The Peregrine: 50th Anniversary Edition. J. A. Baker
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went inland.
While he might convey the emotional flatness or neutrality experienced during long passages of his wildlife excursions, Baker is never dull. In fact, if there is any criticism, it arises because there is so little downtime in the prose. It is all highly distilled, highly concentrated. The reader is being challenged with virtually every sentence. So much so, that it is sometimes easier to consider his prose as poetry. A page or two at a time can occasionally feel like enough. Indeed, it is remarkable how easily his writing can be framed as verse. Take this sentence:
Spring dusk;
Creak of bats’ wings
Over the steel river,
Curlew-call
Of the lemuring owls.
Or this paragraph:
A wrought-iron starkness of leafless trees
Stands sharply up along the valley skyline.
The cold north air, like a lens of ice,
Transforms and clarifies.
Wet plough lands are dark as malt,
Stubbles are bearded with weeds
And sodden with water.
Gales have taken the last of the leaves.
Autumn is thrown down. Winter stands.
If one had to name Baker’s most extraordinary gifts as a writer then I would isolate two qualities. One is a capacity to convey the otherness of wildlife through reference to objects of domestic and human function. The risk he runs is the charge of anthropomorphism, into which he almost never descends. It sounds paradoxical, but he somehow makes the animal or plant instantly accessible through the familiarity of his imagery, yet without diminishing its separate non-human identity. Here is an extended example:
A dead porpoise was humped upon the shingle, heavy as a sack of cement. The smooth skin was blotched with pink and grey; the tongue black and hard as stone. Its mouth hung open like the nail-studded sole gaping from an old boot. The teeth looked like the zip-fastener of a gruesome nightdress case.
More perfect, perhaps, is his description of golden plovers in their summer plumage:
Their black chests shone in the sun below the mustard yellow of their backs, like black shoes half covered with buttercup dust.
The other ability at the heart of his achievement is what I call – though it is not completely adequate – his ‘synaesthesia’: a capacity to experience and express information derived from one sense as if it were encountered by another. For example, he interprets sounds as if they could be seen or tasted. In The Peregrine he writes of the crepuscular churring of the nightjar:
Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk mellows it and gives it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood. The sound spills out and none of it is lost.
This capacity for synaesthesia is seldom expressed in this clear and unambiguous form. More usually it is blended into his wider perception in smaller, subtler gestures that comprise a single word or phrase. Here are four sentences from The Hill of Summer:
The pure green song of a willow warbler descends from a larch.
A moorhen calls from the smell of a pond.
The churring song of a nightjar seems to furrow the smooth surface of the silence.
One by one the calls of stone curlews rose in the long valleys of the downs, like fossil voices released from the strata of the chalk.
The last two quotations are particularly important and exhibit the same sensibility manifest in that line already quoted about ‘leicestershires of swift, green light’. Note how the light is experienced as ‘swift’. These three examples emphasise how my word, ‘synaesthesia’, is not quite enough to encompass all of this facet of Baker’s genius.
For I mean, in addition to the standard definition of that word, his ability to make what is immaterial and without physical form somehow concrete and solid. He reifies the invisible. His prose puts flesh on the white bone of light, space, time, gravity and the physics of movement. It is as if he encountered the air as the material element that we know, from chemistry – oxygen, nitrogen, etc. – that it is, but which we seldom, if ever, truly experience. It was an art that seems almost ecologically adapted to capturing the fastest flying bird on Earth. Baker and the peregrine were a perfect consummation. Yet this special gift is everywhere in Baker’s writings. Here is how he sees a group of greenfinches:
Frequently the flock flew up to the trees with a dry rustle of wings, then drifted silently down again through the dust-moted trellis of sun and shade. The yellow sunlight flickered with a thin drizzle of bird shadow.
In The Peregrine the ability to envision the heavens as something solid leads to a whole sequence of metaphors in which the air and its inhabitants are described in terms of marine life. As Baker looked upwards, so he seems to peer down into the ocean depths. Most beautifully, towards the end of the book, he imagines the falcon: ‘Like a dolphin in green seas, like an otter in the startled water, he poured through deep lagoons of sky up to the high white reefs of cirrus.’
Elsewhere as Baker muses on the fluidity and apparent joyfulness of a seal’s motion at sea he speculates:
It is a good life, a seal’s, here in these shallow waters. Like the lives of so many air and water creatures, it seems a better one than ours. We have no element. Nothing sustains us when we fall.
Here Baker edges towards a remarkable revelation about the whole nature-writing genre. On reading the passage, one thinks of the specific creatures (as well as their most devoted author/admirers) that have made the deepest appeal to the modern British imagination: the otter (Henry Williamson, Gavin Maxwell), whales and dolphins (Heathcote Williams and the whole New-Age fixation with cetaceans) and birds, particularly birds of prey (W.H. Hudson, T.H. White and J.A. Baker himself). If we cannot move between the elements like these wonderful animals, then humans can at least imagine what it is like to be an otter or a peregrine. But no writer I know has taken us deeper into the life of another creature and allowed us to experience how that elemental mastery might possibly feel than John Alec Baker.
Mark Cocker, March 2010
by John Fanshawe
When the Penguin paperback edition of J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine appeared in 1970 – with a striking, black-and-white cover design by Brian Price-Thomas – the biographical sketch revealed little: ‘John A. Baker is in his forties and lives with his wife in Essex. He has no telephone and rarely goes out socially. Since leaving school at the age of seventeen he has had some fifteen assorted jobs, which have included chopping down trees, and pushing book trolleys in the British Museum, and none of which was a success. In 1965, he gave up work and lived on the money he had saved, devoting all his time to his obsession of the last ten years – the peregrine. He re-wrote his account of this bird five times before submitting it for publication. Although he had no ornithological training and had never written a book before, when The Peregrine was published in 1967 it was received with enthusiastic reviews and praise for his lyrical prose. Later that year