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awoodalla's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
relaxing
sad
slow-paced
3.0
swarnak84's review
2.0
Found it incredibly difficult to rate this book. The writing itself and the descriptions of his surroundings are perhaps 3.5 - 4 star. It is important to note that you see what he wants you to see in the book. In the first half of the book you don’t realise that he spends large periods of time away from his rural idyll in London and abroad. He isn’t as isolated as he would like you to think of him as.
When it comes to the otters and other animals- his actions are really objectionable. His transportation of otter after otter in distressing circumstances, leading multiple otters to die purely because of his desire to find an otter as a pet is really quite harrowing- he was perhaps a product of his time. But his amateur attempts to domesticate wild animals without the knowledge or proper resources to do so can not be excused: and are quite correctly highlighted in the foreword by John Lister Kaye and probably warrant a rating of 1*.
When it comes to the otters and other animals- his actions are really objectionable. His transportation of otter after otter in distressing circumstances, leading multiple otters to die purely because of his desire to find an otter as a pet is really quite harrowing- he was perhaps a product of his time. But his amateur attempts to domesticate wild animals without the knowledge or proper resources to do so can not be excused: and are quite correctly highlighted in the foreword by John Lister Kaye and probably warrant a rating of 1*.
sewfarsewgood's review against another edition
3.0
A heartwarming story, I watched the film when I was little and if I thought the film was sad then the books are so much worse, trying not to cry on a bus while surrounded mostly by teenagers was quite a feat. That said I didn't feel as drawn into the book mainly due to the writing style, it's quite slow and I felt it was always quite a slog to get through some chapters. Despite it lacking that unputdownable factor it is still a magical story.
novelideea's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
metaphorosis's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews
Summary
Gavin Maxwell, ensconced in a house on the beautiful coast of Scotland, decides to keep an otter as a pet - at any cost. And costs there are - financial, emotional, and (for the otters) existential.
Review
Ring of Bright Water and its sequel, The Rocks Remain, were two of the books, along with Gerald Durrell’s and James Herriot’s, that made the adolescent me think seriously about animals. I owe them for that. Unfortunately, the books look quite different to a wiser, older me.
Ring of Bright Water is more lyrical in its descriptions than I recall. In fact, there’s quite a lot of the book that’s simply describing the setting – the isolated house of Camusfearna and the nature around it. The otter I remember, Mijbil, doesn’t even enter the book until fairly late. And his successor, Edal enters in, though I’d thought she was only in the sequel.
What does stand out, though, much as it did in Maxwell’s memoir of childhood, The House of Elrig, is his attitude toward animals. What is clear now, but I don’t think was to the child me, is that Maxwell is focused on individuals. He loves Mijbil and Edal deeply and fully. But he’s not really concerned with animals more broadly – or, if he is, only in a somewhat selfish way. The very way he acquires the otters is fraught with risk – for them. Even he admits, in the end, that his very pursuit of exotic pets supports and instigates a cruel, brutal trade that causes many of them to die. It’s a fact that stands out to my adult view from the beginning. As a child, I was no wiser than he, and was simply mesmerized by the otters. Now, some of it is horrible.
I’d planned to go on to the sequel, but now I’m not so sure I can stomach Maxwell’s casual disregard of animal pain or his apparent view of them as an instrument for human enjoyment. Perhaps it’s not surprising in a man who grew up both collecting and killing with equal interest, and who initially set up a shark-hunting venture. Those elements come out with far more weight for me now than they did back in the ’70s.
If you’re an animal lover, I can no longer recommend this. There’s just too much that’s wrong in Maxwell’s approach. If what you’re primarily interested in is lush description, Maxwell’s prose hasn’t changed, and there’s a lot to like in his long descriptions of Camusfearna and the otters.
Summary
Gavin Maxwell, ensconced in a house on the beautiful coast of Scotland, decides to keep an otter as a pet - at any cost. And costs there are - financial, emotional, and (for the otters) existential.
Review
Ring of Bright Water and its sequel, The Rocks Remain, were two of the books, along with Gerald Durrell’s and James Herriot’s, that made the adolescent me think seriously about animals. I owe them for that. Unfortunately, the books look quite different to a wiser, older me.
