Something is wrong in the Robert Macfarlane Extended Universe, also known as the genre of nature writing. I’m not the first to notice. A few years back, Mark Cocker fretted that books on nature had become ‘a literature of consolation’, that writers in the field (so to speak) had become disengaged from the realities of wild landscapes. From a different direction, Steven Poole derided the bourgeois escapism of it all (nostalgie de la boue, ‘nostalgia for the mud’, of a kind with north London farmers’ markets). Most fiercely, Joe Kennedy went after the genre’s ‘cookie-cutter poetics of belonging and self-care’ and – significantly – its ‘often-bad writing’.
Can I shock you? I like nature writing. I can’t go along with political dismissals of the genre: it’s too big and wide for that, even in its present denuded state. When it’s done well – and it sometimes is, we’ll get to that eventually – it’s a rich, exciting, even exhilarating form. But the quality of writing matters, and not just to wincing literary aesthetes handling Granta 102: The New Nature Writing disdainfully, with a pair of tongs.
I maintain, not without some fondness, a small but ever-growing file of ridiculous lines thrown out by nature writers. ‘How does the terminology of beekeeping diminish a symbiosis?’; ‘Every place is unique. Did Thoreau say that? I seem to think so, but I can’t remember where and perhaps I am mistaken’; ‘I don’t operate a mobile phone, or wear a watch. I cycle, like the boy I was’; ‘Furious falls the rain like a snappy tantrum, a fit thrown by the whims of time’; ‘all elsewhere is milk’; the entirety of Paul Kingsnorth’s Arcadia essay (‘What if the truth is in the soil?’).
Writing is voice. Voice is character. Character matters. Nature writing is a chorus of many voices – even as it is, the genre encompasses Natasha Carthew, founder of the Working Class Writers’ Festival, and Adam Nicolson, 5th Baron Carnock. Yet at present one note dominates.
This note is best understood through the I, the first person, specifically the first-person present tense. This style is used in modern nature writing like an in-crowd’s dress code, signifying at a glance that this is that sort of nature writing: personal, lyrical, dressed with multiple gushing blurbs and longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. And so – to grab a fistful at random – ‘as I look out of the back window, I see the shattered rooms of a former dwelling’ (Richard Skelton, Beyond the Fell Wall); ‘the fog fills the moment and I walk towards it, into it, yet never quite reaching it’ (Benjamin Myers, Under The Rock); ‘I watch the geometry of winter trees’ (Paul Evans, the essay Shrewsbury to Crewe).
The form probably owes its preponderance to the lasting influence of the diary or almanac format. Gilbert White recorded the natural history of Selborne in dated letters, not a diary, and wrote about himself in the past tense, like a normal person. But he may nevertheless be partly to blame. A more immediate influence is – inevitably – J A Baker and The Peregrine (‘my diary of a single winter’ [sic]). Writers as various as Chris Ferris in The Darkness is Light Enough, David George Haskell in The Forest Unseen, Terry Tempest Williams in Refuge and of course Dara McAnulty, the 16-year-old winner of this year’s Wainwright, have since made use of the diary form (or something like it: in place of dates, Tempest Williams uses the water level of the Great Salt Lake).
The first-person present (FPP) is a natural fit for the form (we use it as standard in the Guardian’s daily Country Diary column). Now though, like a rose-ringed parakeet, it’s broken out, and has become ubiquitous. Five of the seven books on the 2020 Wainwright shortlist use it (five and a half really, as it comes and goes in Mike Parker’s On the Red Hill), as do the winners from 2015, 2016 and 2019, plus a celebrated runner-up from 2016, Rob Cowen’s Common Ground. In an unsparing review of that book, Anita Roy identified the FPP as one of Cowen’s principal problems: ‘There’s no register so prone to pompous self-regard – and there’s really only so much “I”-ing a girl can take.’
The first-person present lends additional weight and phantom significance to the author’s every action (it’s like a blanket deployment of the hammy trick of finishing a chapter on a single, otherwise unremarkable sentence – itself a familiar feature in our genre, especially in the post-David Peace northern gothic subdivision). It can be used well. Helen Jukes, Stephen Rutt and Horatio Clare are among those who have used it well: conversationally, easily, encouraging immersion and friendly intimacy. But used badly, as it usually is, it’s an inflationary measure: declamatory, portentous, puffed-up. Common Ground ends with an acknowledgments page in which the author thanks, among many others, Thomas Hardy, T S Eliot, Alan Bennett and Philip Larkin, ‘in whose footsteps I humbly follow’. Oh, the humility!
