Guest review by Susan Price: THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O'Brien

"Blends a keen sense of wonder and beauty, with poetry, comedy, horror and despair. I don’t think there is another book like it." 

Susan Price has written everything from picture book texts to ‘cross-over’ novels like The Sterkarm Handshake, which won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award but is read by teenagers and adults alike. Her book The Ghost Drum won the Carnegie Medal. She is one of the bloggers at Authors Electric. Susan Price’s website is here.

“Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar. Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and idle-minded. He was personally responsible for the whole idea in the first place. It was he who told me to bring my spade. He was the one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they were called for.

"I was born a long time ago…”

That’s the opening of The Third Policeman,  and it contains a psychology of psychopathy. The cool, unemotional account of a violent murder. The ranking of murder as equal in importance to the manufacture of a bicycle-pump, and the instant shifting of blame.

Flann O’ Brien is known as a ‘comic writer.’ This is a ‘comic novel.’ It’s also a masterpiece.

It is very funny — and also bizarre, poetic and despairing. It’s sinister. This is sinister, eerie, unsettling comedy.

I first read The Third Policeman thirty years ago, and on re-reading, I find I remembered the comic scenes most: the atomic theory, as applied to bicycles and Irish roads; the men who are more than 75% bicycle; the delicate legal matter of deciding, when a man who is predominately bicycle, commits a murder, which should be hung? The man or the bicycle?

I remembered the book as much more light-hearted than, on re-reading, it actually is. Scathingly funny, yes. Comic in the sense of ‘holding human nature up to ridicule.’ In its inventiveness and originality, it's even playful. But light-hearted? No.

On second-reading, I still laughed at the scenes set in the police station — O’Brien’s inventiveness and verbal audacity is second to none — but was more struck by the poetry of many passages, and how frightening much of it is. I’ve read whole ghost stories that don’t manage to convey such a sense of menace and ill-omen, as, in a few lines, O’Brien does.

The prose is beautiful. O'Brien could move, with ease and perfect rhythm, often in the same passage, from the cant of the pub, to officialise, to poetry.

As I read, certain images kept coming into my mind, all drawn from ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ with its strange, skewed perspectives.

“As I came round the bend of the road an extraordinary spectacle was presented to me. About a hundred yards away on the left-hand side was a house which astonished me. It looked as if it were painted like an advertisement on a board on the roadside and indeed very poorly painted. It looked completely false and unconvincing. It did not seem to have any depth or breadth and looked as if it would not deceive a child… What bewildered me was the sure knowledge deeply rooted in my mind that this was the house I was searching for… I had never seen with my eyes ever in my life before anything so unnatural and appalling and my gaze faltered about the thing uncomprehendingly as if at least one of the customary dimensions was missing, leaving no meaning in the remainder. The appearance of the house was the greatest surprise I had encountered since I had seen the old man in the chair and I felt afraid of it.”

'My gaze faltered about the thing...' What a phrase.

This sense of nothing being as it should be, of indeterminate dread, pervades the book — and is part of the very narration, with its cool, detached, measured descriptions of terrors and shocks.

The nameless narrator, who tells us he can’t remember his own name, is an orphan and, due to an accident, has a wooden leg. He has inherited a fortune, but by the time he is adult and returns to his farm, the money has been squandered by the caretaker, John Divney.

Both the narrator and Divney are keen to replenish the fortune — Divney so he can marry, and the narrator so he can publish a book on the scientist, De Selby, with whom he has become obsessed.

Asides and footnotes on De Selby make up a substantial part of the book, adding both to its oddness and its cool, detached manner. Among De Selby’s theories is the notion that darkness is a contaminating vapour which emanates from holes in the earth, and contributes to disease because we inhale it. This was once a genuinely held theory of the nature of darkness, before it was established that darkness is an absence of light, rather than a thing in itself.

De Selby also argues that if we angle enough mirrors, to give enough successive reflections of ourselves, we could look into our past. He claims, by setting up many mirrors, to have glimpsed himself at the age of eleven. Many of his theories seem to be twisted, or over-literal understandings of relativity or quantum theory, while their twisting of time and space relate to the literally twisted perspective in the description of the book’s world.

