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A review by mattroche
The Peregrine by J.A. Baker
4.0
I have not read a book quite like it. Perhaps “The Living Mountain,” by Nan Shepherd, which like The Peregrine is a work of extreme observation. Or “The Rings of Saturn” which has the same lonely, introspective spectatorship. “The Peregrine” is 181 pages of watching and recording the behavior of a handful of peregrine hawks, male (tiercel) and female (falcon), in a small area in the East of England.
If it sounds boring, it is. The only rising action is windward on thermal columns, and climax happens a hundred times as the talons and beak of a tiercel peregrine neatly execute a small bird or beast before evisceration. It is the boredom of nature, red in tooth and claw, the banality of survival and the quotidian battle for existence of every living thing. Wake. Eat. Avoid being eaten. Sleep.
It is just as boring, dramatic, beautiful, angry and real as life itself in its most pure, minimal expression.
There are perhaps twenty species of birds, barn owls, plovers, curlews, crows and ducks among them in the books ecosystem and a handful of beasts: stoats, field mice, rats foxes and rabbits. There are perhaps an equal number of tree species. And all are described in spare, attentive detail. It is a small cast of characters, centered by the peregrine and their observer. The action takes places place over about 6 months, so the seasons provide meaningful drama and variation. Yet from this meager palate, a world emerges that is achingly real. A world of epic battles and of tedium. Nothing happens until it does, and something is always happening and worthy of note, if you are still and pay attention.
I love “The Peregrine” for its stillness. It has very human flaws, notably the keening desire of the author to make a union between him and the bird. He plays at being Emerson’s transparent eyeball, seeing hut unseen, one with the entire system of life around him. But not so transparent that he isn’t willing to kick the grass a bit to flush out prey for the raptor. He is an unreliable narrator because although he is masterful at observation, he knows that he is not a part of the system he wishes to be one with. Nature just is, it does not narrate, nor does it need a plot. His very presence is foreign, opening the box and killing the cat.
Read this book because what Baker does with language is really quite beautiful. You feel the place in the same way you feel Shepherd’s Cairngorms. Read it for the lovely, colloquial names for the animals. But mostly read it because in painstaking detail it documents a place that no longer exists. Because that is the true narrative of man and nature - that it is repetitive and always new, that it is violent and peaceful, and that for better or worse it is always becoming. The quaint farmsteads of eastern England are no longer quaint, and many of the birds are gone. We are still here to observe, but even that is contingent.
If it sounds boring, it is. The only rising action is windward on thermal columns, and climax happens a hundred times as the talons and beak of a tiercel peregrine neatly execute a small bird or beast before evisceration. It is the boredom of nature, red in tooth and claw, the banality of survival and the quotidian battle for existence of every living thing. Wake. Eat. Avoid being eaten. Sleep.
It is just as boring, dramatic, beautiful, angry and real as life itself in its most pure, minimal expression.
There are perhaps twenty species of birds, barn owls, plovers, curlews, crows and ducks among them in the books ecosystem and a handful of beasts: stoats, field mice, rats foxes and rabbits. There are perhaps an equal number of tree species. And all are described in spare, attentive detail. It is a small cast of characters, centered by the peregrine and their observer. The action takes places place over about 6 months, so the seasons provide meaningful drama and variation. Yet from this meager palate, a world emerges that is achingly real. A world of epic battles and of tedium. Nothing happens until it does, and something is always happening and worthy of note, if you are still and pay attention.
I love “The Peregrine” for its stillness. It has very human flaws, notably the keening desire of the author to make a union between him and the bird. He plays at being Emerson’s transparent eyeball, seeing hut unseen, one with the entire system of life around him. But not so transparent that he isn’t willing to kick the grass a bit to flush out prey for the raptor. He is an unreliable narrator because although he is masterful at observation, he knows that he is not a part of the system he wishes to be one with. Nature just is, it does not narrate, nor does it need a plot. His very presence is foreign, opening the box and killing the cat.
Read this book because what Baker does with language is really quite beautiful. You feel the place in the same way you feel Shepherd’s Cairngorms. Read it for the lovely, colloquial names for the animals. But mostly read it because in painstaking detail it documents a place that no longer exists. Because that is the true narrative of man and nature - that it is repetitive and always new, that it is violent and peaceful, and that for better or worse it is always becoming. The quaint farmsteads of eastern England are no longer quaint, and many of the birds are gone. We are still here to observe, but even that is contingent.