ENGLISH PASTORAL AN INHERITANCE
JAMES REBANKS Allen Lane 304pp, £20
Five years ago James Rebanks, a Cumbrian farmer who had dropped out of school then read history at Oxford in his 20s before returning to the Lake District, published The Shepherd’s Life, a much-admired account of his work with Herdwick sheep. English Pastoral, a book about farming, deserves to do as well if not better. The first part, Nostalgia, is a hymn to the grandfather who taught him to read the fields and sky, and showed by example the rhyme and reason in the ‘old ways’. After his grandfather’s death Rebanks ran away to Australia, where he tried to learn lessons about a different sort of farming while feeling homesick for crooked fields and drystone walls.
The second part of the book – Progress – describes his attempts to work with his father, modernising the farm. Antibiotics and pesticides are in, grazing is out. Then the author reads Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and changes direction. In Part III, Utopia, Rebanks has retreated to his grandfather’s farm on the fells where he has planted thousands of trees, rerouted the river to create wetland areas, and is no longer trying to earn a living solely from the land.
Blake Morrison in the Guardian hailed the memoir/polemic as belonging ‘in a pastoral tradition that runs from Virgil to Wendell Berry’. Julian Glover in the Evening Standard described it as having ‘the raw power of a three-act Ibsen play. Jamie Blackett in the Telegraph compared his descriptive powers to those of Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie. Several reviewers quoted Rebanks’s vision of cobwebs hanging from the rafters of a barn ‘like tangled pairs of women’s tights’.