17 Sep 2013 04:30:21
Sometimes the accounts are harrowing, as when we are initially charmed by the clever honeyguide bird in Zambia shouting "chakka chakka chakka chakka" to summon Dee and his guide, Lazaro, to a bees' nest and waiting for them to retrieve and share the honeycomb, only to learn about the honeyguide's demon chick. Laid in another bird's nest, it massacres the rightful chicks as soon as they hatch: "The honeyguide pursued its half-siblings in a frenzy of killing, puncturing their bodies, dragging them from side to side… until their blood burst beneath their skin."
As evidenced in his acclaimed debut, The Running Sky, Dee possesses an extraordinary eye for birds, and Four Fields is peopled by many birds, but also by frantically swimming wildebeests, "lizards in their stop-start lives", and some very interesting dead people. There's a pickled person standing in his canoe for centuries under the peat; there's poor John Clare eating grass; Red Cloud speaking to President Ulysses S Grant – "When we first had this land we were strong. Now we are melting like snow on the hillside while you are growing like spring grass"; and some Normans who "built a pontoon bridge by inflating the skins of drowned cattle".
Dee mentions that John Ray, a 17th-century naturalist, wrote that he wanted "to gaze with his own eyes on the nature of things". This seems an excellent description of Dee's own intention to see things for himself: in visiting the area around Chernobyl, he registers not only its history but its grasshoppers – how scarce they are in the Red Forest, whose trees turned red after the explosion. In Montana he notices how the white crosses commemorating fatal car crashes "thicken noticeably around Indian places". And everywhere he goes he sees grass, flouting history like the Green Knight: "The felled Green Knight picks up his own head and carries it off, and you know that when he plants it back on his shoulders it will grow again, that what was cut will not die but will come again, that the Green Knight is grass."
The fields he visits are unfrequented places and they inspire unfrequented emotions, and I enjoyed being shown around by someone who sees things this feelingly: "For grey weeks in winter the whole day is tilted towards its end"; "There were leaves coming like new mouse-ears on the apple trees"; "A barn owl, a giant chaff-coloured moth, floated through the thick light, working the harvest corduroy for its trembling animals"
Sometimes the impact of a detail is muffled by the amount of description. Around Chernobyl the villages are full of fruit trees, and since there are no longer any villagers, the trees drop their fruit in terrible abundance. That was an image that pierced like a nail, but then the subsequent description rather upholstered the point: "The fallen lay where they fell, bright and undisturbed, red, yellow, green: demonstrations of the physics of cluster, roll and drop, the way things fall down and fall apart. I walked closer and red admirals that had been feeding on the fallen sweetness lifted over the fruit like small flying carpets. Spun around other trees there were pears and plums as well as apples: atomic models, planets, dwarves, moons, small and large, red, yellow and green."
In many books about nature the writer turns out to have designs on the reader, or else startles us with his private dramas – as if, halfway through a lecture on bobolinks, the lecturer were to fling all his clothes off. But Four Fields is not a ruse; it is genuinely about wildebeests and corncrakes and buried forests, and for its purity of intent and fixity of attention I was very grateful. The book offers experiences and, for anyone whose responsiveness to the world has slackened, a reminder of how full experience can be. "I had almost forgotten Marsh-Earths," Dee quotes John Evelyn as writing, in 1676. I had too, and I'm glad to have been saved from such a forgetting.