In pursuit of fortune, the narrator and Divney murder an old man, Mathers. Divney makes off with the cash-box, which he hides, saying they must spend none of the money until suspicion has died down.

Eventually, Divney reveals that he has hidden the box in Mather’s house. They go together, one night, to the deserted half-ruinous murder house, and while Divney waits outside, the narrator goes in to fetch the box. From this moment on, the book, already strange, becomes increasingly bizarre. The narrator climbs through a window:-

“I clambered through the opening and found myself, not at once in a room, but crawling along the deepest window-ledge I have ever seen. When I reached the floor and jumped noisily down upon it, the open window seemed very far away and much too small to have admitted me.”

He discovers that the cash-box has gone. And then:—

“I heard a cough behind me, soft, and natural yet more disturbing than any sound that could come upon the human ear. That I did not die of fright was due to two things, the fact that my senses were already disarranged and also that…the cough seemed to bring with it some more awful alteration in everything, just as if it had held the universe standstill for an instant…”

The narrator then takes tea with the old man he has murdered.

I don’t want to spoil the book by detailing the narrator’s adventures after that. Suffice to say that he meets with two enormous policemen, Sergeant Pluck and Constable MacCruiskeen, and also with his own soul. We learn about MacCruiskeen’s mind-boggling hobbies, and even more about De Selby’s experiments. We meet the brotherhood of one-legged men, visit Eternity and, eventually, meet the third policeman, Sergeant Fox.

If the book has a message, I understand it to be that Evil is self-centred, self-aggrandising, futile and barren. And, possibly, that to be such a person is its own punishment, though they will never understand that.

In fact, a lack of understanding is one of the book’s themes. The narrator obsessively studies the works of De Selby, trying to understand them — but his understanding of the world around him seems to dwindle as his knowledge of De Selby increases.

The Third Policeman is a book that blends a keen sense of wonder and beauty, with poetry, comedy, horror and despair. I don’t think there is another book like it — except those others by Flann O’Brien, whose real name was Brian O'Nolan.

His first novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds (also a must-read) was published, and acclaimed, in 1939.

The Third Policeman was his second novel, and it was turned down. It wasn’t published until 1967, after the author’s death, when it was recognised for the wonderful piece of writing it is.

I wonder if, these days, any conventional publisher would accept it at all?

The Third Policeman is published by Dalkey Archive Press

Guest review by Yvonne Coppard: FLÂNEUSE by Lauren Elkin

"It has motivated me to ditch the car, don the trainers and become a flâneuse myself, wandering the city in which I live but know so little about."

Yvonne Coppard is a writer of children’s fiction, non-fiction for adults and occasional columns and articles in a variety of publications. She is currently a Writing Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, working with businesses and public service organisations to promote clear, understandable English in written communication. See more on her website.

Trying to describe what this book is and why I loved it will be a challenge. It’s part memoir; part cultural commentary; literary biography and history, underpinned by a skilful evocation of our human need for connection.

The term flâneuse is Elkin’s adaptation from the masculine noun ‘flaneur’: an idle, aimless wanderer. The flâneuse, like her male counterpart, walks the streets with no other purpose than to blend and observe. The seemingly small point about adapting language is actually fundamental to Elkin’s approach; she is a woman reclaiming territory that was traditionally assumed to be exclusively male. Although the term ‘flâneuse’ already existed, the Dictionnaire Vivant de la Langue Francaise defines it as ‘a lounge chair’. Elkin’s perspective is clear: search for images of ‘flâneuse’, she says, and you get: “a drawing of George Sand, a picture of a young woman sitting on a Parisian bench and a few images of outdoor furniture…. Is that some kind of joke? The only kind of curious idling a woman does is lying down?”

Elkin is a native New Yorker with experience of life in Tokyo, Venice, London and Paris, which is now her permanent home. She has negotiated the nuances that must be grappled with in order to make the change from tourist to resident; she understands the difference between living in a community and feeling integrated into it. Elkin’s account is infused with the keen observation and insight that being an outsider affords. She includes slices of the lives of flâneuses who have gone before her: writer Virginia Woolf; artist Sophie Calle; journalist Martha Gellhorn and film-maker Agnes Varda, among others. All of them were keen observers of the environments they moved through and blended into. Their stories are fused with Elkin’s developing insights into her own experience.

“Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement… Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote.”