Ring of Bright Water is more lyrical in its descriptions than I recall. In fact, there’s quite a lot of the book that’s simply describing the setting – the isolated house of Camusfearna and the nature around it. The otter I remember, Mijbil, doesn’t even enter the book until fairly late. And his successor, Edal enters in, though I’d thought she was only in the sequel.
What does stand out, though, much as it did in Maxwell’s memoir of childhood, The House of Elrig, is his attitude toward animals. What is clear now, but I don’t think was to the child me, is that Maxwell is focused on individuals. He loves Mijbil and Edal deeply and fully. But he’s not really concerned with animals more broadly – or, if he is, only in a somewhat selfish way. The very way he acquires the otters is fraught with risk – for them. Even he admits, in the end, that his very pursuit of exotic pets supports and instigates a cruel, brutal trade that causes many of them to die. It’s a fact that stands out to my adult view from the beginning. As a child, I was no wiser than he, and was simply mesmerized by the otters. Now, some of it is horrible.
I’d planned to go on to the sequel, but now I’m not so sure I can stomach Maxwell’s casual disregard of animal pain or his apparent view of them as an instrument for human enjoyment. Perhaps it’s not surprising in a man who grew up both collecting and killing with equal interest, and who initially set up a shark-hunting venture. Those elements come out with far more weight for me now than they did back in the ’70s.
If you’re an animal lover, I can no longer recommend this. There’s just too much that’s wrong in Maxwell’s approach. If what you’re primarily interested in is lush description, Maxwell’s prose hasn’t changed, and there’s a lot to like in his long descriptions of Camusfearna and the otters.
hermini's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
funny
informative
relaxing
slow-paced
3.5
evastrange's review
1.0
Rich bloke goes on a nature retreat, abuses an animal or five and tells us all about it in the most pretentious of purple proses from hell to show off his Oxford education. What a gem!
doug_whatzup's review against another edition
4.0
“Ring of Bright Water” sat forlornly in my “to be read” stack of books for far too long. As the true story of a naturalist Gavin Maxwell’s successes and failures at domesticating otters on the Scottish seacoast, it’s not the type of book I would normally read. With the possible exception of “Animal Farm” and “Charlotte’s Web,” stories featuring animals have never interested me. I’ve no desire to watch “The Lion King,” “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” I found so stultifying that I barely made it past the first 20 pages, and a paperback copy of “Watership Down” that mysteriously showed up in my book collection a decade or so ago has yet to be cracked open and probably never will be.
Aside from golden retrievers, which I find to be far more lovable, and quite often smarter, than my fellow man, and Sammy, the ancient, diabetic poodle I inherited from my mother and grew to love in a measure equal to his dependence upon me for his daily insulin injections, I have somewhat mixed feelings about keeping animals. This may be due to over-exposure; my ex-wife collected and disposed of animals like so many weeds — parrots, ferrets, a chinchilla (which she inadvertently killed by allowing it to lick a lethal dose of Vaseline from her hand), mice (a collection that quickly got out of hand), hamsters, a six-toed kitten more feral than tame and appropriately named Booger, and assorted other creatures. Most of these brushes with ill-suited pets ended badly and left me resistant to forming emotional bonds with beings whose existence I would more often than not find inconvenient, if not downright annoying, or in the rare instances in which that wasn’t the case, whose inevitable demise would prove excruciatingly heartbreaking.
To be honest, these ambiguous feelings of mine about God’s fellow creatures goes back further than my previous marriage. My dad was an avid hunter who frequently required my services as a substitute bird dog, an exercise I loathed to the point of wishing the doves and quail could shoot back. My father wished that I would become, like him, an avid hunter; what he succeeded in doing, however, was to instill in me a lifelong tendency to root, always, for the underdog.
My mother, much like my former spouse, also had a tendency to collect exotic pets. As a toddler growing up in suburban Los Angeles, I remember ducks and chickens kept unpenned in our backyard and occasionally escaping into the neighborhood and wandering single-file down sidewalks and across busy streets. A decade or so later we kept a goat in our backyard for some months, feeding it a steady diet of alfalfa pellets and keeping him relatively quiet at night by penning him in our shed, before the San Marino authorities threatened to cite us for code violations. And until recently, I had managed to block from my memory the summer I came home from boarding school only to find a caiman in residence in the downstairs bathtub, the one I used.
