Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I read a little of this book of nature essays ten years ago, not long after it was released (and highly praised). I was underwhelmed. Yet the same characteristics I wasn't keen on then are what I enjoyed now.

In the intervening decade, a strand of mystically, historically inclined nature writing has become popular. My theory (as I've mentioned already to some friends) is that many of these authors, in their thirties and forties, fellow late Gen-X'ers, grew up on series I also loved, for example, The Dark Is Rising and Robin of Sherwood and as a result something a bit pagan is entwined with the way we appreciate nature. It used to feel like it was mostly in my head, there were only a handful of people I'd ever spoken to who 'got' it; then a few authors started writing that way; and the next thing you know, you can't browse books without falling over and bruising yourself on atavistic verbal celebrations of the countryside. Findings is like wholemeal bread - all the easier to appreciate when indulgences have become so frequent as to get boring, but it would be a grey world if that was all one experienced.

Findings is rooted in its present; ferries and oil rigs and plastic rubbish on the seashore are as much part of the vista as the older landscapes. (It never felt aesthetically wrong to read this as an ebook, as it might with some texts.) The author visits Maes Howe, and there are surveyors inside with technical equipment; she also can't stay for the solstice as she has to be home to look after the kids that day. This is an experience of nature frequently bound by practicalities; there are no months'-long escapist trips (or the impression of them) to far flung wildernesses, or experiences of landscape that feel as if one could easily stumble back in time hundreds or thousands of years.
Between the laundry and the fetching kids from school, that's how birds enter my life. I listen. During a lull in the traffic: oyster-catchers; in the school-playground, sparrows. And the natural world is a solace, to some extent in the background, when her husband is seriously ill for a couple of weeks, and when she has to talk to her grandmother about going into a home.

As I started this book again, I recalled something - which my Scottish friends may take issue with. A cumulative personal feeling and experience, picked up from people in different places is that this kind of nature mysticism, and a certain associated fanciful extravagance is rather English, there being far more sympathy for it in the southern half of England in particular. Whilst the average Scot, albeit not necessarily Calvinist in the religious sense about such things, would typically find them silly, superfluous and perhaps a little suspicious if actually articulated (cf. the writing of Robert MacFarlane* compared with this book, an Englishmanedespite the name). The best response you'd get would be that person's version of 'that's nice dear', they wouldn't take the conversational ball and run with it. Kathleen Jamie's Scotland feels Nordic and sensible; the obverse of that is, perhaps inevitably, a touch of Jante Law. Then there's the quality of Belle & Sebastian and other Scottish indie commonly called 'fey': if you must be weird and artsy, you should be a bit shy and apologetic about it - not flamboyant (unless of course you're drunk).
I didn't expect Jamie, later in the book, to write a scene illustrating the contrast I perceive.

Nonetheless, I feel robbed � denied one of the sounds of summer, which all our forebears would have known, that irksome little crex-crex. Why conserve them, other than it being our moral duty to another life form on this earth? If there is no ‘clam’rin craik�, no ‘noisy one of the rushes�, it betokens something out of kilter with the larger ecosystem on which ultimately, in mysterious as-yet-undiscovered ways, we all depend.
That’s what the ecologists and scientists will tell you. But there are things which cannot be said � not by scientists, anyway. Another person arrives at the viewing bench, not an old lady but a man in young middle age, a holiday-maker. We fall into conversation � he obviously knows his stuff about birds. He has a young family with him on the island and, while they’re on the beach, he has slunk off for an hour in the hope of spotting a corncrake. So here he is, an Englishman of higher education with a professional job, a family, a cagoule and good binoculars.
‘Can I ask why you like them? Corncrakes I mean.�
‘Well,� he said. ‘They’re like� little gods of the field, aren’t they?�
I could have punched the air. If corncrakes are rare, animism is rarer still. Anyone can clear his throat and talk about biodiversity, but ‘Corncrakes� little gods of the field� will not get you published in ornithologists� journals. That’s how I picture them now, however: standing chins up, open-beaked, like votive statues hidden in the grass.

I get the feeling she would never have allowed herself to imagine it of her own accord.

On a couple of other occasions she reprimands herself for some poetic ideas - but she's a poet. (e.g. In a museum of dead things: In this place of silence and slow time, it’s as though [they] hug each other and look happily forever up - on the bright linnets and wrens. Which, I remind myself through tears, is ridiculous. ) If even a poet isn't supposed to imagine such things, who on earth is, in her stringently realist world-view?

Most of the essays are about rural lansdcapes, but two are about Edinburgh. One is about rooftop features of notable buildings in the city, the other a visit to a museum collection of 18th and 19th century medical specimens: organs, bodies and the like. The latter is something I'd never have chosen to read about, but I'm not so soft I'd need to leave a gap in the book. I wasn't squeamish about the description of a dead beached whale on an uninhabited island in an earlier essay. It's not the purely physical I mind, but the introduction of human authoritarian behaviour into the equation alongside the physically repulsive must be what leads me to I find the account of these specimens nauseating and angering. I very much liked the way Jamie tried to balance her instinctive felt suspicion of the character of the old specimen and body collectors with attempts to understand the different mores of the time and the stage science was at. (Professional writers are so much better at that sort of thing than the average GR reviewer...) Although given that empathy is now said to be considered far more important in medical training - and a strong stomach for witnessing physical ills doesn't necessarily preclude caring about individuals' experiences - I must disagree with her final point in that piece in which she agrees with a C19th quote about doctors' acquired lack of pity being useful for humanity as a whole.

The downside of Jamie's love of the quotidian is that the writing could be more spectacular too; its attention to detail is excellent but it can lack the intensity some would expect from a poet. However, Findings would be ideal for those who find Macfarlane's books overly literary, elitist, and dreamy - or who feel that one can sometimes have too much of a good thing as far as romantic nature writing is concerned.


* My own conclusion, but whilst writing this I found an - there's a quote from the paywalled text in this - indicating that at one point Jamie also considered herself a different sort of writer from MacFarlane.