Established in Paris, Elkin falls in love and agrees to move with her French boyfriend when he takes a job in Tokyo. Uprooted, displaced and unnurtured, Elkin struggles to connect with her new home and, ultimately, her partner. Her description of the final stages of their soured relationship is powerful.

“Dead words, dead tongue, dead of disuse, my mouth stuck shut… I said in your language, which I have come to speak, ta langue, ta langue dans ma bouche, and you’ve brought me to this place where my new tongue lies flat in my mouth. A crack in the road, the sidewalk blistered, how long has it been since I left New York concrete for Paris cobblestones? Why am I here, where I can’t ask for aspirin, or sleeping pills, where the yogurt aisle is a tofu aisle? I can’t think straight, I can’t make one thought lead to another, I just tell you I hate it and hate it, and I mean you, and before we know it I am breaking things and jumping up and down and screaming at you in your tongue, in my tongue, in my mother tongue. My mother spoiled me, you say. But you have spoiled us. I never thought I’d be here.”

The breadth of Elkin’s sweep across art, literature, history and politics is impressive, signalling its roots in the post-graduate research that led her to write the book, but her own story is the connecting thread that unifies the whole. Ultimately, it is the uplifting and inspirational account of a search for the true self, and the landscape that resonates with the soul. It’s a book that I think will be satisfying to return to again and again over the years, offering something fresh each time. Meanwhile, it has motivated me to ditch the car, don the trainers and become a flâneuse myself, wandering the city in which I live but know so little about.

Flâneuse is published by Chatto and Windus.

Guest review by Daniel Hahn: BIRD COTTAGE by Eva Meijer, translated by Antoinette Fawcett

"As much as anything, this is a book about communication and about relationships ... the reader feels a real warmth and joy emanating from the curious friendships that are its heart."

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator. "One way or another, most of my work involves books. I write them, translate them, edit them and review them. Quite a lot of what I do has a particular focus either on international writing / translation or on children's literature." A former chair of the Translators Association and the Society of Authors, as well as national programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation and trustee for the Society of Authors, he has worked with a number of other organisations working with literature, literacy and free expression, including English PEN, The Children's Bookshow and Modern Poetry in Translation. In 2017 he established a new prize for debut literary translation - the TA First Translation Prize. More on Daniel's website.

Bird Cottage is based on the life of a real person, and a very unlikely life it was. But the novel itself feels somehow unlikely, too, not least because it took a Dutch writer to discover the story and evolve it into this excellent novel, to be beautifully translated by a woman in the north of England, and a copy of the published translation sent to me at home in East Sussex . . . just down the road from where the real story took place. Until Bird Cottage (originally Het Vogelhuis) popped through my letterbox, I had never even heard of Gwendolen Howard.

Len – as she was known – was born at the end of the nineteenth century, she had an Edwardian childhood in Wales, then moved to London to be a professional violinist. Becoming restless in her early forties, she gave up this career to retire to a cottage in Sussex, where she lived for four decades, with her windows kept always open to let the birds in. Birds were her passion, and she built a life to be shared with them – they had the run of her cottage at all times, and she befriended them, named them, studied them, and wrote about them. As a musician, she could differentiate between their songs, writing them down in musical notation.

Author and translator create two voices for the book: the main narrative thread, giving us Len’s telling of her life in the first person (novelist Meijer’s attempt to make sense of a person through a narrative), and short interspersed pieces of what are ostensibly Len’s own ornithological writings, focusing on one particular favourite of hers, a great tit called Star.

Bird Cottage examines the great turning point in Len’s life – what led to it, and its consequences – as she decides to rebel against social expectation and withdraw almost entirely from human society, from the inadequacies of human relationships and of human linguistic communication. (Worrying at these limitations is both a natural and a stressful thing for a novelist to engage with.) Along with her isolation, she attains a kind of emotional detachment from what is happening elsewhere – the death of members on her family, even the consequences of war.

