Got a beef with life? Try talking to some cows

Early one sunny morning in spring, more than 20 years ago, I spoke to some Hereford cows as they bobbed their curly heads over our fence, telling them they were beautiful.

In that moment, my long winter of sadness ended and I shifted into a new life — a small miracle that came back to me as I finished John Connell’s superb memoir about one tough season on his parents’ farm in County longford.

The Cow Book is an unexpected triumph: a brutally realistic account of mud and slime and relentless rain and incredibly hard labour.

you turn the pages desperate to know the ‘what next?’ and ‘why?’ — and the genius of this 30-year-old Irish farmer and writer is to keep secrets and resolution until the very end.

This is the story of a young man who

NATURE THE COW BOOK: A STORY OF LIFE ON A FAMILY FARM by John Connell (Granta £14.99)

had travelled the world, gladly shaking the mud of rural Ireland off his shoes, turning his back on the isolation of the family farm to forge a glamorous career in the media and film — but who had to return home in order finally to understand himself, his family, his roots.

We don’t learn the nature of the problem that led him back until we’ve shared (and suffered) with him the punishing nature of farm work.

Connell went home to try to make it as a writer, but finds little time for art while calving and lambing. He works for his keep — and a sort of penance, too. This is not a self-indulgent memoir. The Cow Book reeks of dung and blood and Connell is searingly honest about working with cows and sheep destined for the market and the table.

There is no time to rhapsodise about landscape, no room for sentiment, when you have your arm plunged deep into a cow’s birth passage, praying that the valuable calf will live.

We meet the characters — human and animal — of Connell’s deceptively simple narrative: Mam and Da and Granny and Vinnie the dog, as well as neighbours and Irish rebels of the past.

The backbone of the book is his struggle with his father, a simmering drama culminating in a terrible argument.

On the farm — prey to constant exhaustion, worry about animals, money, disease, death and despair at the weather — father and son engage in an ancient

struggle. Behind the clash between old ways and new ideas is claustrophobic closeness, disappointment and unspoken love.

connell also guides us on a fascinating history of the cow itself, from its worship as a god by ancient egyptians, through cowboys and bullfights, to the unnatural practices of industrial farming.

this provides an excellent counterpoint to connell’s vivid narrative of one calving season from January to April, because it takes us briefly away from the rainy, oppressive landscape of mid-ireland, where men are hard and women stoical because there is little choice. it’s a satisfying, powerful mix.

One of the joys of this book is the prose, its clean plainness offset by the glorious cadences of irish speech, which are also those of the Bible and prayer book: ‘i too have known that joy at the salvation of something you thought was lost — as shepherd, as cattle drover, as a man come through darkness . . . i found the beauty and wonder of nature on this farm, and in it the joy and despair of life.’

how strange it is that the cow Book was born from failure, depression and conflict. As connell explains: ‘When i came home my plan was to write what i needed to and then get back to the city, but the farm has taken over. i only have the time to make small notes to myself, patches of paragraphs here and there, in between the sheep and cows.’

those very paragraphs have become this book — surely a prize-winner, as fine as the pedigree herd i communed with so many years ago.