A few weeks ago I saw a pair of swifts in the local park, sweeping around in dizzying arcs, swooping towards the ground but never touching, never stopping. I confidently told my children that swifts never land, then quickly googled on my phone to check I was right. If I’d read Vesper Flights I would have known for sure, and could have added that swifts can even sleep and mate on the wing. (I might have left out the mating.)
This is not the follow-up to Helen Macdonald’s breakthrough book, H Is for Hawk – that will be “a big book about albatrosses and the end of the world”, which is still in progress – and in that sense it may disappoint some of her readers. But it needn’t: in fact, as a selection of Macdonald’s journalism and essays (many from her regular homes in the New York Times magazine and New Statesman, others from elsewhere and new), it provides a series of short blasts of insightful, invigorating nature writing.
Even using that term, “nature writing”, feels loaded. It’s too broad – covering, in some sense, anything that isn’t about people and some things that are – and also too narrow, suggesting a sort of fey world of yomping and tree-spotting as practised by people in 4x4s wearing Barbour. It can be off-putting if, like me, your comfort zone is – to quote Mark O’Connell in Notes from an Apocalypse – “at all times more or less room temperature”.
Fortunately, Helen Macdonald is not like me. “When I was small I wanted to be a naturalist,” she writes, and she uses her expertise in this book to help us not just learn but think about things in a new way, and invoke a sense of wonder. I am glad to know now, for example, that many mushrooms are simply the visible protrusions of an underground network that may be miles in extent, so picking a mushroom doesn’t kill it. For added colour, “in Baltic mythology, mushrooms were thought to be the fingers of the god of the dead bursting through the ground to feed the poor”.
Solar eclipse
That sense of wonder is perhaps best evoked in the piece on a total solar eclipse that Macdonald witnessed in Cornwall in 1999: she knows already that “nineteenth century scientists on eclipse-viewing expeditions saw them as an exercise in self-control … in the face of the overwhelming emotions totality would bring”. But she is unprepared for how “my throat is stopped. My eyes fill with tears,” how “I’m tiny and huge all at once” and, above all, how writing about it seven years later, “it is an event that still lives in the part of me where everything is in the present tense, as if it is still happening, as if it will never stop happening.”
There are some essays here that fall outside “nature writing”, such as a fascinating report on “the numinous ordinary” or the quasi-religious importance of everyday objects in our lives, and some of the best writing is about the cultural overlap where humans and animals meet, such as the activity of swan upping, or people who keep birds.
There are also profiles, such that of astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol, who notes that concerns about environmental collapse are in one sense misguided: Earth itself is in no danger whatsoever. “It will survive whatever we throw at it. What is in danger is the environment that made us possible. We are pretty much cutting the branch we are sitting on.”
But if we fall from the tree, so do many other species, and Macdonald despairs that “so many of our stories about nature are … defining our humanity against it” when she prefers “a child’s way of looking at nature: seeking intimacy and companionship”.
Childhood memories
That may explain her talent for explaining the elements of the natural world that are evocative in our childhood memories: glow worms, cuckoos, even thunderstorms. And if her prose doesn’t have the wild beauty of Kathleen Jamie’s or the eccentric force of TH White – one of her muses for H is for Hawk – Macdonald nonetheless has a good turn of phrase: birds are “like precious stones, but alive”; armies of swifts are “a pouring sheaf of identical black grains”; and she shares that the Danish term for those vast fluid clouds of starlings that flock over roosting sites in the early evening is “black sun: it captures their almost celestial strangeness”.
Unlike Helen Macdonald, I will never be a naturalist. I can’t even guarantee that reading Vesper Flights will send me out into the green world more, though it may give me new eyes when I do unavoidably end up outdoors. But we need people who aren’t like us to share their experiences, and I’m glad to have “met” someone who “discovered my fox allergy while skinning a road-killed fox to turn into a rug”. That is not a sentence you will read anywhere else this year.
