The Seabird's Cry

Here's my review of Adam Nicolson's new book, from this month's edition of Literary Review, Britain's finest etc, etc...

The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers
By Adam Nicolson (Collins 400pp £16.99)

Adam Nicolson’s new book is, in his own words, ‘an exploration of the ways in which seabirds exert their hold on the human imagination’. It ranges far and wide – across the world’s oceans, through literature, anthropology, social history and folklore, through the author’s own experiences, and deep into recent scientific discoveries that have transformed our knowledge  of how these still mysterious birds live when they are not, briefly, visiting our world.
  At the centre of it all is Nicolson’s own intense engagement with seabirds, the roots of which lie deep in his childhood experiences of watching the birds on the Shiant Isles, three tiny Hebridean islands that his father, Nigel Nicolson, bought in the 1930s. Adam felt and still feels the awe that seabirds have always inspired in those who have shared some part of their world with them – the awe appropriate to the only creatures that are at home in the air, in and on the sea, and on land (though the least of these, in most seabirds’ lives, is land). The astonishing extent of these birds’ mastery of the skies and oceans is only now becoming apparent, thanks to ever lighter and more efficient tracking devices. An albatross, for example, ranges across six million square miles of ocean and can fly 7,000 or 8,000 miles in a few days, while expending almost no energy, such is its mastery of the ‘windscape’ in which it lives.
  The Seabird’s Cry explores ‘the lives and loves’ of ten birds, or groups of birds, each of which ‘displays a different facet of the central question: how to exist in all three elements’. They range from the deep-diving guillemots and razorbills and the ferocious gannet to the shearwaters that live their lives in a ‘huge and narrow slice of air, a yard or two high, 20,000 miles wide’, from the coast-hugging cormorants and shags to the kittiwakes and albatrosses that have all but abandoned dry land.
  That phrase from the subtitle, ‘the lives and loves’, is significant, for the ruling idea of this book is that of the Umwelt (a notion I first came across in John Bleibtreu’s extraordinary The Parable of the Beast, a title long overdue a reprint). The Umwelt is the animal’s individual subjective world, its sensory universe, its unique ‘meaning world’. The term was first used by a remarkable Estonian biologist, Jacob von Uexküll, whose work inspired Konrad Lorenz and that great observer of seabird life Niko Tinbergen.
  Von Uexküll is one of a small company of scientists, including the flamboyant Ronald Lockley and the auk’s-egg obsessive Alfred Newton, who people these pages. As you might expect of a book that takes its title from a Seamus Heaney poem, there are literary presiding spirits, too: the chapter on albatrosses, for example, looks beyond the obvious Coleridge to Herman Melville’s vivid account of his first meeting with an albatross and Baudelaire’s ‘vastes oiseaux des mers’. Homer (the subject of Nicolson’s masterpiece, The Mighty Dead) is everywhere, perhaps most eloquently in Nicolson’s account of how once, when he was limping back to land in his storm-battered sailing boat, a kittiwake suddenly appeared, ‘elastic, vibrant, investigative, delicate’, as if sent to guide him home. Just such a seabird appears to the half-dead Odysseus as he battles through stormy seas in flight from Calypso. In Homer the bird is Leucothea, the white goddess, and she saves Odysseus’s life with the gift of a holy veil – but she is still, also, a seabird of the material world, drawn from nature.

  Nicolson, a fine descriptive writer, is drawn to the otherworldly beauty of seabirds, but he is also fascinated by the science, expounding lucidly the dramatic advances of recent years in seabird research. And, unlike some of our more rhapsodic nature writers, he is clear-sighted about the horrors of life in a seabird colony, where, as well as predation from outside, cannibalism is often rife and the struggle for survival ferocious and unrelenting. He tells the grim tale of a species called the Nazca booby, which lives a life of ‘comprehensive dysfunction’, beginning with sibling murder and often graduating to apparently psychotic persecution and lingering murder of vulnerable young birds in the colony. However, there is, happily, another side to seabird life, as best exemplified in the long, blameless lives of albatrosses, perhaps the only truly monogamous birds in nature. (They, however, don’t have to contend with life in an overcrowded colony.) Nicolson traces plenty of examples of what is clearly altruistic behaviour among seabirds, to counteract what often appears to be sheer malice.
  Sadly, Nicolson has to end this celebratory book with a look at the headlong decline in seabird populations overall – down 70 per cent in the past 50 years. Mostly, of course, this is the price of sharing the planet with us humans, but it is also we humans who have the power to save the situation, or at least ameliorate it, and we are finally beginning to do so. There are grounds for hope, at least enough for Nicolson to end this wonderful book on a hopeful note. The Seabird’s Cry (beautifully illustrated by Kate Boxer) will, I think, become a classic of bird literature.

Fifty Years On...

