The New Nature Writers: An Encounter

 

The invitation appeared in my inbox some weeks ago. The very week, in fact, that I had been grappling with questions about how to represent the land-as-character in my fiction, how to give it a voice that was pre-historic, pre-linguistic, while still using words (and not, as a friend put it, sound like a yoghurt weaving vegan fundamentalist). The email offered a conference on the ‘new nature writing’ hosted by Bath Spa University and the opportunity for me to explore this unfamiliar new frontier. It was a classic case of synchronicity – serendipity indeed.

The conference didn’t disappoint. It was a fascinating (exciting even) day of discussion amongst a small group of thirty-odd writers, activists, artists, journalists and poets concerned with how to leverage their combined and considerable talent and their obsession(s) with nature to tackle the urgent issues of climate change and environmental degradation.

As I drove through the summer lanes on my journey there, it hadn’t occurred to me that I might actually be drawn in to a community of writers, inspired by their integrity.


We had Richard Kerridge’s brilliant introduction to the new nature writing’s scuffles with the Romantic sublime, localism and scientific discourse. Brett Westwood of the BBC Natural History unit urged us to eschew jargon and embrace complexity with new languages designed to engage and ‘reach out to the heart’ of audiences. John Vidal spoke to the importance of the new nature writer’s position ‘outside looking outside,’ beyond the industrial and commercial interests that have and continue to ‘corrupt' nature, as well as the mega-NGOs that are supposed to serve it. A seriously smart operator, it would be easy to dismiss Vidal on first meeting as a buffoon, an entertaining relic from the school of ‘60s journalism, but that would be a big mistake. He knows what he's talking about. Melanie Challenger was, I thought, unduly hard on herself and her achievements as she talked of the difficulties and pitfalls of ‘making a difference’ while Paul Evans silenced the room and gladdened our hearts with a moving and lyrical meditation on an ancient, local yew tree. He deserves his reputation as one of the most enthralling writers of our times.

The question of language was central to all of our discussions – how to name things, how to use that naming to enchant and reach out and advocate for the environment. What is critical here – and evidenced so wonderfully by Paul Evans’ reading – is the importance of communicating the particularity of one’s experience, of speaking with a unique voice, inhabiting authenticity.

But what was also critical was this question of how writers can ‘make a difference.’  Coming at this as a complete novice, it seemed to me that the new nature writers, like so many people with very specific expertise, were so involved in tying themselves up in philosophical and idealist knots that they fail to see the ‘difference’ that they can make as staged, specific, small and of necessity short term. It seemed to me it was about expectations and I wanted to cry out to them and say, that the idea of ‘making a difference’ was way too big an idea. Speak to any successful campaigner or advocate and they will tell you that their targets are very particular, often small-scale, approached with the recognition that achieving those targets will enable them to step up and move on to bigger and bigger things over time. Unsatisfactory and frustrating as this can be, particularly to the idealist, it can offer a genuinely radical and achievable change agenda that is sustainable in the long term.

I was left with so much to think about, from the nature of personal responsibility in an age of environmental emergency, to the idea that the practice of being a ‘new nature writer’ must just be a complete and utter bloody blast – all that tramping about in ancient woodlands, slapping around on wet sand at low tide, lying prone in long summer grass hoping for a sighting of the Lesser Speckled Tit Warbler.

My encounter with the new nature writers left me enriched and with my eyes wide open to the nature we have now, as well as the nature that’s to come. I went on my way as a member of a new network to which I hope I can find something worth contributing. I also left feeling relief, that here was a group of genuinely decent, grounded individuals with a passion for the world around them and an extraordinary gift to convey that in some of the most brilliant prose I have heard for some time. For once, here was a series of readings that had me actively listening from beginning to end. And not a yoghurt weaving vegan fundamentalist in sight.

Review: Chris Cleave's The Other Hand

Plagued by the stereotypes and tropes of the African continent this is an uneven book that feels like it’s been written by numbers.   

The characters are dislikeable, the storylines unbelieveable – and I really wanted to believe them but they were just too ‘pat.’ The narrative didn’t have the detail, tone or style that make a story sing.  For anyone who’s spent any time in Nigeria, so much of the detail is incorrect – as if the implied European reader can be hoodwinked, as if no one from Nigeria would actually read it themselves. There is a ridiculous marketing ploy on the back cover that won’t tell you what the book’s about because it’s so incredible and about-to-change-the-world and builds the book up to a level it can’t possibly attain. And falls very far short of. 

