Review round-up: the natural world

Books about wildlife, farms and the outdoors, fiction and otherwise

Over the 15 years I had my Wordpress blog I wrote a fair few book reviews, most of which I’ve imported into my Substack archive, though I also reviewed for The Bookbag. Chances are you won’t have read them, and even if you did you may be in the mood now for a book you didn’t fancy then so I thought I’d collect a few together, with supplementary recommendations. I started with crime and thrillers set in the real world and followed up with some that weren’t, and then some assorted fiction. This time I’m looking at books about nature and the world around us, both fiction and non-fiction, though not anything explicitly about climate change (I recommended a few climate change novels in 2019). If it’s too long for your email, you might need to read it in a web browser, and if you make it to the end there’s a prose poem I wrote about rain.

The obligatory start in Yorkshire

I started 2020 reading the pair of Simon Armitage books my sisters bought me for Christmas 2019. They’re both about long-distance walks so there’s a lot of time spent outdoors commenting on weather, scenery, wildlife and the like. In the enjoyable Walking Home, Simon Armitage (now the poet laureate) walks the Pennine Way in the reverse of the usual direction, starting in Scotland and ending up near his house in West Yorkshire. It’s an entertaining journey through the north, sometimes walking with friends, sometimes with strangers and sometimes alone, but each night doing a poetry reading in an attempt to pay for bed and board.

Walking Away is a similar format from a couple of years later, but this time he’s walking in an unfamiliar part of the country, the south-west coast. I didn’t enjoy Walking Away as much, partly because I got the sense that he wasn’t enjoying the trip as much. He comes across as almost mourngy at times – his back hurts, his feet hurt, he’s not in the mood for a reading, he’s not enjoying the company of the strangers who’ve come to walk with him – and the book has a faintly dissatisfied air like a contractual obligation album from a band you used to like. If you’ve enjoyed any of his prose though, give Walking Home a go.

Birds and suchlike

I read Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald at the end of 2021 and reviewed it at the start of 2022 — see link below. It’s a collection of essays and articles focused for the most part on birds and wild animals. Some of them are more obviously ‘nature writing’ than others, though it is filed under nature writing in bookshops.

This is a book then for the curious non-specialist. Someone with a passing interest in nature, perhaps, eager to read descriptions of it by someone more deeply immersed - a casual dipper, willing to be drawn in

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

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Into the Tangled Bank by Lev Parikian is a great next step if you’ve dipped a toe with Helen Macdonald and you’re eager for more of the nature stuff. It is a book about nature, but also about how the average Briton (whoever that may be) experiences nature, so there are urban street/park/garden excursions as well as the grounds of museums, and nature reserves and the like. From memory, there is nowhere he visits that isn’t accessible to the general public, though that does include an isolated holiday destination on an island of birds.

Lev Parikian sometimes writes the Country Diary for the Guardian (as does Richard Smyth, mentioned below), and judging by both the humour and the use of footnotes in this book, is probably a reader of Douglas Adams and/or Terry Pratchett. His latest book, Taking Flight, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book prize. He has a Bill Bryson-ish air of being interested but not an expert, even though he knows an awful lot about birds, and his enthusiasm is contagious — he’s also, handily, on Substack.

An Indifference of Birds by Richard Smyth is highly recommended for the interested amateur birdwatcher, particularly if they’re urban-based. I read and reviewed it in 2020 (link below) and was most enthusiastic about its accessibility to the novice.

White-tailed eagles, we're told, are 'broad-spectrum feeders - they'll eat any old shit'. This is the level of technicality I can deal with.

Richard writes fiction as well (see Fiction section below) and has written other non-fiction nature-related books that I haven’t read, including one about exploring the natural world with small children.

