At the Very End of the Road
Phillip Edwards (Whittles, £16.99) An Eye for Birds
Bruce Kendrick (Whittles, £18.99)
IN At the Very End of the Road, the author deliberately sets out to ‘remove the me’ from his book so that we are left with beautifully observed vignettes of wildlife around the author’s home in the West Country. The prose is at times a little too rich—‘a lone curlew pipes in a candy floss dawn melting over icing sugar fields’—but the writer has an interesting slant on life and original ideas. Where he bursts into verse, he writes some beautifully lyrical poetry.
This is a book to savour by reading a chapter at a time through the year (it is conventionally structured by month), rather than at one sitting. What emerges is a strong sense of place and a selfless love for the land. One forms an impression of a true countryman who is very much at one with his environment, although Phillip Edwards writes: ‘I am an outsider here and just an observer, never having farmed nor shaped the land… nonetheless this land has embraced my soul.’ Amen to that.
When the history of the culture wars come to be written, there should be a chapter devoted to the ‘wokery’ that is becoming a characteristic of the onceharmless genre of ornithological Nature writing. Perhaps publishers think that, in order for the RSPB to put its considerable weight behind it, a book such as An Eye for Birds must parrot tired tropes about moorland gamekeepers killing wildlife, farmers ‘wreaking real havoc on our planet’ and contain a leitmotif of neo-rousseau-ist digs at land ownership.
Much of the action centres around watching curlews and other wading birds in estuaries around the Wirral, yet, ironically, there is an increasing weight of evidence showing that habitat managed for grouse shooting supports many more successful wader nests than do the RSPB’S upland reserves.
The constant pushing of an environmentalist agenda detracts from the charm of the story about the author’s boyhood rites of passage in 1960s Merseyside, and some vivid passages of Nature observation. This is a pity, as Bruce Kendrick does indeed have an eye for birds and the book contains excellent photographs. Jamie Blackett