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 Cindy Jefferies: UNSETTLED GROUND by Claire Fuller

                                                    

"These characters are beautifully drawn by Fuller with their frailties and difficulties with the modern world laid bare."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars. Both titles are now available in paperback.

Unsettled Ground took me back to my teenage years, when I was made melancholy by reading some of the Russian classics. There is something of the plight of those serfs here. But while they suffered grinding poverty with no recourse to a better life, this is a very modern, English tale of two marginalised country dwellers.

Jeanie and Julius are fifty-one year old twins, living with their mother in a cottage that hasn’t been updated, perhaps ever. They do have a solid fuel Rayburn, but no bathroom and an earth closet outside. They scrape a living from their large garden, producing fruit and vegetables for sale, as well as eggs. Julius gets occasional work, but nothing permanent, while Jeanie has a weak heart and has never been employed outside the home. When their mother dies suddenly the twins are thrust into the horror of having no money for any sort of funeral, and their precarious existence begins to implode.

This novel made me both sad and angry at the plight of these two characters, especially Jeanie, who has few resources to cope in a society where data is king and electricity for charging gadgets essential. I have known people like this and these characters are beautifully drawn by Fuller with their frailties and difficulties with the modern world laid bare.

There was a point at which I wondered if I could bear to carry on reading but I’m glad I did. There are secrets in this family to be unravelled and they are revealed with skill. Unsettled Ground settles at last into an ending I could believe in without giving me sleepless nights. The gentle, unquestioned love between sister and brother is beautifully done throughout the novel. Highly recommended.

Unsettled Ground is published by Fig Leaf

More of Cindy's choices:

The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

The Master by Colm Toibin

Thirteen Moons by Charles Frasier

Guest review by Graeme Fife: BESIDE THE OCEAN OF TIME by George Mackay Brown

'Mackay Brown is a writer of haunting spell, a compelling weaver of yarns...' 

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now 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 and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, has just been published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

The great skua is known in the Scottish islands as a bonxie, a Shetland name of Norse origin. He flies low over the sea but think of him cruising into a higher slipstream and circling the string of rocky outcrops that make these other islands, ‘the green hills and the blue waters of Orkney’, the treeless open ground where the men and women of the small population tend the planticrus (walled vegetable patches) and haul up their boats from the chafing sea onto the noust (a scooped-out trench atop a beach, protected by a shallow wall of stones), ready for the next foray into the waters for fish. The low walls are everywhere, sign of the need to win shelter from the wind that sweeps over the low ground, the wind that tosses the bonxie as he espies the pattern of existence that has been the same and changed endlessly over the centuries here.

For these islands have played unwilling host to succeeding waves of ‘land-hungerers’ as George Mackay Brown terms them in this novel, one of a series exploring the vicissitudes and intrigue of Orcadian life. In it he traces the dwindling lines of a story which slips in an out of the strands of history of these people – particularly the abiding menace of ‘war-hunger’: the advent of the Norsemen…the days when the Oracadian men marched south to join Robert the Bruce on the field of Bannockburn against the English come, in vain, to subdue all Scotland…the final chapter of the incursions, a great onslaught of concrete and tarmac at the outset of the war against Germany, laying flat the farms and holdings of the Orkneys as a base for fighter planes to combat the waves of bombers, slashing through the skies at speeds inconceivable to the bonxie and seeing beneath them, on the raw stone, scraped clear of ploughed farmland to make way for landing strips, men and women at war but not displacing the centuries-old hard toil of harbouring the fish, culling the oats for the staple cakes, churning the goat milk to butter and cheese, cutting the peat for the fires that must never be left to die out, for when a fire goes out ‘the croft dies’.

Mackay Brown is a writer of haunting spell, a compelling weaver of yarns – how apt that the image of the woollen garments the Oracadian women knit should chime with the tales that beguiled their long winter evenings by lamplight. He is an outstanding embodiment of what he calls ‘the music of  (the) island speech’, a language that laces together Norse, English and Scots, exploring the pull of ‘the ocean of eternity, the many voiced sea’. One young woman, though, has a voice that is quite different. ‘Her speech had something of the music of breakers in a cave-mouth, or far-off horizon notes, or dolphins in the flood tide.’ She is a selkie. If you don’t know what a selkie is, what enchantment awaits you in finding out. For the selkie is part of the continuum of these island stories and Mackay Brown is a shrewd and kindly companion in the roaming through them.

At the conclusion of the novel, a woman returns there to live, to be with the man she met when she came first and they were young - he written off as an idler, a good-for-nothing and the central narrator of the stories that fill the book to bursting, like the stomachs of Burns’s haggis-feasters, ‘bent like drums’. She contemplates her future: 'I'll dig my three acres and milk my goat,' said Sophie. 'I'll settle for that. We never find what we set our hearts on. We ought to be glad of that.'

For there is no quarrelling with the wind or the winnowing storm. The choice is resignation or accommodation. The peoples of the island, prey to all manner of invasion and incursion, natural and human, are stuck, to a degree, but persist, somehow. Their wandering – their continued defiance - is expressed in the stories they tell, the plunderings of the outer reaches of the imagination where they travel in ‘dream time’ which they bring back to the fires in the crofts, the work on the creels outside the stone-built dwellings, the quiet of the times on the calm seas as they wait for fish...

‘The body laments, the body dances; from somewhere deep within, in the heart’s heart, or from beyond the furthest star, the good angel, the guardian,is playing on his pipe’.        

                 

Beside the Ocean of Time is published by Polygon.