ALBION by Anna Hope, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Combines typical ingredients of the big house novel and family saga with deep questions about individual responsibility, whether wrongs of the past can be righted, how we adapt to climate change and nature loss, and what kind of future we can shape."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She is a writer, reviewer and active campaigner on animal and environmental issues. Her latest novel, published earlier this year, is The One True Thing. 

The big country house as a fictional setting has enduring appeal. Names come readily to mind: Downton Abbey, Brideshead, Manderley, Mansfield Park, Brandon Hall (see Graeme Fife's recent review of The Go-Between) and countless more, including the recent Saltburn. The house in Anna Hope's latest novel differs from these others in never being named, though it's certainly as grand as any of them - an eighteenth-century Greek Revivalist mansion standing in a thousand acres of Sussex pasture and woodland. The name we focus on isn't that of the house, but of the Albion Project - a ten-year rewilding project that certainly owes much to the influential and nearby Knepp Castle estate, obliquely referred to. As with the Knepp project, the ambition of owner Philip Ignatius Brooke and daughter Frannie is to extend beyond their own boundaries, creating a green corridor that will reach through Sussex and Kent countryside to the sea. 

Now Philip has died, and the novel's action takes place over five days in May during which the family reassembles for his funeral. Of his three children only Frannie, the eldest, still lives there, and is in the process of moving with her young daughter into the main house, while Philip's widow, Grace, will take over their cottage. Philip himself had inherited house and estate at just eighteen when both parents were killed in a car crash; he set up what became known as 'the English Woodstock', a festival known and fondly remembered as The Teddy Bears' Picnic. There he met his future wife, leading to a marriage from which she wishes she'd had the courage to escape. While she remained at home with the children,  he did escape - to New York, where he settled for years with another partner (and possibly another child?) before returning and zealously taking up the rewilding scheme.

Anna Hope loses no time in showing us the spiky relationships and resentments of the three grown-up children, Frannie, Isa and Milo. Frannie is named as heir in their father's will, to the disapproval of brother Milo; she in turn is impatient with Isa, who's barely been in contact; Milo, recovering from various kinds of addiction, plans an exclusive rural retreat in the grounds in which, bizarrely, he aims to convert the 1% who can afford it into benevolence that will benefit the whole of society. Frannie, faced with paying millions in inheritance tax, is desperate to find the money somehow, fretting as she tries to write her father's eulogy; Grace, relieved to exchange the house she hates for the cottage, has ambivalent feelings about her late husband and how she'll express them at his funeral. Isa, distancing herself from wealth and privilege, is a teacher in London, scornful of her sister's enterprise: "The shepherd's huts, the yurts, the caravan serving lattes to middle-aged white people while they sit on hay-bales and chatter about their Pilates teachers and their dogs. A theme park for solvent fifty-somethings, all of it about as wild as a fucking printed tea-towel." Meanwhile, seven-year-old Rowan is showing what her class teacher sees as a disturbing fascination with bodily decomposition after death.

Into this potent mix comes a young American PhD student, Clara, with a bombshell to drop. Most readers will see what's coming, but that doesn't lessen the impact when she chooses her moment to reveal the source of the estate's wealth. With mesmerising clarity, calmness and precision she compels the family to listen, making eloquent use of her encounter with Rowan playing with a box of shells.

What next? How will these descendants of Oliver Ignatius Brooke adjust to the knowledge of the vast injustices (more than one) that underpin their privilege?

I first came across this novel when it was dramatised as Radio 4's Book of the Week earlier this year. There, I thought the repercussions of Clara's revelation were disappointing, too glibly and swiftly dealt with, so I wanted to see how Anna Hope handles this in the novel. Even here, though, I'm not sure. There are various reconciliations: too many and still too quickly, because of the constraints of the five-day structure. Frannie is the one whose ending is left most open-ended and uncertain as she confronts difficult questions, both practical and ethical.