Meijer herself is a writer about animals (a new non-fiction study of animal communication, Animal Languages, is also just out in English), and one of the things that interests her is Len’s place in the professional ornithological world. Her published work was best-selling, and widely translated, but dismissed by the scientific community, not only because she was inadequately qualified, and a woman besides (though this, too), but because her methodology was outside the prevailing scientific fashion. Her observational research involved watching birds close-up in something not too different from their natural habitat, rather than laboratory observation – at the time, the common practice was behaviourist study in lab conditions. Her desire to observe birds in the most natural, unconfined environment possible blurs the boundaries of her world and theirs, which in turn narrows the focus of Meijer’s story to one of the most extraordinary intimacy.

So this is a true story, which relies on the historical evidence that exists for Len Howard’s unusual life (the line separating fact and fiction here is a fuzzy one, of course); but there’s much more to it than just the curiosity value. This is not a piece of documentary but a novel, driven by some beautiful writing and by appealingly believable characters. The careful characterisation applies not least to the birds themselves, several of which (of whom?) recur as Len comes to know them well. As much as anything, this is a book about communication and about relationships, and – surprising though this may be – the reader feels a real warmth and joy emanating from the curious friendships that are its heart.

A post-script: when you’ve read the book (and you should), read Antoinette Fawcett’s fascinating piece in Asymptote about the lengths she to which she went to produce the translation.

Bird Cottage is published by Pushkin Press.

Independent bookseller feature No.11: Orb's Bookshop, Aberdeen: DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

"This is the kind of book we love to stock at Orb’s – something a bit different, something you might not stumble across in every bookshop."

We (Maureen Ross and Dawn Finch) are two of the volunteers who run Orb’s Community Bookshop in Huntly, Aberdeenshire. This is a small rural town in the middle of many farming communities and we are the only bookshop for over an hour’s drive in any direction. The bookshop was threatened with closure and the local writers group, Huntly Writers, stepped in and raised the money required to keep it open. This December we’re celebrating out tenth anniversary! We do everything from going out to schools and literary events with our pop-up bookshop, to making sure our shelves contain books that you might not find in mainstream bookshops. We don’t try to compete with supermarkets or The River That Shall Not Be Named, because we can’t match the super-massive discounts they offer, and we don’t feel those prices give a fair deal to authors. We tend to stock things other bookshops don’t and we have a mix of old and new books and we have a gentle specialism in things like nature books, poetry and diverse and inclusive children’s books. We also stock books by local writers and poets, and have many books by our most famous former resident, Victorian fantasy writer George MacDonald.

A book that we’ve enjoyed very much recently is Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk – published by independent publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions. This was a book that was originally published in Polish but was translated into English in 2018 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and in 2019 it had a wider release. It won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, and has been on many other award lists since including the Booker Prize.

The plot revolves around an older woman who lives in a rural Polish village close to the Czech border. She studies astrology and translates William Blake, adores nature and wildlife, and misses her two dogs. When her neighbour shows up dead, Janina appears fascinated by the death and writes to the local police with her theory that the wild animals of the forest have killed her neighbour because he was a hunter. The chief of police does not believe her – but when he too is found dead, and then the village's fur farmer vanishes, people start to take a second look at Janina’s theories.

Orb’s team member Maureen says: “I first came across Drive Your Plow in a newspaper article about crime novels. I'm addicted to crime fiction and immediately ordered a copy. From the start this book captivated me with every word and I read every word which is unusual for me as a greedy and impatient reader. The book is much much more than a murder mystery although it is a very clever mystery tale. Janina is an acerbic and tough eccentric woman in her sixties, with a mordant sense of humour and a passionate belief in justice and freedom for all creatures not just humans. The tale is linked in with the work of the visionary poet William Blake - a direct quotation from him serves as the title of the book - and this in itself together with some intriguing information about astrological systems kept me delighted from start to finish. The geography and meaning of borders was also given a place in the building atmosphere of what it is like to experience the world from a totally different perspective. I loved this book and will re-read it again and again. I have never wanted to re-read a book before but this is finally the one. So much in it. Thank you Olga for the fabulous wit and intelligence of this story."

Orb’s team member Dawn is also a great fan of this book. She says, “Maureen recommended this one to me and I know it’s an oft repeated phrase, but I genuinely could not put it down. I’m not a crime novel reader so I wasn’t immediately convinced, but I am a sucker for a book in translation and that lured me in. Drive Your Plow feels different from the very first pages. Janina comes across as so real that you are drawn into her life and her world. This was one of those books that I found myself slowing down to read because I wanted to be part of Janina’s life for a while longer. I’ll be honest with you, I think I still miss her. I love it when a book does that to me.”