Then there were the rabbits, common enough pets in 4-H country but fairly unusual for the suburbs of Los Angeles. Two supposedly female rabbits were kept in a cage in the far reaches of the backyard, and as the oldest male offspring in our household it fell to me to keep the cages relatively clean. One Sunday evening, as I was performing chores (or perhaps sneaking a cigarette; I can’t remember which) while the rest of the family gathered around the television set watching Disney, I discovered that the two rabbits were raising a ruckus in the cage. It being more dark than dusk, I could hear better than I could see, and I ran into the house to report that the rabbits were “fighting.” For whatever reason, my alarm was met with shrugs all around, and my suggestion that the two “females” be separated was poo-pooed. Sure enough, one morning about a month later I went out to the back of the backyard to discover one of the alleged females trying to push newborn bunnies through the wire-mesh cage bottom. So began one of the worst days of my life, my mother and the four of us kids frantically trying to feed and warm some dozen baby bunnies, only to have them slowly expire in our arms, one after the other, like clockwork.
This was just my first tragic experience involving rabbits. While in my late 30s I “rescued” a baby rabbit whose warren I had very nearly mowed over in our backyard. I kept him in my bedroom, in a shoebox lined with shredded newspaper, fed him milk from an eyedropper a few times a day and, aware that my daughter’s cat had suddenly taken an interest in whatever that was behind my closed bedroom door, watched over him like a mother hen. My concern about the cat was not misplaced, and only the fact that frightened baby rabbits emit an ear-piercing, human-like shriek saved him from being carried off the one time that a carelessly unlatched door allowed the cat to sneak into the bedroom. It wasn’t the cat that did him in, however; it was my own ignorance. Proud that I had nurtured this baby rabbit to the point that he appeared ready to venture out into the real world, I decided to start working a bit of grass into his mostly milk diet. Had Google been around at that time, I might have learned that too much grass too soon can cause upset baby rabbit stomachs, and ultimately cause bloating to the point of lethality – which is exactly what happened.
Not all my experiences with animals, wild and domestic, ended badly. Take Bird, a baby robin that had fallen from its nest and whom I decided to rescue during the early spring of 1995, much to my new wife’s dismay and against my own better judgment. This being my second or third attempt at rescuing a wayward baby bird, I had a pretty good idea of what to do and what not to do. I had learned from childhood experience, for instance, that armadillidiidae, aka roly poly bugs, while possibly delicious to adult birds, cannot be accommodated by a baby bird’s throat.
I housed Bird in a large cardboard box in our bathroom and fed him a diet of crushed worms and canned dog food mixed with a bit of water. Surprisingly, he thrived, and it wasn’t long before we seemed to bond. He grew excited whenever I entered the bathroom and was soon able to jump on my extended index finger to accept a meal. He soon made the leap from my finger to the rim of the box and before long was taking short, experimental flights inside the bathroom. My parents were due to visit us from California for the first time since I had re-married, and as the anticipated date neared, Bird was not only flying quite capably, he was causing our home’s ground floor bathroom to stink to high heavens.
The day before my parent’s arrival, I introduced Bird to the outside world. For some time he clung to my finger, apparently overwhelmed. Once I set him down on the grass, however, he began to tentatively explore his surroundings, and before long he felt confident enough to fly to, and take up residence in, one of our river birch’s lower branches. I felt proud as the father of a new Harvard graduate and even more full of myself when I discovered that he would come to me whenever I extended an index finger and called, “Bird.”
My father was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease at the time and, aside from tremors, was having difficulty crossing thresholds which, to him, was an experience akin to stepping off a cliff. As a consequence, when they arrived the next afternoon, my parents immediately concentrated on the task at hand, that of entering the front door, and they did not notice when, Snow White-like, I called to Bird and he obediently flew to my extended finger. It turned out to be the last time he came to me, and when I tried to replicate the trick for my parents the next day I managed only to cause them to suspect that their son had lost his mind.