Whether they will then grow up to be teenagers as nature-obsessed as Dara McAnulty is another matter. I read his Diary of a Young Naturalist in 2021, after it had won the Wainwright Prize, among other things, and everyone was talking about it. Dara is an autistic nature enthusiast and climate change activist from Northern Ireland, currently studying at Cambridge University. The book covers the year he was 14, from Spring to the following first day of Spring. It's in the form of a diary as you might expect from the title, though not every day has an entry.

Some of his descriptions are amazingly vivid, and I don't just mean 'for a kid'. There were passages in the book that were completely immersive, a joy to read — his focus and intensity really draw you into the scene and his enthusiasm is infectious. Because I grew up in the 1980s, the first thing that springs to mind for me when I hear 'Northern Ireland' is unfortunately sectarian violence. This short book (150 pages in the ebook I borrowed from the library) introduced me to a part of the UK countryside I knew nothing about, and portrayed it as a place of wonder. It obviously has its problems, and he mentions the dwindling of bird species and problems with the reintroduction of red kites for instance, but there is a lot of hope and positivity here.

There is, however, also a fair amount of teenage angst. This is a diary first and foremost, and happens to be mostly about nature because of his interests. Reading about a child being bullied to the point of suicidal thoughts, in the child's own words, made me feel deeply uncomfortable and I was surprised that aspect hadn’t been mentioned in the glowing reviews I’d read. That said, there is far more natural wonder than anything else, and his passion and drive are inspiring. If you want to rekindle a sense of childlike awe for the world around you, dip into this book and then spend some time outdoors watching birds in a tree or insects on a wall.

Farms and farmers

Until I left home at 17 I was usually within earshot of sheep. For the last fifteen years, if I want to lean over a gate and get my fix of the sounds of bleating and grass-cropping I have a ten-minute walk, or if I’m in the mood for cows I can head in a slightly different direction for about the same amount of time, but basically I have spent most of my life in the vicinity of farmland.

Farmer’s Glory by AG Street must have been mentioned by Cumbrian farmer-author James Rebanks at some point (in fact he wrote the introduction to the edition I’ve got) for me to have added it to my huge To Read list. The author worked on his father’s farm somewhere in the south of England in the early years of the twentieth century, then went to work on a Canadian farm in 1911. If you’re interested in man’s changing relationship with nature, or the history of farming itself, it’s a sad but enjoyable comparison of two very different farms, and also the pre- and post-war farm in England.

I never properly reviewed English Pastoral by James Rebanks because I don’t know where to start but I think it should be read by every politician, everyone on the board at supermarkets, and everyone who has the luxury of choice when it comes to food — by which I mean, their first priority isn’t maximum nutrition per pound due to their tiny food budget. James Rebanks is a Cumbrian farmer and in this book full of love and a sense of responsibility, he looks back at the way his grandfather farmed, where it all went wrong in his father’s generation, and how James and his children might be able to start putting things right. It talks about soil health and the downward spiral of artificial fertilisers, but also about the land and the wildlife, and it’s written beautifully.

In a similar vein but with a different focus is Wilding by Isabella Tree, which my other half and I listened to in 2020 (audiobook via the library). I started out bristling at the entitled aristocrats but it is a fascinating account of switching from intensive farming to a system that’s more in tune with nature, and I learnt a lot about counterproductive government incentives for agriculture. You can see how they’re doing on their website https://knepp.co.uk/

More bristling at entitled rich folks with Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squat, which is a surprisingly enlightening book that I reviewed in 2023 (link below). He does explore complexities that other people perhaps feel they need to present as simpler choices, and amazingly he does come across as pro-Nature.

Given that he doesn't seem keen on environmentalists, he is doing a surprising amount that on another farm, under the guidance of a more palatable farmer, would be seen as the Right Stuff

Fiction

The only adult fiction in this section is The Woodcock by the aforementioned Richard Smyth. I recommended it on Twitter after reading, as follows: If you like novels set in Yorkshire and/or the 1920s and would like to be deeply immersed in a fictional coastal town such that you feel you could become a visitor guide I recommend The Woodcock by @RSmythFreelance. Lots of bird & rockpool action, plus love, philosophy & sadness. Not to mention a theatrical American with a vision of Coney Island adjacent to the North Sea.

