I don’t write ‘nature books’ – it sounds like a specialism requiring, at the very least, years living in the country, or a degree in botany / biology / zoology, or some close up lived experience with a wild animal, or a fascination for clouds, or a mix of any or all of these things. Some nature writers may concentrate on newer issues, like climate change, and apocalyptic weather patterns: floods, fires, winds. Again, it seems important to have a good knowledge of the issues, though a few writers will avoid the technical details, and the risk of getting them wrong, to concentrate on a fictional post-apocalyptic world.
I don’t do any of those things, and I rarely read books that do; although when younger I did read Tarka the Otter, Ring of Bright Water, Born Free, and, in my early twenties, a manual on self-sufficiency when I believed living close to nature sounded pretty idyllic – rather than the cold and muddy experience it turned out to be once autumn arrived. But reading any books marketed as nature novels? No. Not my scene.
But hold on! What novel is fully satisfying without any reference to the weather? No novel may actually have opened with the words: ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ but where would Wuthering Heights be without the odd storm? Or Emma without the sultry weather on Box Hill? What would the main character in Mrs Dalloway have done if she had no flowers to arrange? How many books’ characters travel without ever looking out of the carriage or car window to remark on the changing landscape? Or gaze out of the aeroplane window and marvel at the sun tinged clouds beneath?
My latest book, Silent Echoes, is definitely not a nature novel. But it has a pivotal crisis during a rain soaked holiday by the seaside when family members couldn’t get away from each other – a crisis that certainly couldn’t happen when the weather was better and people could escape into the surrounding countryside. And one of the central characters finds solace admiring how nature is taking over the bomb sites in his native Coventry.
In short, it is hard to avoid writing about the natural world, whatever your genre, and the danger is that you might get carried away with your beautiful / dramatic descriptions. As a critic says of what she regarded as an otherwise great new novel, Something New Under the Sun, by Alexandra Kleeman, ‘[It] could be subtitled A Thousand Different Ways to Describe Wildfire and, fatally, the reader’s attention wanders.’ Sometimes, as the saying goes, less is more. The American author, Anthony Doerr, may have got it about right in his latest book Cloud Cuckoo Land. This, a Times reviewer has described as a ‘fantastical historical adventure’ (think Tolkien) full of ‘… beautiful plants and animals.’
Link to my new book:
NEW!! A story set in 20th century Coventry for Coventry 2021
Silent Echoes: The Carters seem just like any other family. Apart from the life changing events nobody talks about. Will history just keep repeating itself? Ebook-£1.99, Print-£7.99.