There is a four year old son whose persistently ungrammatical speech sounds just like padding and is far more annoying than it is endearing. There is the central character Little Bee who we are expected to believe can be naïve village girl one moment, then wise African mama the next and it simply isn’t convincing. There is the monumentally dull character Lawrence. And there is Sarah, about whom we should care very much, but don’t. The twists and turns in the plot feel like brutal devices to push the story further but do nothing to add depth to character or theme. I hate to barrack another writer when I know how much hard work goes into a novel but it's not often a book annoys me this much – I’m so glad it’s over.

How To Write About the West Country

Always talk about the West Country as if it were a single place, the rustic wilds beyond the M4 corridor aspic-ed in real ale and cream teas. You wonder where it begins and ends – does it include Dorset? The Cotswolds? Shrug off concern with geographic precision and waste no more time. No one really cares. When writing about the West Country, litter your prose with adjectives and phrases such as ‘timeless landscape,’ ‘rolling hills,’ ‘blousy hedgerows,’ ‘rough banks’ and ‘lush meadows.’  It is the land of long grasses, wildflowers and larks.

Never show West Country characters as well-rounded, intelligent individuals (unless they live in Bristol and listen to triphop – see below).  They have neither the technology nor the brainpower to invent, create or pioneer any products or services that others might want. Except cheese. They live like Laurie Lee in a bucolic paradise where the second world war has not yet happened.

People in the West Country generally fall into two camps: wurzels or aristos. Aristos wear pink trousers or have hair like Princess Anne, spend their weekends hunting and are, naturally, to be despised. They are the polo-playing jetset, appearing each week in the backpages of Country Life magazine. Tory politicians, hedge fund managers with weekend cottages and celebrities are a subset of this camp. There are no subsets of the former camp, though a query remains over women wearing round-toed sandals, patchouli and knitted rainbow scarves. They are usually addled on homegrown.

Everybody in the West Country is white – unless they are immigrants funnelled into urban centres where children point at them in the street and parents respond with unabashed, frowny stares. In exceptional circumstances, immigrants can be white and from Eastern Europe.  These people steal jobs from the locals, live in static caravans on farms with upturned trolleys in the yard and are known for stealing the road-signs to sell as scrap.

Young people are to be seen as dim, deprived and disenfranchised. They are trapped in a monotonous wasteland of arable or dairy farming from which they feel alienated and thus race around in pimped-up Ford Escorts, an action which inevitably leads to early and tragic death in an RTA.  Grey-faced, football-shirted fathers shake their heads in graveyards as young girls lay solitary red roses and sentimental cards written in big round letters with circles over every ‘i.’ Girls / young women never feel alienated like this. They are too busy nursing their multitudinous babies and sponging off the state. This is the endgame for the lusty wench, last seen serving ale in pewter tankards and lolloping her breasts over unlaced corsets under the rafters of roadside taverns.

No one you’d ever want to write about lives in a provincial town. Nor do they live in the following cities: Gloucester, Exeter, Cheltenham, Truro, Taunton or Bath (especially not Bath). They can, however, live in Bristol. In Bristol, they listen to triphop and may go to edgy warehouse raves in St. Paul’s. St Paul's is to be treated as per Peckham or Brixton – transfer cultural references across (no one will notice). In Bristol, they have art and art-house cinema and arty music which they listen to /watch / look at in horn-rimmed spectacles and ethical jumpers. They have been to the dark side.

People who live in the middle of nowhere are likely criminal and not to be trusted. Unless they are downshifters from London who’ve gone west to start a small-holding. These people are romantic idealists, idiots in dungarees with double-barrelled surnames.

Make knowing jokes about sheep and lonely men living in valleys.  Or bring it bang up to date with a scene about dogging in gravel pit car-park. 

West Country people spend their time at village fetes, farmer’s markets or car boot sales. The knowledge they all drink cloudy cider hardly bears repeating, so well understood is this fact. The only people who don’t drink cloudy cider are middle aged card-carrying members of CAMRA with beards and leather jerkins. This demographic accounts for a high proportion of wurzels and may be linked to the women in round-toed sandals.

None of this applies to Cornwall, which is equivalent to London with a coastline and must be treated accordingly. People there go surfing before breakfast, eat lots of mackerel (cooked by Rick Stein) and have bunting permanently strung between the trees in their gardens.

Finally, conspire with your reader by adopting a patronising tone when talking about people from the West Country - never countenance the possibility that they might be reading your book / article / blogpost too. Don’t be afraid to cash in a bit of nostalgia capital - end your book / article / blogpost wistfully with a quote from WH Davies about life being incomplete without having the time to stand and stare. 

(with apologies to Binyavanga Wainana)