Richard also writes short stories — he was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2021 — and all the ones I’ve read have a strong nature theme. Some explicitly, like the ones about ornithologists, others with strong contextual detail. In fact I once went to a very enjoyable workshop he ran, about how to weave the natural world into your fiction. You can read a fair few of his stories on his website at https://richarddsmyth.com/

David Almond came to one of the New Writing North How to Start Writing the Climate workshops during the summer of 2021 to talk about his new YA novel Bone Music. Set in the north-east of England (Kielder I think) it’s about a city girl who goes on climate marches but is used to all mod cons. She spends a short time in the tiny village where her mum was born and deepens her connection to nature, helped by a lad of her age who plays an ancient bone flute. It has a great sense of place, some lovely description and plenty to think about.

I still feel like I’m in a fiction slump and after giving up on a couple of novels recently I re-read the children’s book The Little Grey Men by BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford). My edition is a paperback from 1986, I remember my dad buying me it as it had been a favourite of his as a child — it came out in 1942. The story is about the last gnomes living in England, Warwickshire to be precise, and a trip they take up-river from where they live beneath an oak tree.

It wasn’t so much the story as the nature-writing that I pulled The Little Grey Men off the shelf for, an aspect of the book that I’m sure I appreciate far more now than I did when I first read it. It is packed with detail: plants, birds’ nesting materials, the play of light on the bank from the water, seasonal changes. His descriptions are so vivid, like the ‘mudsmoke’ — the drift of muck washing off the cows’ legs as they stand in the shallows to drink — or sherry-coloured pools. As with many children’s books with countryside themes, there’s a fair amount of death and destruction: think Watership Down by Richard Adams, The Animals of Farthing Wood series by Colin Dann, or more recently Pax and Pax: Journey Home by Sara Pennypacker. All of which are readable as an adult as well, and are both wonderful and sad.

The Lost Words was our Christmas present from friend T in 2018, and is just beautiful. It’s a response to various nature words being removed from a new edition of a children’s dictionary a few years ago. Those words have been gorgeously illustrated by Jackie Morris, and it’s aimed at children. They won’t appreciate it — get it for yourself.

I hope you’ve found a book, author or topic to explore. Let me know in the comments or by replying to the email.

If you missed it in January you can read an essay I wrote about accidentally learning to identify birds:

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Finally, here’s a prose poem called Endless Rain, that I wrote in one of the aforementioned How to Start Writing the Climate workshops:

Watch the lightning flicker across the surface as the globe spins through the void like a sycamore key twirling its way to earth in autumn. Lightning forking down to tower blocks in Tokyo and castles in Scotland, bruising the afternoon over the plains of Nebraska, reflected by every ocean. Waves slap at the birds that taunt them as they swoop and dip towards the surface. The wind whips across and between continents and the birds go with it. They go to dance on branches and trill their desire, acrobats with a failsafe: falter and they peel away to safety. They go to a cat's pounce, hidden amid the downpour. They go to perch on rooftops as the rain hammers the tiles, dripping through branches and ferns, bouncing off rocks and into pools, running through meadows to the sea. Pattering on bird's wing, lamb's fleece and deer's antlers. As dusk falls, the sheep bleat their worries that tomorrow, tomorrow might be the day the sun doesn't rise, the day the dark stays and the wind dashes their thoughts away across the fells with the clouds that float on high. The cycle of water: clouds and wind and rain. Neverending from time out of mind, it's always raining somewhere. Until it isn't and the drought creeps and spreads from desert to sea, until the sea shines no more and the fish run out of depth, the birds don't have to swoop to catch them, the waves no longer snatch at their tormentors, and all is silence. Still, except for the drip, drip of the last of the rainwater leaking out of the moor.