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

MODERN NATURE by Derek Jarman, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"The New York Times described his film The Garden as 'a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury', which could apply equally well to this journal."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review.

"I have re-discovered my boredom here," Derek Jarman writes, finding at Prospect Cottage, his Dungeness home, an escape from the celebrity he earned through his films and his activism. "All around the traps were set. Traps of notoriety and expectation, of collaboration and commerce, of fame and fortune. At first a welcome trickle, something new. Then a raging flood of repetition, endless questions that eroded and submerged my work, and life itself. But now I have re-discovered boredom, where I can fight 'what next' with nothing."

Well, not exactly nothing. Beginning after Jarman's diagnosis as HIV positive (which gave, at that time, a grim outlook) his 1989-90 journal conveys a time filled with interviews, film projects and visits to London exhibitions and social events, interspersed with the making of his iconic Dungeness garden, constantly planting, propagating and making sculptures from objects found on the shore. The contrasts are stark, moving from the many demands on him in London to the quieter, reflective times at Dungeness. He writes of  "the separation of my two lives ...  work here (in London), sunsets and sunrises there." Always in the background is his sorrow at the death of friends from AIDS and the foreboding of his own, which by the end of the journal seems close, although he lived for another three and a half years, regaining enough health and energy to film Edward II, Wittgenstein and Blue.

Having visited Prospect Cottage and somewhat fallen under the strange spell of Dungeness, its flat horizons, big sky and sparse vegetation, I found that these sections appealed to me most, beautifully evoking that distinctive terrain with the nuclear power station looming in the background. "There are no walls or fences. My garden's boundaries are the horizon," he writes, and of the night sky: "So flat is the Ness that those stars that lie at the horizon touch your very feet and the moon tips the waves with silver ... The nuclear power station is an ocean liner moored in the firmament, ablaze with light: white, yellow, ruby." Both my visits have been in calm July sunshine; the place must be very different in harsh winter weather. Once in this memoir Jarman feared that the cottage roof would be torn off in a gale, while on another occasion a lightning strike at the power station sent him and other residents into a panic, rushing to pack for a hasty evacuation (which, fortunately, wasn't needed).

Derek Jarman is an engaging diarist, full of contradictions and charm. The boldly unconventional film-maker, rebellious activist and one of the first public figures to be open about his HIV diagnosis expresses a wistfulness for pre-decimal coinage and describes himself as too shy to try on clothes in shops; as a student at King's College in London he felt "frightened and confused," convinced that he was the only gay in the world. Almost every writer or artist will identify with the self-doubt he experiences: "All the way back on the train I was plagued with misgivings about The Garden. Looking at the rushes over the last six days, I discovered not one sequence that worked. Glaring faults everywhere ..." At the same time he feels a compulsion to write. "I find it difficult to write each day, but if I don't I'm swamped with guilt. Where does the compunction come from?" So strong was it that even when he temporarily lost his sight while being treated in hospital he dictated his journal entries to his devoted companion Keith Collins (referred to by his nickname HB in the book). 

Those us who were around in the 80s may remember how the AIDS epidemic was viewed by some who saw it as a punishment for homosexuals. "Last week a doctor in the mainstream of research with a leading drug company said that looking for drugs to combat the virus and to prolong the lives of those already infected posed an ethical problem, as keeping them (read me here) alive only exacerbated the situation. Better we should all die quickly. Every day, in many little ways, we are subjected to this terrorism. Our relationships unsanctioned, beyond the law." No wonder there is always anger simmering beneath the surface of Jarman's writing.

As it's a journal, events are understandably related without context, which can sometimes confuse the reader with a great many names, places, and visits whose purpose is unclear. Interspersed with these almost daily records are reminiscences from his childhood, spent in various countries with the RAF father with whom he had a difficult relationship. But it was early in childhood that his fascination with plants and gardening began: at four his parents gave him an illustrated Edwardian book, Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them, an unusual gift for so young a child but one which provided a lasting influence: "Flowers spring up and entwine themselves like bindweed along the footpaths of my childhood." The early part of Modern Nature refers constantly to plants in folklore, in herbalism, in classical literature. "If fate had turned out different," he writes, "I am sure I would have been a professional gardener, rather than an enthusiastic amateur."