So, here we are, a full half century on from the making of the Beatles' album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The BBC is celebrating the anniversary on a grand scale, as you'd expect - it's 'iconic' and obvious, there's lots to be said about it, many people love and revere it and, yes, it's a very fine album. But is it the best ever, as many still claim? Was it the best Beatles album? (I certainly found Rubber Soul more exciting at the time.) Was it even the best album of 1967?
 Bryan, for one, thinks not, nominating John Wesley Harding and The Velvet Underground & Nico as better choices. Quite right too, I'd say - and 1967 was also the year of Songs of Leonard Cohen, Nico's Chelsea Girl, Tim Buckley's Goodbye and Hello, the Byrds' Younger than Yesterday (not to mention their first Greatest Hits album - one of the greatest Greatests), Captain Beefheart's Safe as Milk, Scott Walker's first solo album and the Grateful Dead's eponymous debut. Does that amount to a great year? Not as great as 1966, I'd say (see Best Year Ever?). And we had to wait until 1968 for one of the three greatest albums ever made - Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. The other two? Well, I'd say Pet Sounds and Blonde on Blonde, both from 1966. Whatever, those were surely golden years, all three of them - and probably 1969 too...

Machair and Covfefe

June is here, in a blaze of sunshine in these parts - a promising first day of the 'meteorological summer'. Turning over my calendar, I find a picture of a handsome bee called Bombus distinguendus, the Great Yellow Bumblebee. This once widespread species, I learn, is now found only on the far North coast of Scotland and on a few of the isles, where it lives on the machair.
 Machair? This was a new one on me. It means a particular form of extremely flower-rich coastal grassland, in which the Great Yellow's favourite flower, the Red Clover, grows in prodigious abundance. The word 'machair' in Gaelic simply means 'fertile plain', and it was not used by scientists until the 1940s. Being scientists, they are still wrangling over its precise definition and over different classifications of machair.
 Ah well, it's good to start the new month - the new season - with a new word (and a bumblebee).

Indeed, not one new word but two, for last night Donald Trump somehow coined the neologism 'covfefe'. I like it - it has a similar sound to that fine English word 'kerfuffle'. Perhaps El Trumpo was groping for a word to describe the lamentable state of the UK election campaign...

A Fall

Well, I learned a lesson yesterday - the lesson being this: if you're walking along a bridleway in deepest Kent (or indeed anywhere) and decide to consult your map, stop walking, unless you're absolutely sure what lies underfoot for the next few yards. I thought I knew there were no impediments on this soft, smooth, dry path, but I soon discovered otherwise. A sturdy tree root tripped me over and threw me down, straight onto my face and, apparently, my right hand - a good thing that path was relatively soft.
 There was blood, but not much; my nose was bleeding, but not for long, my upper lip was clearly cut, and there was a bruise-coloured swelling on my right hand. I sprang to my feet, as one does - nothing to see here - dabbed at the blood, roughly assessed the damage, and strode on. Then I looked at that map again (this time breaking stride) - and realised I couldn't make head or tail of it.
 I recognised no names on it, or in my notes. It seemed to be the wrong map, with the wrong notes - was it the map from my last Kentish jaunt? Overlooking the evidence of the bloodstains on the map - my brain was really not working very well at all - I began to wonder if there'd been some kind of timeslip. Where was I? How was I going to carry on walking with the wrong map? This was all very strange. Happily I'd taken a few pictures earlier with my phone, so I had a look - yes, it was today's date - and noted the locations. Looking at that bloodstained map again, I finally spotted a name I recognised and everything fell into place. I walked on.
This morning, I find my swollen upper lip has given me something of a Simpsonian overbite, and the cut looks quite impressive, the damage extending into the philtrum (a word everyone should use once in their lifetime). At least it's given me a rare opportunity to polish up that old chestnut, 'You should see the other fellow.'

