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

THIRD ANNIVERSARY POST No.1 by guest Jill Paton Walsh: SCENES FROM A CHILDHOOD by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls

Photograph by Julia Hedgecoe

"What an extraordinary writer Jon Fosse is!"

Jill Paton Walsh has been a professional author since 1966.  She has written for children of many ages, from toddlers to teenagers,  has written five literary novels and more recently four detective stories with her own detective. She has also been pursuing the cast of characters in Dorothy L Sayers' famous Lord Peter Wimsey stories into their later adult lives.

She has lectured extensively about children's literature, predominantly in the United States, where her children's books have won several major prizes.  In the UK one of her adult novels, Knowledge of Angels, was a near miss for the 1994 Man Booker prize. 

She is that odd person – an Oxford graduate happily resident in Cambridge.  

My grand-daughter Catherine has grown up in Australia, so I have not seen very much of her during her childhood. She was rather sporty and talkative and not much interested in reading. Now she is in England for her gap year, and is visiting me regularly in Cambridge. Of course she has changed in many ways, but the most striking to me is that for her Heffer’s is the central sanctum of the city.

She is suddenly reading voraciously and buying books with all her spare cash.

With the excuse that she wants to know what I think of this author and that, she is controlling my own reading, concentrating on titles like Normal People by Sally Rooney, which I managed to read half way through… but at 82 I quickly found that teenaged sex was not fascinating for me.

However, she recently demanded that I read a book by a writer I must confess I had never heard of - Scenes from a Childhood  by Jon Fosse, translated from Norwegian by Damian Searles, and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

This is a collection of short stories of a strange and fragmented kind. When Catherine mentioned it to me I thought first of Schumann, and then inaccurately of Chekhov. But I was quickly very intrigued by the copy Catherine bought for me.

Jon Fosse is, as one begins to read his stories, almost impossibly artless. The scenes from childhood are raw fragments of recollection, about as coherent as fragments of china lying broken on a floor. They are not arranged, nor threaded together at all - not in any sense I at first recognised as narrated - almost literally artless. Everything is in the present tense. It is not of course particularly original to write in the present tense - nor to write a narrative imitating strains of thought - that goes back at least as far as Dorothy Richardson. I have attempted narrative in the continuous present myself, hoping to capture the immediacy of experience, and awareness of the physical context in every remembered event of one’s life.

But I have never before encountered a work of literature in which total realism, including realistic representation of the fragmented nature of recollection is being carefully employed. It is not even evident if the fragments of disconnected events are in any kind of order. It is like looking at a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces laid out helter-skelter on a table, none of them yet fitted together.

Very gradually a broken picture emerges of growing up in Norway - of family and friends, and any episode in which the narrator hurt himself and bled. That sounds harrowing, and it is - but it casts a deep light of joy on fragments of remembered moments of happiness. It is completely convincing, in the way it might be if someone were telling you what happened when they fell in the river, or broke a limb or some other traumatic or puzzling event, recalled, not understood, and recounted without any art or interpretation at all. Now and then what is remembered, is a later memory of an earlier one, still unvarnished, and unstructured.

Of course there is in a way a narrative voice; and this narrator conveys with startling and moving clarity the experience of not understanding the adult world around him.

This book ought to be depressing, so bleak and without order is the narrative; but in fact it is exhilarating to be reminded what the world is really like to innocent eyes, when the pieces don’t fit together, and understanding is not yet achieved.

Of course one result of reading the book is to feel that meaning and understanding are undercut, they are shown to be a construct. What we truly experience is not coherence…. and the fragmented pieces are mesmerising….

What an extraordinary writer Jon Fosse is! I did not expect, at my age to be offered a new view of the world, nor to find, at last, a common vision with my grand-daughter.

Scenes from a Childhood, translated by Damion Searls, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Independent bookseller feature No.6: Borzoi Bookshop, Stow-on-the-Wold: SIXTEEN TREES OF THE SOMME by Lars Mytting

"Don't rush it - you could miss the vital hints which help solve the mystery."

I am Aloÿse Packe and I have worked for the independent Borzoi Bookshop in Stow-on-the-Wold for the past 29 years. The shop has been in the town since the late 1970s. During this time there have been three owners and twice as many shop dogs. There have been too many changes to go through here but some of our customers are still the same and they certainly appreciate our quirky individualism. We have just moved premises within Stow, so please don’t think we have closed - we have just moved. We are the official bookshop for the Chipping Campden Literature Festival held in May; we hold regular book signing events, and we run a successful book club for Daylesford Organic. We love to chat to our customers about books, as Linda will testify, so please drop in.

I chose The Sixteen Trees of the Somme because it has tremendous all-round appeal. I have read it twice. Usually I find this an annoying thing to do but I enjoyed it just as much the second time round. In fact I found so much more in the detail.

Lars Mytting, the author, is better known in the UK for his best selling non-fiction book Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. Wood plays an enormous part in this atmospheric family saga spanning the twentieth century.

Edvard is brought up by his grandfather on a remote farm in Norway. Following his grandfather’s death in 1991 Edvard decides to delve into the mystery of the death of his parents in France where, as a small boy, Edvard went missing for four days. Intertwined with this is the story of Einar, Edvard’s great uncle, a skilled cabinet-maker who was estranged from his family. The story moves to Shetland where Edvard meets Gwen Winterfinch, a young aristocratic Scottish girl, whose own family story is entangled with Edvard’s. Together, they travel to France hoping to find the truth about a missing inheritance. The chapters set in France are poignant and deeply moving. It is appropriate that the paperback edition was released in October 2018 as we remembered the end of hostilities in 1918.

Through the descriptive passages on wood we discover the link between the main characters. Trees have deep roots. The idea of a family tree is deeply symbolic.

To begin with the book moves slowly but take heed – every little piece of information fits into the jigsaw puzzle (rather like stacking wood). Don’t rush it – you could miss the vital hints which help solve the mystery. Ponder on the love story – attractive, wild, girl versus the sensible committed girl next door. This book may not stand the test of time but it is a really good read.

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme is published by MacLehose Press.