I’d imagine that most people have stories like these. Most human beings, the decent ones anyway, have a nurturing instinct, an impulse to rescue endangered lives, regardless of species. Who isn’t charmed by a cute puppy or kitten? Who would stumble upon an injured fawn and not be concerned? When coming across a turtle trying to cross a highway, most people will try to void hitting it and the best of us would pull over, pick it up and carry it out of harm’s way. As iconoclastic and occasionally misanthropic as Gavin Maxwell was, he’s relatable on at least some level to readers of “Ring of Bright Water.”
He’s also completely nuts. Sure, otters are adorable, but would you sleep with one? Would you otter-proof your entire home? No, you wouldn’t, especially after reading this book, unless you, too, are completely nuts.
But the fact that Maxwell is out of his mind is a large part of the book’s charm. Finding out just how far Maxwell is willing to go to get and maintain the non-human companionship he so desperately needs is enough to keep the reader turning pages.
The fact that he’s a terrific writer also helps. I read several chapters to my wife in bed at night, something I sometimes do if I think what I’m reading at the time would appeal to her and is particularly well-written. Usually, she falls asleep after a page or two. “Ring of Bright Water” kept her awake for chapter after chapter, and I only stopped reading aloud when my voice gave out. I kept right on reading silently, though. Contrary to her wishes, I was too fascinated to put the book aside. And selfish. And stubborn. How otter-like of me.
Aside from golden retrievers, which I find to be far more lovable, and quite often smarter, than my fellow man, and Sammy, the ancient, diabetic poodle I inherited from my mother and grew to love in a measure equal to his dependence upon me for his daily insulin injections, I have somewhat mixed feelings about keeping animals. This may be due to over-exposure; my ex-wife collected and disposed of animals like so many weeds — parrots, ferrets, a chinchilla (which she inadvertently killed by allowing it to lick a lethal dose of Vaseline from her hand), mice (a collection that quickly got out of hand), hamsters, a six-toed kitten more feral than tame and appropriately named Booger, and assorted other creatures. Most of these brushes with ill-suited pets ended badly and left me resistant to forming emotional bonds with beings whose existence I would more often than not find inconvenient, if not downright annoying, or in the rare instances in which that wasn’t the case, whose inevitable demise would prove excruciatingly heartbreaking.
To be honest, these ambiguous feelings of mine about God’s fellow creatures goes back further than my previous marriage. My dad was an avid hunter who frequently required my services as a substitute bird dog, an exercise I loathed to the point of wishing the doves and quail could shoot back. My father wished that I would become, like him, an avid hunter; what he succeeded in doing, however, was to instill in me a lifelong tendency to root, always, for the underdog.
My mother, much like my former spouse, also had a tendency to collect exotic pets. As a toddler growing up in suburban Los Angeles, I remember ducks and chickens kept unpenned in our backyard and occasionally escaping into the neighborhood and wandering single-file down sidewalks and across busy streets. A decade or so later we kept a goat in our backyard for some months, feeding it a steady diet of alfalfa pellets and keeping him relatively quiet at night by penning him in our shed, before the San Marino authorities threatened to cite us for code violations. And until recently, I had managed to block from my memory the summer I came home from boarding school only to find a caiman in residence in the downstairs bathtub, the one I used.
Then there were the rabbits, common enough pets in 4-H country but fairly unusual for the suburbs of Los Angeles. Two supposedly female rabbits were kept in a cage in the far reaches of the backyard, and as the oldest male offspring in our household it fell to me to keep the cages relatively clean. One Sunday evening, as I was performing chores (or perhaps sneaking a cigarette; I can’t remember which) while the rest of the family gathered around the television set watching Disney, I discovered that the two rabbits were raising a ruckus in the cage. It being more dark than dusk, I could hear better than I could see, and I ran into the house to report that the rabbits were “fighting.” For whatever reason, my alarm was met with shrugs all around, and my suggestion that the two “females” be separated was poo-pooed. Sure enough, one morning about a month later I went out to the back of the backyard to discover one of the alleged females trying to push newborn bunnies through the wire-mesh cage bottom. So began one of the worst days of my life, my mother and the four of us kids frantically trying to feed and warm some dozen baby bunnies, only to have them slowly expire in our arms, one after the other, like clockwork.
