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 Like the conquering Romans who built the road, it has been superseded and overlaid by centuries of development – a fitting portent for the direction in which our modern society is heading.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.

Q&A: Jane Rogers on her new short story collection, FIRE-READY

 

"In fiction you can test things out and examine both sides of a question. I write to explore."

Photograph by Linda Newbery

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, plus radio drama and stories. Her subject matter ranges from the past to the present to the distant future. Prizes include the Arthur C Clarke Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Writers Guild Best Fiction Book Award. Jane’s new collection of short stories, Fire-Ready, was published by Comma Press this November. 

Jane teaches writing at all levels, currently running workshops for MsLexia and mentoring for Gold Dust. Find out more from her website. Here she answers questions from Linda Newbery.

Linda: First, congratulations on publishing your second collection of short stories, following Hitting Trees with Sticks (2012). In between, you’ve written two novels and several radio dramas and adaptations, including Clear Light of Day, a dramatisation of Anita Desai’s novel which was broadcast this summer on BBC Radio 4. What draws you to the short story form?

Jane: Thanks Linda. I think of myself really as a novelist, and I find the short story form extremely challenging. Very occasionally there's an idea which presents itself immediately as a short story (like the title story of Hitting Trees with Sticks), and that is great. But more often, it’s a question of endless revision and cutting and battling to actually locate the story in the mass of ideas and words of a first draft. As a reader, I used to think stories were slightly inferior to novels; then I read Alice Munro, and I realised that a really well-crafted story can contain as much as a novel, if the writer is skilful enough. But it is a different craft from writing a novel. I suppose I have written in lots of different forms; radio, TV, adaptation, novel and short story – I quite like a challenge! At the end of the day, I tend to feel more confident about my novels than my stories.

(By the way, off topic, I know many people now disapprove of Alice Munro so strongly that they have stopped reading her. Yes, it seems she behaved badly in her personal life. But quite frankly, if we stopped reading authors who have behaved badly – well, as King Lear says, Who shall ’scape whipping?)

L: One striking thing about this collection, and of your novels too, is the range of subjects and genres you cover. Here we move from the present to the near and more distant future; some stories could be classed as sci-fi, cli-fi (climate fiction) or even veer towards horror (Clearances) while others are tender explorations of domestic life and relationships, one of which, Treasure, I suspect comes from your own experience with a grandchild. A thread that links them is the struggle of ordinary people to find purpose in life, to make space for themselves, to appreciate everyday pleasures. Some are bound by duty or by the restrictions of lockdown; in more than one, the birth or prospect of a baby offers hope and a glimpse of uncomplicated innocence.

How did this collection come about? I see that several have been published before, while most are new. How did the idea of a new compilation come to you? Fire-Ready is the title story – was that always your choice of title, and does it suggest a unifying theme?

J: It’s a good question, and to begin with I couldn’t really figure out if this was a collection or not. I certainly didn’t sit down to write a collection – the stories have accumulated over years, and I was not able to find many common themes between them. My editor, Ra Page, was helpful here, because he identified four interlinked themes; the climate emergency, activism, and aging and relationships with children. Together we eliminated the weakest stories, and he suggested I write an additional cli-fi story, to even out the balance. So I have spent most of my writing time for the past 4 months working on the opening story, Hope. 

I was surprised when I realised how many are about parents (or a single parent) and children, but then I realised that in fact that is a central theme in several of my novels.

And re the title – I hope it does suggest a unifying theme. The term is actually used in Australian government warnings about bushfires. Farms in the path of fires have to be made ‘fire-ready’, that is to say, with sprinklers on the roof, shutters, reserves of water, an underground spot where important documents can be securely left, and so on. And more generally, characters in some of the other stories are trying to make their homes or lives ‘fire-ready’, in the sense that they know they will be tested.

L: For one of your Writers Review contributions, you chose Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, in which he asks: ‘What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction?’ In the eight years since his book’s publication, that’s changed, with books such as The Overstory, Orbital and The Deluge featuring on shortlists. But still, fiction that portrays the climate emergency in the context of ordinary present-day lives seems rare. Some of your stories do just that – Fire-Ready, set in Australia, sees Kayla preparing for the very real threat of wildfire, while others look at likely changes to society and adaptations in our behaviour. Climate concerns run through this collection but without dominating – did you feel that the balance between bleakness and hope was important?