This is the kind of book we love to stock at Orb’s – something a bit different, something you might not stumble across in every bookshop. We hope that’s what our customers are looking for – the kind of personal contact and recommendation that comes from people who really do love books!

Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is published by Fitzcarraldo Books

Maureen on Harry Potter night at the local library

Guest review by Graeme Fife: UNCLE SILAS by Sheridan Le Fanu

"How tricks and illusions undercut a sense of reality, the deliberate attempt to disturb the balance of a rational mind ..."

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, is 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.'

Le Fanu’s best-known novel, Uncle Silas, concludes with what may stand as a central fixation in his work, framed by the protagonist and narrator of the novel, Maud:

‘This world is a parable – the habitation of symbols – the phantoms of spiritual things immortal shown in material shape.’

The statement might read as a lofty philosophical animadversion on Nature’s mysteries and the unexplained phenomena of the universe whereas, in this context, it delves into the darker corners and impulses of the human psyche, the machinations of the unprincipled, the bid to influence, manipulate and subdue the innocent. Deceit, deception, undermining trust become instruments of domination. But…slow down, you horses of the night, we must tread more circumspectly.

Ann Radcliff, author of a number of Gothic novels, ushered in a new genre of fiction which extended interest in the mind’s darker impulses. Sophocles’s introduction of the third character in tragedy, Webster’s obsession with ‘the skull beneath the skin’, Hamlet’s ‘more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ laid the groundwork. Romantic poets deepened the theme of spiritual torment and angst, the irresistible lure of ‘the dark tower’, and the Victorian novelists ran riot with all the possibilities that these new areas of insight opened up, from Hogg’s Justified Sinner to the shivery crime novels of Wilkie Collins. Le Fanu is part of that coterie of writers whose work is forged in the inquiry into how tricks and illusions undercut a sense of reality, the deliberate attempt to disturb the balance of a rational mind, a sinister interference with a fragile psyche as a prelude to betrayal, fraud, incarceration, violence.

The effect of these scary workings is to instil terror, causing such a radical shift in the foundation of what a character believes to be so that they cease to have any firm grip on what is actually so. Radcliff draws a distinction between terror – perhaps what the character in the novel experiences – and horror, the effect of that on the reader:

‘Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.’ (On the Supernatural)…terror, ‘dread, fright,’ and horror, the bristling of nape hairs.

Le Fanu is a master at inciting both.

Maud, protected by a reclusive, gloomy father, is a motherless heiress. She tells the story of how she comes to live in the remote Derbyshire home of her uncle, Silas, once a notorious rake, now converted to pious Christianity. And which does she see? Who he was or who he has become? The household is also home to a dissolute male cousin, a simpleton of a female cousin, a dodgy servant with a peg leg, a virago of a French governess. The sombre mansion, Bartram-Haugh, in vast parkland - mists at dawn and dusk, eerie noises and flitting movements, essentials of Le Fanu’s atmospherics – contributes to the vivid painting of scene, a very cinematic trope, much favoured in fiction of the time. There was fog, they used fog. And fog as symbol, because the conspiracy to deprive Maud of her wealth hinges on befogging her so that she is at sea, uncertain of where solid grounding is.

Her father dies. Now she is alone and unprotected, tied by a promise to remain a guest of Silas for three and a half years, until she achieves her maturity. If she dies in that time, the money goes to Silas. Her father appears to her in a dream (hallucination?):

‘This night my dear father’s face troubled me – sometimes white and sharp as ivory, sometimes strangely transparent like glass, sometimes all hanging in cadaverous folds, always with the same unnatural expression of diabolical fury. From this dreadful vision I could only escape by sitting up and staring at the light.’

She does, eventually, fall asleep, but in a dream hears her father’s voice, distinctly ‘outside the bed-curtain: “Maud, we shall be late at Bartram-Haugh.”’

Outside the bed-curtain…she’s confined in a four-poster, vulnerable, a prey to what prowls beyond it, and now what is she to believe of what she sees and hears? There is even passing reference to Bluebeard at one point.

Forewarned by whisper, enigmatic comment and her own intuition, she manages to evade the attempt to overpower her – with drugged claret – and watches, from a hiding place, the murder of a victim intended to be her.