This was just my first tragic experience involving rabbits. While in my late 30s I “rescued” a baby rabbit whose warren I had very nearly mowed over in our backyard. I kept him in my bedroom, in a shoebox lined with shredded newspaper, fed him milk from an eyedropper a few times a day and, aware that my daughter’s cat had suddenly taken an interest in whatever that was behind my closed bedroom door, watched over him like a mother hen. My concern about the cat was not misplaced, and only the fact that frightened baby rabbits emit an ear-piercing, human-like shriek saved him from being carried off the one time that a carelessly unlatched door allowed the cat to sneak into the bedroom. It wasn’t the cat that did him in, however; it was my own ignorance. Proud that I had nurtured this baby rabbit to the point that he appeared ready to venture out into the real world, I decided to start working a bit of grass into his mostly milk diet. Had Google been around at that time, I might have learned that too much grass too soon can cause upset baby rabbit stomachs, and ultimately cause bloating to the point of lethality – which is exactly what happened.
Not all my experiences with animals, wild and domestic, ended badly. Take Bird, a baby robin that had fallen from its nest and whom I decided to rescue during the early spring of 1995, much to my new wife’s dismay and against my own better judgment. This being my second or third attempt at rescuing a wayward baby bird, I had a pretty good idea of what to do and what not to do. I had learned from childhood experience, for instance, that armadillidiidae, aka roly poly bugs, while possibly delicious to adult birds, cannot be accommodated by a baby bird’s throat.
I housed Bird in a large cardboard box in our bathroom and fed him a diet of crushed worms and canned dog food mixed with a bit of water. Surprisingly, he thrived, and it wasn’t long before we seemed to bond. He grew excited whenever I entered the bathroom and was soon able to jump on my extended index finger to accept a meal. He soon made the leap from my finger to the rim of the box and before long was taking short, experimental flights inside the bathroom. My parents were due to visit us from California for the first time since I had re-married, and as the anticipated date neared, Bird was not only flying quite capably, he was causing our home’s ground floor bathroom to stink to high heavens.
The day before my parent’s arrival, I introduced Bird to the outside world. For some time he clung to my finger, apparently overwhelmed. Once I set him down on the grass, however, he began to tentatively explore his surroundings, and before long he felt confident enough to fly to, and take up residence in, one of our river birch’s lower branches. I felt proud as the father of a new Harvard graduate and even more full of myself when I discovered that he would come to me whenever I extended an index finger and called, “Bird.”
My father was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease at the time and, aside from tremors, was having difficulty crossing thresholds which, to him, was an experience akin to stepping off a cliff. As a consequence, when they arrived the next afternoon, my parents immediately concentrated on the task at hand, that of entering the front door, and they did not notice when, Snow White-like, I called to Bird and he obediently flew to my extended finger. It turned out to be the last time he came to me, and when I tried to replicate the trick for my parents the next day I managed only to cause them to suspect that their son had lost his mind.
I’d imagine that most people have stories like these. Most human beings, the decent ones anyway, have a nurturing instinct, an impulse to rescue endangered lives, regardless of species. Who isn’t charmed by a cute puppy or kitten? Who would stumble upon an injured fawn and not be concerned? When coming across a turtle trying to cross a highway, most people will try to void hitting it and the best of us would pull over, pick it up and carry it out of harm’s way. As iconoclastic and occasionally misanthropic as Gavin Maxwell was, he’s relatable on at least some level to readers of “Ring of Bright Water.”
He’s also completely nuts. Sure, otters are adorable, but would you sleep with one? Would you otter-proof your entire home? No, you wouldn’t, especially after reading this book, unless you, too, are completely nuts.
But the fact that Maxwell is out of his mind is a large part of the book’s charm. Finding out just how far Maxwell is willing to go to get and maintain the non-human companionship he so desperately needs is enough to keep the reader turning pages.
The fact that he’s a terrific writer also helps. I read several chapters to my wife in bed at night, something I sometimes do if I think what I’m reading at the time would appeal to her and is particularly well-written. Usually, she falls asleep after a page or two. “Ring of Bright Water” kept her awake for chapter after chapter, and I only stopped reading aloud when my voice gave out. I kept right on reading silently, though. Contrary to her wishes, I was too fascinated to put the book aside. And selfish. And stubborn. How otter-like of me.