2019 read #2: Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin
Edited by Alison Hastie and Terrence Blacker
302 pages
Published 2008
Read from December 28, 2018 to January 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Roger Deakin is one of my all-time favorite authors, though in his lifetime he only published one book (Waterlog) and finished the manuscript for one other (Wildwood). Not long after I read Waterlog, I ordered a copy of Walnut Tree Farm, a collection of Deakin's journal entries from his later years, collated and compiled into a single "year" of entries—natural history observations, musings on pollarding and sustainable uses of common land, mixed together with rather more personal entries on Deakin's boyhood, his loneliness and horniness living alone at the namesake farm, his crabby misanthropy toward suburbanites and women out jogging who don't respond to his hellos.

I held off from reading Notes for all these years, possibly because I didn't want to read the last published words to come from his pen. Having finally read his journals, I'm left with a feeling of knowing a little bit too much about him—that maybe I didn't need my image of Deakin the sensitive and perceptive eccentric who soaked up woods and waters in all the forgotten little nooks of England to be replaced with a more grounded, less ethereal image of a cranky old goat alternating between lustful fantasies and "things will never be as good as they were when I was a boy" conservatism.

Notes is a strange document, a posthumous publication of diaries never intended to be made public. It's full of lovely observations of the natural world around Deakin's farm and the adjoining common, arranged in a seasonal cycle, ending in a lovely and sad moment of shooting stars, which could easily have been purpose-written to serve as a coda for Deakin's life. But in revealing so much of the man behind the words, Notes can only make him appear more human, more fragile and fallible.

Deakin's diaries often dwell on the topic of how people no longer appreciate the natural world and what it has to offer, contrasting the modern suburbanized state with his own idyllic recollections of childhood adventures along creeks and in copses. One might question just how attuned most English folks were to natural cycles of subsistence during Deakin's golden age, but we'll leave that aside. I find myself interested in the conservative roots of conservation. You can catch a whiff of nativism in a lot of these lovely works of English nature writing, this idea that "the old ways are the best" for conserving the health and vitality of the English natural world. "People these days" (meaning urbanized people, technocratic people, often the agents from a central government body, sometimes immigrant populations) just aren't in touch with the real life of the hedgerows and little waterways, just don't understand how to manage land in harmony with the plants and creatures that share it.

I'm reminded of how much our American, Muir-inspired "wilderness" ethos derives from the proto-fascist Rousseau, and erases millennia of Native history and land-use practices with the words "where Man himself is a visitor and does not remain."

It's a troubling ideological heritage for us to unpack. Our species and our culture need to do what we can to ameliorate the massive extinction event we're inflicting upon the world, but we have to do so together—not by excluding "people these days," however they might be coded.

2019 read #1: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
391 pages
Published 2012
Read from January 2 to January 14
Rating: 3 out of 5

When authors approach folklore or other fantastic story elements from a literary perspective, they often show a certain reluctance to get their hands dirty. "Is this fantastic event really happening, or is it all in the mind of the protagonist?" and "Is this event really fantastic, or is there a perfectly mundane explanation?" are two of the most boring and tired cliches one could possibly use—certainly the least interesting questions one could examine with the storytelling tools the fantastic provides, close siblings of "It was all a dream." Yet while "It was all a dream" is rightly derided and nearly extinct outside of the crappier tiers of children's cartoons, these two cliches are seemingly mandatory for any lit fic writer who wants to dip a toe in the vast possibilities fantasy has to offer.

My advice, as an author who has never been published on a professional level and certainly has never been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is to embrace the fantastic. If you're going to write a novel based on a Russian folktale about a girl made out of snow, don't waste my time spinning major plot threads like "Only the old woman and her husband ever see the snow child, perhaps they are crazy with grief and isolation!" Especially when (spoilers!) such threads never turn into anything and everybody ends up seeing her after all as soon as a young man gets interested in her. Don't weave the beauty and strangeness of folktale magic into the heart of your novel, if you plan to reveal that, well actually, the ethereal snow child is an orphan who's been living in her family's abandoned homestead and this is all perfectly rational and explicable and dull.

Maybe my experiences with other literary works of fantasy have left me impatient with lit authors who hold their noses while they play with the fantastic. It isn't going to sully your perfect Pulitzer-worthy fingers to leave mundane explanations up to the tastes of the reader. Not everything has to be explained. This isn't hard sci-fi, after all.

Aside from that pet peeve, I found this book to be... fine? Adequate, somewhat moving, probably not something I'd nominate for a Pulitzer but pretty good overall. Though I certainly wanted something more magical from it, and that may have affected how I enjoyed it.