J: Like many people, I am haunted by the climate emergency, and the thought of the devastated world we are leaving to our descendants. I set out to write a novel on the topic, soon after reading The Great Derangement. To begin with I read as much future fiction as I could find, and quickly realised that novels which simply focus on a very bleak future are simultaneously depressing and rather preachy. There are a lot; I could give you a list of titles not to read, but that would be cruel! Two which deal with the topic much more imaginatively are Bewilderment by Richard Powers, and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Both highly recommended. There’s no point in writing doom and gloom, everyone knows it and it doesn’t make anything better. I don’t think I was trying to create a balance between bleakness and hope (though I am glad if that’s the effect!) I think I was trying to examine specific situations through the minds and experiences of my characters. Human beings are wonderfully adaptable, so that even in bleak situations, hope and joy can be found. For example, in Hope, the child Kara who has been evacuated from a no-longer-viable Earth, is thrilled by the sight of distant stars and galaxies in deep space. As individuals, we feel pleasure as well as pain, and good writing describes individual experiences which are universally recognisable.

L: The hope in many of the stories comes through a kind of epiphany, and I love the way you show these – not in any flash-of-light sense but more a kind of quiet acceptance, especially for your older characters. More than one of these is faced with a rearrangement of their life following release from the duty of care to a relative or partner – situations I feel sure will resonate with many readers.

J: Yes, there’s quite a lot about growing older – I guess the topic is on my mind, now I’m in my eighth decade! Again, I’m interested in the pleasure, or relief, of letting things go in older age – as well as the grieving for the past. ‘Letting things go’ is probably the story I am most pleased with, because I was afraid readers might find it quite mad that my protagonist can happily lose himself for hours in sounds from the distant past; but so far the responses have been very positive.

L: There’s humour too, in Weeping Beech and in The DNA of Bats. You must have given a lot of thought to the ordering of the stories?

J: Ha. Indeed. And since I carefully ordered them, they have been re-ordered so many times by my editor that I honestly can’t tell if it works or not. Readers will have to let me know!

L: I want to ask about the final story, The Night Before, without giving too much away. Anyone who’s campaigned (as we both have) with Extinction Rebellion has been told, in connection with roadblocks etc, “I like what you do but not the way you’re going about it”. But what actually does make the kind of difference needed to confront the climate emergency? Your character here, Szandra, is on the brink of doing something most activists would (fortunately) baulk at – but can such an action be justified? She’s questioning herself about that, right up to the abrupt shock of the ending. Can you tell us how this story took shape?

J: It began as a ‘What if?’ What if you were asked to do something which is really dangerous, which will have tragic consequences, in the service of a cause in which you believe passionately? I love the fact that you can explore an idea in a story, test it out, see how far you can go. I have been asked if I agree with or condemn the characters’ plan in that story. And the answer is, neither. That’s not the point. Any more than I agree with or condemn Jessie Lamb’s action, in my novel of that name. The point is to honestly explore an idea, an action, the potential consequences. In fiction you can test things out and examine both sides of a question. I write to explore.

L: More generally, how does a short story idea come to you? Does it arrive in your head complete, as it were – I mean the shape of it, the point? Or do you discover that through writing?

J: It really varies, from story to story. That’s one of the maddening things about writing, isn’t it? It never gets any easier, you have to re-invent the wheel each time. I usually have a sense of what’s at the heart of the story, but how to reach that, or, as you put it, ‘the shape of it’ – that is something I have to work out as I go along.Weeping Beech, for example; my idea was for a tree surgeon who couldn’t bear to fell a beautiful tree. So he was conflicted. Gradually, as I worked on it, the conflict became externalised, and his opponent became, not his own appreciation of the tree, but a retired parks and gardens employee who knows all the old trees in the town. Other characters came in to take sides, and I was pleased (especially with the nosy neighbour!) because the story became funnier.

L. The reader learns to adapt quickly to each new story: learning not only about the characters and their relationships but about where we are in time, how society has changed and how new rules and conventions dominate their lives. You’re adept at conveying these things without overwhelming the reader. Does beginning a short story feel very different from beginning a novel?

J: You have to establish the world of the story very quickly – so yes, that is a difference. In a novel the reader is usually content to be drip-fed information that builds a picture of the novel’s world, and in fact, in a novel, that slow release of information can be part of the suspense. What’s fascinating is how little the reader needs, to understand they are in a different time and place. And that’s something I’ve learned through cutting my stories. For example, in Daytrip to Glastonbury, the opening paragraph describes the coach journey towards Glastonbury along recognisable A roads. But the coach stops at Wells. ‘From Wells the only way was by boat.’ Suddenly the reader is transported to a future where swathes of the country are underwater. No date or backstory is needed.

L. You’ve done a great deal of tuition and mentoring, at Sheffield Hallam and with Mslexia, Faber Academy and Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. What advice do you give to students about writing short stories?

J: Well, I could give you the outline of the five-day short story course I’m going to teach for Faber Academy in the new year . . . But that might be a bit much! I guess the single most important thing is CUT. It is amazing how much you can cut out of a story, and how every cut seems to improve it. All the cliches are true; Get in late, get out early. Cut adverbs. Strip down adjectives. Make every word work. I think short story as a craft is closer to poetry than it is to novel.