That reservation aside, I found Albion utterly compelling: it combines typical ingredients of the big house novel and family saga with deep questions about individual responsibility, whether - and how - wrongs of the past can be righted, how we adapt to climate change and nature loss, what kind of future we can attempt to shape and who will benefit. The pace is leisurely enough to draw us fully into the family's concerns, while never seeming slow; tensions crackle off the page while the depictions of the natural world are vivid and immediate, whether portraying the woodland in May extravagance, the brisk extermination of a pregnant mink or the dawn song of a nightingale. I hadn't read Anna Hope before, so this is a very impressive introduction.

Albion is published by Penguin.

See also Anna Hope's Expectation, reviewed by Claire Grint of Cogito Books, Hexham.

Linda Newbery's The One True Thing is published by Writers Review Publishing.

ENGLISH PASTORAL by James Rebanks and THE FARMER'S WIFE by Helen Rebanks, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"He and his family had tended to see environmentalists as 'bonkers', impractical opposers of farming realities, but now he made the connection between the decline of once-common birds such as lapwings and the prevalence of modern farming methods."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review and was a Costa prizewinner for her young adult novel Set in Stone. Her recent publication This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us looks at our daily choices - what we eat, wear, buy, use, waste and throw away - and how we can choose better for animals and the environment.

James and Helen Rebanks, husband and wife, have each written about the experiences that led them to the small mixed farm close to Ullswater, formerly managed by James's grandfather, where they now live with their four children. James's 2020 book, English Pastoral - an inheritance, which details his conversion to the nature-friendly farming they now practise, deservedly won the Wainwright Prize and was the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year; Helen has followed with The Farmer's Wife - my life in days. James's book had been on my pile for some time, so when The Farmer's Wife was a reading group choice, I read both.

James's book invites comparison with Isabella Tree's Wilding, and he acknowledges the influence of her project with Charlie Burrell at the Knepp Castle estate in Sussex. As a young man he travelled to Australia, where he saw very different large-scale land management; swayed by the drive to modernise and increase food production, he began to see his grandfather's ways as antiquated. Gradually, though, he saw that this race to higher productivity drastically harms nature while doing farmers no good, either - pushing small farmers off their land and lowering food prices so that producers have to strive harder and harder to make any profit. 

Reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, while living on his father's rented farm, was a catalyst for James. He and his family had tended to see environmentalists as 'bonkers', impractical opposers of farming realities, but now he made the connection between the decline of once-common birds such as lapwings and the prevalence of modern farming methods. Mowing grass meadows for silage, rather than later in the summer for hay, deals death to curlew chicks and other ground-nesting birds; removing hedgerows takes away valuable habitat, shelter and food; endless application of fertilisers exhausts the soil, and spraying pesticides causes the wide-ranging losses of which Rachel Carson warned. "This was business-school thinking applied to the land, with issues of ethics and nature shunted off to the margins of consciousness." 

He set himself the task of farming in a way that was not only nature-friendly but that would restore much of what had been lost. He sought the help of specialists, notably Lucy Butler of Eden Rivers Trust who showed him and his father that allowing streams to meander and form pools and wetlands would amply benefit wildlife and flood prevention (as described in Wildings, too). "I've come to realise that we need a small army of naturalists to help us play our part in the restoration of the countryside. There is more to understand about the ecology of a farm than any farmer can reasonably be expected to know." 

Returning to slow, traditional ways has its cost, and for years James took outside employment to support his family. "I'm not sure I'm much good at being a farmer," he writes. "It is overwhelming. I can't get everything done, let alone done well ... Often I get things wrong. The farm makes almost no money, and whatever money it does make, it devours." He readily acknowledges how much he owes to his wife Helen, and to women in general, who do much of the work that keeps a farm and family functioning.

