This months book club choice is Crow Country by Mark Cocker. The timing couldn’t be better as at the end of May Norfolk will be hosting a three week long literary festival called New Writing Worlds 08 Human: Nature – a celebration of writing and nature organised by the Norwich based New Writing Partnership. Mark is involved in the festival and I’m hoping to spot him at the Bishops Garden, Norwich on the afternoon of Sunday 15th June where he will be reading from Crow Country his latest book.
Mark is one of Britain’s foremost writers on nature and contributes regularly to the Guardian and BBC Radio. In fact Radio 4 is presently repeating his 4 part programme The Rook and Me at 5.45am on Saturdays although the internet now means you don’t have to get up that early to catch it unlike Mark who got up early many times in order to observe the rooks and jackdaws described in great detail in the book. I must confess to not having read any of Mark Cocker’s books before Crow Country although I have occasionally caught his Country Diary entries in The Guardian over the last year or two.
I was a little wary of starting the book as the fly leaf says it is ‘a prose poem in a long tradition of English pastoral writing’. Not another one was my first thought! I’m glad to say I don’t think it is anything close to a prose poem but a grounded and easily told account of his fixation with corvids as the ornithologists term rooks and jackdaws or crows as they are known to the layperson. In fact where the book hovers towards the poetic is where I felt most uncomfortable as a reader. For instance he describes moving to a cottage in the Yare Valley from the ‘congested’ streets of inner Norwich - “I wanted to break free. I wanted an airborne cradle of sticks from which to scan the world passing below, wide horizons to stretch my gaze, and the open space with its faint breath of the steppe to fire my imagination.’ I can cope with that from Richard Mabey but from Mark Cocker it sounds forced. I’m sure the ghost of John Clare isn’t looking over the shoulder of every nature writer in East Anglia.
Mark Cocker as the book blurb says ‘..pieces together the complexities of the birds’ inner lives, the historical depth of the British relationship with the rook and the unforeseen richness hidden in that sombre voice, a raucous crow song that he calls “our landscape made audible’. That is certainly the case but it still didn’t make me like crows. On the other hand Crow Country, did make me like Mark Cocker as a very readable down to earth nature writer. Crow Country has been short listed for the 2008 Samuel Johnson prize for Non-Fiction and I reckon it has got a good chance of scooping the £30,000 prize.
Jeff Taylor
I am a very occasional bird watcher, the sort that knows little but enjoys watching whenever I get the opportunity, which is not that often. I would run a mile if offered a guide to birds. I don’t need to know if a bird is such or such a species or very rare. I was given Crow Country as a gift - unwanted I thought until I saw it wasn’t full of diagrams and latin names. It was a fascinating story of one man’s obsession with a type of bird which I more often hear than see. I enjoyed the book so much that I went to see him reading from his it at the Human Nature event in the Bishop’s Garden last Sunday.
I was glad not to find a Bill Oddie look alike but a man who spoke about his obsession in the same measured way he writes – with a gentle but determined passion. Someone from the audience asked if he found it difficult writing a book which was both literary and factual. He slightly hedged the issue by saying that there is ‘poetry in facts’. This didn’t matter because this comment paled into complete insignificance later in the afternoon when I heard Jay Griffiths reading from her book Wild – An Elemental Journey. The commitment and passion of Griffiths was just over whelming and some of the detail almost too horrific to listen too. I know that the work of Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey is important but the content and presentation of Wild was at such odds with their gentle expertise and familiar intellectualism.
I’m not sure if this is the right place to mention this but I have some comments about the Sunday afternoon Human Nature event. Firstly not everybody there new who the people introducing the speakers were. There was an element of elitism in this. Next time please could they introduce themselves? Secondly it was quite obvious that Charles Rangley-Wilson was a bit of a filler. He admitted that he hadn’t even read the Human Nature writing brief until the last minute. He was a bit of a disappointment after the earlier speakers. And finally it would have been good to have had the opportunity to ask Jay Griffiths questions after her reading. On the whole it was an interesting but not a particularly well attended event.
Sarah
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