L. Finally, what are you working on now?

J: A novel! And it’s only tangentially about the climate emergency.

Thanks for your thoughtful questions, they have really made me focus on the stories and why I wrote them.

Fire-Ready is published by Comma Press.

Read Jane's review of The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

THE HIGH HOUSE by Jessie Greengrass, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"A disastrous near future that could be the day after tomorrow..."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She has published widely for young readers of all ages, winning the Costa Children's Book Prize with her young adult novel Set in Stone. Her latest title is non-fiction: This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us, a guide to compassionate living. She is currently working on a new adult novel.

When I think of the hot summer days of childhood, my memories are of a paddling pool in the garden, adults resting in the shade, the jingling tune of the ice-cream van; maybe a day at the seaside and sunburned skin in the days before we knew to take more care. We enjoyed it while it lasted, before the heat disintegrated into a thunderstorm and the days became cooler. Now the feeling is different, threatening. What if temperatures continue to rise and become unbearable? What would be the effect on wild animals, vegetation, crop-growing, and even human ability to survive? What if huge areas of the world become uninhabitable?

In The Great Derangement, recently reviewed on this blog by Jane Rogers, Amitav Ghosh asks why literary fiction so comprehensively ignores the climate emergency, the most pressing issue of our times, and why those novels that do deal with it tend to be sidelined into genre fiction. His book was published five years ago. Since then we've seen Richard Powers' The Overstory deservedly shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Melissa Harrison wrote in The Guardian that "the 'cli-fi'  genre is growing exponentially – no surprise, given the coming crisis. In fact, as an artist in any medium it can feel self-indulgent, in 2021, to be making work about anything else."

Now here's another novel that puts climate breakdown centre stage, set in a disastrous near future that could be the day after tomorrow. Although to climate change deniers it could be seen as science fiction, the sense of foreboding in the early section of the novel - flooding, changes in the seasons, dangerous cyclones, migration patterns disrupted - is all too familiar to anyone seriously concerned about human impact on the planet. 

With its focus on a group of isolated survivors, the novel reminds me of Robert C O'Brien's Z for Zachariah and Edwin Muir's haunting poem, The Horses. The High House is located somewhere unspecified on the east coast of England (the nearby church with its carved angels and the shifting of the coast and river call to mind Blythburgh and Dunwich). Unknown to teenaged Caro, her stepmother and father have been meticulously preparing this house as a refuge for when disaster strikes; stepmother Francesca, environmentalist and climate campaigner, is more aware than most that the ways of life we take for granted cannot endure. "She didn't have the habit that the rest of us were learning, of having our minds in two places at once, of seeing two futures: that ordinary one of summer holidays and new school terms, of Christmasses and birthdays and bank accounts in an endless uneventful round. And the other one, the long and empty one we spoke about in hypotheticals, or didn't speak about at all."*

Just before he and Francesca are lost in a violent cyclone that hits Florida, where Francesca is speaking at a conference, Caro's father tells her to take her toddler stepbrother Pauly to the High House, urgently. Caro resents Francesca for neglecting Pauly in favour of campaigning, but becomes equally critical of herself for devoting herself to him as a means of shutting off from the catastrophic wider situation. Arriving, Caro is surprised to find the house already inhabited and grounds well-tended, by the practical Sal and her wise grandfather, Grandy, recruited as custodians by the prescient Francesca. When the floodwater comes, inundating the village and drastically changing the shape of the land, this little group is safe on its bulwark, carefully husbanding their resources, growing crops, keeping chickens, preserving fruit and vegetables. We move into a future where the rest of the world seems to have disappeared; as Pauly matures and is given his own viewpoint, we realise what limitations these young people have accepted, and how they must cope without medical treatment beyond what they can provide for themselves.

The novel is saved from bleakness by the immersion in daily lives, the tenderness between Caro and Pauly, Sal and her grandfather, the small satisfactions of daily life and self-sufficiency and even moments of joy. But it's a stark warning too: how we take for granted that there will be power at the flick of a switch, food available in shops or delivered to our door, "that vast net which, invisible, imperceptible, held us up," and how ill-equipped we'd be for survival if these systems failed. It's also a hymn to the natural world and a reminder of how much we face losing if we continue to behave as if the Earth's resources were infinite. "You think that you have time," Grandy says. "And then all at once you don't."

The High House is published by Swift Press.

The Bolinda unabridged Audiobook is narrated by Mariam Abu-Hejleh, Sam Newton and Camilla Rockley.

* I listened to the Audiobook, so the punctuation and sentence breaks in these quotations may differ from those in the print edition.

See also: The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh, reviewed by Jane Rogers

The Overstory by Richard Powers, reviewed by Tracey Mathias

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.

Copyright Knepp Wildland

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.

Copyright Knepp Wildland

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.