In between making videos for the Pet Shop Boys, filming The Garden, beginning to research Edward II and frequently staying at his London flat, he spends his time at Prospect Cottage walking the shores of the Ness, collecting and arranging the driftwood, stones and found objects which give his garden its unique character. He reports constantly on the progress of his seedlings and cuttings. Even at his lowest, when friends' deaths are reported with horrible frequency, he finds solace in his plants. "I plant my herbal garden as a panacea, read up on all the aches and pains that plants will cure - and know they are not going to help. The garden as pharmacopeia has failed. Yet there is a thrill in watching the plants spring up that gives me hope."   

The New York Times described his film The Garden as 'a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury', which could apply just as well to this journal.

                                                           

Modern Nature is published by Vintage.

Derek Jarman photograph from Wiki Commons. Others by Linda Newbery.

For more of Linda's nature and garden writing choices, see:

Natural Selection: a year in the garden by Dan Pearson

Q&A with garden designer Cleve West on The Garden of Vegan

The Invention of Nature: the adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the lost hero of science by Andrea Wulf

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

The Flow by Amy-Jane Beer

Guest review by Sue Purkiss: SIGHTLINES by Kathleen Jamie

"... the reader is right there with her, feeling the force of a wind strong enough to knock you over, seeing how gannets glint against a storm cloud, shocked at the speed with which killer whales slice through the water."

Sue Purkiss writes for children and young people. She has been a Royal Literary Fellow at Exeter and Bristol Universities, and has also taught English and worked with young offenders. Her latest novel for children, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, is an adventure story set in the Himalayas at the end of the 18th century, featuring plant hunters, a sacred mountain – and its mysterious guardian! For more information, see Sue's website. She also has her own literary review blog, A Fool on a Hill (where this review first appeared), and is a contributor to The History Girls.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned to a friend that I was about to go on a course on nature writing (at Ty Newydd – I wrote about this on my blog). She chuckled, and said, “Oh, but nature writing’s so boring, isn’t it?”

I was taken aback and lost for words. Now, I would say to her: but what do you even mean by nature writing? How could it be ‘boring’ to read about something which I know she loves, just as I do? How could she not be interested in reading about what gives life to us, and makes our planet apparently unique - and how it is under profound threat?

Or perhaps I’d just give her this book by Kathleen Jamie and say, “Just give this a try. Go on – do.”

Kathleen was one of the tutors on the Ty Newydd course. I had heard of her before, but though I’d given this book to a couple of other people as a present, I hadn’t actually read it myself. I’ve just remedied this, and have found it completely engrossing – and therapeutic. It’s autumn, which is a beautiful season but has at its heart the fading of things – the fading of light, the falling of leaves, the gradual death of flowers. Of course it’s not all bad – there are birds that arrive as well as those that depart, and there are already buds on the bare branches. But still – it’s a season when it’s easy to succumb to a generalised feeling of sadness. And there are one or two things going on in the outside world which are also just a tad worrying.

So there have been mornings when I’ve woken up feeling gloomy. But as soon as I begin to read a chapter of Sightlines, I am taken into another place - and what a relief that is. That is perhaps a cliché: certainly, it’s my stock, easy answer when someone asks me what I like about reading: “A book can take you into another world…” But in this case, it really feels true. The book is a collection of essays. In most of them, Kathleen travels to Scottish islands, though there’s also one where she goes to a Norwegian museum and reflects on whale skeletons (in other essays, she writes about encounters with living whales); another where she decides she needs to see inside the body, not just outside, and examines pathogens under a microscope; another where she recalls an archaeology dig, from which the discovery of the ancient skeleton of a young girl lingers in her mind.

Wherever she goes, she is supremely attentive. She looks, she listens, she tastes, she touches, she thinks, she explores, she reflects. And she does this so effectively that the reader is right there with her, feeling the force of a wind strong enough to knock you over, seeing how gannets glint against a storm cloud, shocked at the speed with which killer whales slice through the water.

But she doesn’t simply describe what she sees. She muses, considers, makes analogies, asks questions. The reader follows not just her physical journeys, but the path her thoughts take. At the back of it all is an awareness of transience. As she says in the book’s final paragraph: "There are myths and fragments which suggest that the sea that we were flying over was once land. Once upon a time, and not so long ago, it was a forest with trees, but the sea rose and covered it over. The wind and sea. Everything else is provisional. A wing’s beat and it’s gone."

(She is flying in a helicopter as she leaves a remote, storm-swept island, where she had found a dead swan, describing its outstretched wing as a full metre of gleaming quartz-white, a white cascade: the swan’s wing, the wind, the helicopter flight – they all link into a chain of thought.)

Boring? Not remotely.

Sightlines is published by Sort Of Books.

See also: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham, reviewed by Graeme Fife

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, reviewed by Paula Knight