except to say that secrets affect the story in a big way. Perhaps nowadays these secrets would be less kept, not hidden, especially between the generations.

Let’s hope so.

Marianne does come to realise, however, that she loves the English countryside with oak trees and hedgerows and narrow English lanes threading towards hills and tumps.

Absolutely & Forever is both amusing and piercing as Marianne tries to find herself in spite of everything, with little encouragement from those around her. "Daddy’s glittery eye blinked and his head jerked upward and he said, Nobody should put their hopes in stories, Mops." It’s not all gloom. When Marianne pauses in reading her story to her mother, Mummy was staring at me. `Go on,’ she said.

Some years before this novel, Rose Tremain published a memoir Rosie – Scenes from a vanished life. It is dedicated to `Nan’ (who showed Rose her how to love) and Rose’s beloved grandchildren. Rose writes of her mother, Jane had no schooling in love…This was the tragedy of her existence. We crept away to Nan’s comforting lair.

When she is ten, Rose loses her father, her home and welcoming school to a cold boarding school in Hertfordshire. Like Marianne, she feels stifled and yet finds her way out. She longs to be destined to be something, and fortunately has a memorable moment, a summertime epiphany when she was thirteen or fourteen, a profound feeling of wonder, a fleeting sense of the marvellous, which in its intensity, was almost a visionary experience. It slips away, leaving desolation. How to capture and lock away this feeling?

She would write it as fiction and experience it afresh.

Luckily for her readers, this is what Rose Tremain has been doing ever since.

Absolutely & Forever is published by Vintage.