Over to Helen's own book for more of this, with an emphasis on food; she prides herself on providing her family with wholesome, nourishing meals and includes recipes, many of them traditional, in her memoir. There's a lot (too much) about combining the demands of farm admin and domestic tasks with the care of small children: detailed episodes about looking in the fridge for something to cook, tidying toys and negotiating a supermarket with toddlers in tow soon become tedious. But a section on the 'Beast from the East' vividly describes the urgency of caring for animals and keeping the family warm and fed in an isolated, snowbound building, without electricity. When the worst is over and they venture down snow-banked lanes to the main road three miles away, the traffic is flowing freely, making their ordeal seem part of a different world. 

The Farmer's Wife goes back and forth in time, from childhood, through the couple's residence in Oxford while James was studying history there, Helen trying various ways of making a career for herself after finishing an art degree, and renovating a house. Far from giving an idyllic picture of farming life she is frank about rifts and tensions between James and herself at tough times, and writes of the devastation to both their families at the time of the foot-and-mouth pandemic. From Oxford, Helen "could only watch and listen to it all unfold from afar. After a couple of weeks she (her mother) told me the news we'd all feared: there was a contaminated farm nearby, and all our sheep and newborn lambs had to be slaughtered. Dad was busy helping sheep give birth, knowing that they were all destined to be culled and burned or buried soon ... Men that you'd never normally see showing emotion were now filmed with red blotchy faces, trying to hold back the tears for the BBC." In Oxford, "people around me seemed oblivious to it all."

Both authors have much to say about how dissociated most people have become from the food they buy and eat, and the importance of understanding the connections between our choices, farming and the natural world. "We need to be highly suspicious of food that seems too cheap to be true," Helen writes, "because somewhere a field, an animal, a farmer or a worker is paying the price for that." But neither pursues the connections between animal agriculture, carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. Although James has much to say about the industrialisation of agriculture he only briefly suggests that eating less meat would reduce the environmental impact of food. Helen is disparaging about plant-based eating and seems proud of her children when they argue with a teacher about the school's introduction of Meat Free Monday. One paragraph particularly infuriated me: 

"The worst farming on earth is acres and acres of wheat, soy and maize grown by ploughing, which creates whole landscapes devoid of nature. These crops are wholly dependent upon synthetic chemicals - pesticides, herbicides and fossil-fuelled fertilisers that are disastrous for the soil, rivers, oceans, insects and birds. Eating 'plant-based' products supports these systems." (My emphasis). 

 

I felt like throwing the book across the floor at that point. Helen Rebanks must surely know, even if her editors don't, that most arable crops are grown to feed farmed animals, not humans directly. Not everyone who wants to eat meat has access to pasture-fed local produce; most meat bought and consumed in the UK is reared in intensive systems and fed on precisely the kind of crops she deplores. Reducing meat consumption is the best and only way to reduce the need for arable farming on such a vast and unsustainable scale. It's exasperating to see such a staggering piece of misinformation in a book designed for popular appeal, where many readers won't question its logic.

 

Because of this and other irritations I found English Pastoral by far the more rewarding of the two books, with its lyrical glimpses of landscape, weather and wildlife. "In the biggest darkest pool, clouds of minnows, little trout, swirl around erratically, their bodies scratching scribbles on the skin of the water"; "at dawn and dusk the valley bottom feels a little primeval, with the cattle and roe deer often grazing in a sea of mist"; "the air is heavy with mint, trampled by sheep feet".

One question that goes unanswered is how either James or Helen can possibly find time for writing and all that goes with publication, amidst the constant, pressing demands of farm and family. But both conclude their books with quiet contentment and appreciation of the life they have made. 

James: "The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in a little life on the land. In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly may be a virtue." 

Helen: "Caring roles in our society are all too often invisible, ignored in the crazy 'look at me' world we live in ... Learning that the word 'mundane' has its roots in the Latin word 'mundanus', of the world, made me see everything through a different lens. To me, caring for my family is, and always has been, the most important work in the world."

English Pastoral: an inheritance is published by Allen Lane

The Farmer's Wife: my life in days is published by Faber

Read Linda's review of Wilding by Isabella Tree

and of Sixty Harvests Left by Philip Lymbery

This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us is published by Farshore.