It ends…but you must see how, and then move on, perhaps, to Wylders Hand.

Uncle Silas is published by Penguin Classics; Wylders Hand is published by Clean Bright Classics.

Guest review by Pippa Goodhart: OLD BAGGAGE by Lissa Evans

"An absorbing story of faulty, empathetic, endearing, infuriating characters one truly cares about."

Pippa Goodhart has written over a hundred books for children. Best known is her picture book You Choose, illustrated by Nick Sharratt. Her most recent children’s novel, The Great Sea Dragon Discovery, set in her home village of Grantchester, has just won this year’s Young Quills Award for best historical children’s novel for 10-13 year olds. More on Pippa's website. 

This is an absolute joy of a book. I loved it so much on first reading that I deliberately slowed my pace in order to savour it. I then set it as my book group read choice, and every one of that opinionated and interesting group also loved it, which is a rarity! Everybody liking a book can sometimes kill off debate about it. But this book gave us much to discuss, especially since we are of a generation who remember from childhood the elderly spinster characters created by the First World War’s cull of young men, some of whom had notable political and social opinions.

Mattie, in her fifties, was a Suffragette, as was her lodger Florrie, ‘the Flea’, Lee and various other wonderfully individual characters in the book. But they are living in a Britain that feels it has moved on from that particular fight. Living on the edge of Hampstead Heath, Mattie decides to set up a club for girls, promoting political and social debate, good healthy exercise, games and competitions … and javelin throwing, which doesn’t go down well with her stuffy retired Major neighbour. Set in 1928, this is a story with heart, much historical interest, great wit and humour, and utterly brilliant writing. I’m not going to give away more of the plot because it’s a delight to discover for yourself, but there are certainly uncomfortable parallels between the time it depicts and our present time. Mattie has never had to work for her income, giving an uncomfortable edge to her strong ideas about how working class girls and women should behave. There is hypocrisy, but isn’t she still mostly right in what she thinks? Some in our reading group had fresh experience from the Extinction Rebellion protests in London, demanding government action to heal the climate, and yet these are people who frequently fly off on holiday, some have more than one home, and so on. Similarly, hypocrites, but right? On a different tack, there is talk of ‘laws upheld by those who were apparently beyond the reach of it themselves’. Much food for thought and discussion, but, first and foremost, an absorbing story of faulty, empathetic, endearing, infuriating characters one truly cares about.

Let me give you some small tasters of that brilliant writing. We get an instant feel for Mattie when, early on, she ‘swished past like a Daimler.’ How many of us recognise her problem of middle-aged eyesight when she tells her optician, ‘I find I am living in a perpetual Pissarro.’ The Major next door ‘looks like a classical statue carved out of brisket.’ Florrie, in a sulk, ‘draped the oblong of pastry across the pie dish with the visage of someone easing a flag over a coffin.’ Teenage Inez, part of Mattie’s club, was ‘participating, though only in the way a stick participates when borne along by a stream.’ … And so much more. The period language is a delight too. ‘You don’t look quite the thing.’ ‘She is an absolute pill.’ Do read the book and find your own favourites!

For those who may have read other books by Lissa Evans (do try her children’s books as well as her adult ones), let me just place Old Baggage in book context. Evans’ The Crooked Heart was written and published before Old Baggage, but Old Baggage is a prequel to Crooked Heart, explaining the odd pairing of a couple of characters who nagged for further attention.

Old Baggage is published by Black Swan.

See also: Suffragettes in Fiction, a round-up by Linda Newbery

WILDING by Isabella Tree

"Essential, even exciting, reading for anyone interested in nature, wildlife, ecosystems and climate change." 

Linda Newbery is the editor of Writers Review. She has written widely for young readers and is currently completing a new adult novel.

'Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch.' Wendell Berry

What a fascinating book this is! It covers so much, overturning several preconceptions along the way, that I hardly know where to start. So I'll begin at the end, where Isabella Tree comments on the benefits of natural surroundings for mental health, and the sad fact that many people nowadays have little exposure - through choice or circumstance - to wild nature. Readers of this blog probably know that Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris were spurred to work together on The Lost Words - a beautiful book which won Jackie Morris a well-deserved Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration - by news that the Oxford Junior Dictionary was ditching such words as acorn, bluebell, wren and otter to make space for  terms deemed more relevant to today's world: celebrity, blog, broadband and suchlike. Macfarlane and Morris's widely-acclaimed collaboration is a timely and important book, and so in its different way is Wilding. 

Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell, inheriting his family estate of 3,500  acres, at first continued the arable and dairy farming already established there, but found that their hard-baked clay soil did not produce good yields. Could there be a way of letting their land fulfill its potential - not for commerce, but for wildlife? Inspired by a Dutch project on land earmarked for industry but then abandoned, they learned how the presence of grazing animals - greylag geese, then large herbivores - had produced surprising results; close grazing kept the water fringes clear and tree growth in check, providing habitat for a wealth of insects, birds and small mammals. It's often assumed that any fertile land, if left untended, will become mature woodland; but, as Isabella Tree points out, this notion overlooks the presence of grazing herbivores such as the ancient aurochs, tarpan and bison which preceded human intervention, later replaced by deer, domesticated cattle and pigs. Perhaps, she thinks, we have the wrong idea about ancient forests. She quotes Oliver Rackham: "To the medievals, a Forest was a place of deer, not of trees. If a Forest happened to be wooded it formed part of the wood-pasture tradition."

Wondering if this minimal-intervention approach would work with their own land, Isabella and Charlie sought grants from English Nature (now Natural England), the government's advisory body. Unlike most applicants for funding they had no clear plan for what was in effect an experiment: their plan was, over twenty-five years, to see what would happen if they fenced their land to make it deer-proof, a major expense, and introduced Longhorn cattle, fallow and later red deer, and Exmoor ponies. As in the Dutch project, they chose tough, sturdy animals that could fend and forage for themselves and withstand all weathers.

Copyright Knepp Wildland

Of course the Knepp project couldn't fully replicate natural ecosystems without including apex predators - lynxes or wolves - to keep the numbers of cattle, ponies and deer in check.The Dutch project, leaving weak and elderly animals to die from illness or starvation, had met with justifiable opposition; at Knepp, with the land crossed by footpaths, such a hands-off approach couldn't be justified on humane, aesthetic or even practical grounds. So the grazing animals are culled, and their meat sold. Apparently grass-fed beef is delicious, and pasture grazing is certainly the most environmentally efficient way of producing meat, although it's a luxury few can afford.

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The Knepp experiment, now sixteen years on, has produced inspiring results. Iconic species such as turtle dove, nightingale and purple emperor butterfly have moved in; beavers have been introduced, their dams creating marshy wetland which supports wading birds, amphibians and bog plants. The softening of water edges is so important for flood defences, another re-think: rather than funnelling water into hard-edged channels, it can effectively be dispersed and soaked up, to the benefit of pasture and wildlife. Another keystone creature is the humble earthworm, whose importance has been underestimated to the detriment of soil health.

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Few individuals will be able to replicate the Knepp experiment - Tree and Burrell owned a substantial swathe of land and were able to recruit expert help and funding. But I hope their findings will influence government and NGO policy on land management and conservation. Among many revelations, perhaps the most significant is that if we intervene less, nature can be trusted to restore itself. Whether there's time, in the face of climate breakdown, to attempt this on a wider scale, is impossible to know - we may be too far into our reckless uncontrolled global experiment with the world's climate and ecosystems.

I'd say that Wilding is essential, even exciting, reading for anyone interested in nature, wildlife, ecosystems and climate change - and I think most readers will find surprises and revelations to make them see the countryside, and our role in it, with fresh eyes. And I don't want to end without giving a flavour of the writing: although packed with information, comparisons and statistics, Wilding also has moments of lyrical joy, such as this description of a nightingale's song: "It throws the ear with unexpectedness ... florid trills, first rich and liquid, then mockingly guttural and discordant; now a sweet insistence of long, lugubrious piping; then bubbling chuckles and indrawn whistles; and then, suddenly, nothing - a suspended, teasing hiatus before the cascades and crescendos break forth again ... these pulsating strains issuing from tiny vocal chords belting out like organ pipes, throwing the music of the tropics into the English night air."

Wilding is published by Picador.

Find out more on the Knepp Wildland website.