Brightness

Continuing my progress through the (hard-to-find) novels of Elizabeth Jenkins, I have just finished reading Brightness. Though not in the same league as The Tortoise and the Hare, it's a fascinating piece of work and well worth a read, if you happen to come across it.
 Published in 1963 and set in the then present (unlike the fact-based Harriet and Dr Gully), Brightness portrays a fairly tight-knit Home Counties community with a pen as sharp as and often more brutal than Jane Austen's. The first chapter is a masterclass in skilful scene-setting, deftly introducing the key characters, telling (or rather showing) us just what we need to know about them, and placing them precisely in the social milieu of New Broadlands, a pleasant town set on a high ridge, its earliest houses 'built in the Edwardian era by a community of high-minded cranks'.
 What unfolds over the first three quarters of the novel seems to be a fictional study of parenting, good and bad, of youthful rebellion and delinquency and the 'generation gap'. The Tortoise and the Hare, you might recall, included a vitriolic portrait of a couple with modernistic progressive views, especially on the raising of children - views that amounted to an abdication of all parental responsibility. A background element in The Tortoise and the Hare, Jenkins's loathing of progressive thought, in particular in relation to the upbringing of children, comes right to the fore in Brightness.
 The most conspicuous representative of progressive thought in general is the frightful old humbug Mortimer Upjohn, 'a figure in the tradition of the town's Edwardian past', with his knitted waistcoat, grass green jacket, sandals and thick white woollen socks. Pursuing his self-imposed mission in life as a thinker and speaker in the progressive cause, he carries considerable weight in local affairs and is 'a man of no vices, unless a combination of bumptiousness with meanness could be called so; he was genuinely devoted to things of the mind; no sensual pleasures, to him, could compare with the interest he took in the discussion of social and psychological theories'.
 Upjohn's ruling idea, based on popular psychology, is that the blame for criminal actions 'rested entirely on those who tolerated the environment that had conditioned them'. He believed that 'the young were the only section of the human race that could be considered interesting and worth talking about. Of the young, the most sacred were the young criminals. From their double claims Mr Upjohn appeared to derive an extraordinary stimulation; he never tired of descanting upon them, as their exponent and defender; yet these subjects had nearly all to be drawn from hearsay and the public press. There was disappointingly little juvenile crime in New Broadlands...'
 Good knockabout stuff, but more central to the novel is Jenkins's withering portrayal of the nouveaux riches Sudgens, he a successful businessman, his wife a selfish and silly woman who cannot forgive or forget anything she regards as 'criticism', the pair of them engaged in bringing up their now late-teenage son with a toxic combination of unrestrained indulgence and non-existent discipline. As a result, the loathsome son is interested in nothing but the pursuit of his own massively subsidised pleasures - girls, money, jaunts to London and abroad, and fast cars.
 As contrast to the terrible Sugdens, we have Una Lambert, a widow with a beloved - and not indulged - son who is at Cambridge and, having got through a period of adolescent sullenness, is turning out to be a remarkable young man, a credit to his mother. We see much of the action through the eyes of the sympathetic Una, a woman more interested in the possibilities of Christian faith (though not a conventional 'believer') than in the inanities of progressive thought.
 As the novel progresses, a good deal of broadly theological discussion and speculation enters the picture, making the reader wonder: where is all this going? Is it a satire on progressive thought and parenting, a study of parent-child relations, a reflection on the nature of faith? It is all of those, but where it is going is towards a shocking and tragic event, about three-quarters of the way through the story, that changes everything in the most profound way, and puts all that came before in an entirely new perspective.
 It's hard to say much more without giving away the plot. Suffice to say that in its last section Brightness becomes a very different, stranger, sadder and more interesting novel than it seemed to be in its early stages. I'm not sure that it works, but it's certainly a remarkable piece of writing.
 The title, by the way, comes from St Bernard of Clairvaux, as quoted by Una's son:
'He said: "Bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright", and he described mystical experience as "an immersion in the infinite ocean of eternal light and luminous eternity".'

Found

Having visited one local nature reserve that I'd located but failed to enter last year, I thought I'd chance my arm with one that I last year failed even to locate. This time, I'm happy to say, I found it, and was rewarded with an abundance of that dusky little beauty (our smallest butterfly), the Small Blue. It can reasonably be described as 'rare' and is certainly 'threatened', but if you find it at all, you're likely to find it in considerable numbers. That was certainly the case today; in an hour or two's wandering around this (un'improved' grassland) reserve, I saw scores of them - sometimes a dozen or more in view at one time amid the grass or nectaring on flowers, some fluttering about, some mating, many contentedly settled out of the wind, doing nothing. I also saw my first Small Copper of the year, feeding eagerly on an umbel of Ground Elder, that beautiful, much-maligned 'weed' - and a single Brown Argus and an early Large Skipper...
 Every year, the miracle begins again - the butterflies appear, first the hibernators that have survived the rigours of winter, then the newly emerged spring fliers, then the great surge of summer butterflies, and finally the late fliers of autumn, the last we'll see before the great winter disappearance and the bleak butterflyless months. And every year the butterfly season unfolds in a different way - no two years are the same. That is one of the things that makes butterfly watching in this country, where so many species have but a tenuous hold, such a particular bittersweet delight.

Two Ascensions

Today is Ascension Day (and, as it happens, my late father's 108th birthday).
 The Ascension of Christ has proved a challenging subject for painters, involving as it does a two-tier composition, with Earth and astonished disciples below, Heaven and the ascending Christ above. This posed no particular problems for artists working in the Byzantine tradition of flat, two-dimensional picture space. But to present the scene naturalistically, in the three-dimensional world of Renaissance and later art, was more difficult.
 The picture above, by Perugino, tackles the problem by presenting what is essentially a static, two-dimensional image of the scene, but with each element painted naturalistically, the figures rounded and lit as if in three-dimensional space. The image is so patterned and tightly structured that it could almost be a stained-glass window. Note those formal, symmetrical angels and that mandorla of cherubim heads around Christ. But note too the shadows on the ground and that lovely Umbrian landscape in the blue distance.
 For a completely different approach, consider the picture below, a modello by Tiepolo (probably G.B. and his son G.D. working together, as they often did). Air was Tiepolo's element, and skies - skies peopled with dramatically posed figures in ravishing colours - were his forte; no one painted ceilings with such convincing pictorial depth, or rather height, and his clouds are as eloquent and perfectly placed as his figures. Jesus ascending into clouds, to his disciples' astonishment, was a subject that came naturally to him (as did the Assumption of the Virgin, which he painted many times). His version of the Ascension might lack religious intensity, but as a piece of masterly painting there's no arguing with it.