Golden Twins: The Peregrine by J A Baker, & The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

Here are two books about the natural world, so great in their descriptive power that you are transported from the warmth and comfort of your home either to a frost-rimed field in Essex, with your eyes lifted to a peregrine circling in the winter sky, or to a stoney track in the Cairngorm with the wind in your face and the mountain rising before you. Two books in which prose and poetry merge so magically that no reviewer, certainly not me, can do them justice.

John Alec Baker lived an unremarkable life in Essex near Chelmsford. He was not a lifelong bird watcher, nor a writer, but he became obsessed with the peregrine falcon and wrote an ecstatic elegy to this magnificent yet murderous bird. The peregrine is the fastest living creature, a biological weapon that can dive at over 200mph as it plunges onto its prey. In his introduction to The Peregrine, Baker writes: “For 10 years I spent all my winters searching for that restless brilliance, for the sudden passion and violence that peregrines flush from the sky. For 10 years I've been looking upward for that cloud-biting anchor shape, that crossbow flying through the air. The eye becomes insatiable for hawks.”

The book takes the form of diary entries between October and April. Each day Baker seeks out the peregrine and describes what he sees in the landscape. Sounds a bit specialist, a bird-watchers book, a bit tedious perhaps. Absolutely not. If you have any love of the natural world or love writing that soars off the page, this book is for you. Here is a flavour:

Softly through the dusk the peregrine glides, hushing it aside with silent wings. He searches the constellations of small eyes, sees the woodcock's planetary eye look upward from the marsh, shifts back his wings, and plunges to the light. The woodcock rises, twists under the blade of the hawk and wavers away. He's overtaken cut down. He drops with a squelching thud……. 

The day hardened in the easterly gale, like a flawless crystal. Columns of sunlight floated on the land. The unrelenting clarity of the air was solid, resonant, cold and pure, and remote as the face of the dead.

An American reviewer says: This is one of the greatest books I have ever read. It’s impossibly good...…. one of those, “Oh I didn't know you could do that”, books.

If you are persuaded to read The Peregrine, then do get the 50th anniversary edition which fleshes out J A Baker’s life and contains an excellent afterword by Robert Macfarlane, who writes: No other book - save perhaps Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain - which stands as The Peregrine’s golden twin, offering light to its darkness, relation to its depletion, and love to its harm - has been so influential on the recent British literature of landscape. 

Which brings me to… The Living Mountain. 

Nan Shepherd was a lecturer in English at what is now the Aberdeen College of Education. She lived in the same house most of her life and walked year by year in the Cairngorm, seeing the plateau not as a summit to be conquered but as she says:  to know its essential nature that I am seeking here ….. 

one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.

The Living Mountain was written during the last years of WWII but only published in 1977. Just like The Peregrine, this is a book to get lost in, to savour slowly and drift into thought. A book to be read, not written about. So, here very briefly let Nan Shepherd speak for herself:

So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow—the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in. If I had other senses, there are other things I should know.

How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? —the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle—as beauty.