We were asked to read 2 books from a selection and examine how they used the landscape as a device to explore human conditions emotions and relationships.
These are the slides from the presentations with accompanying text.
The Running Sky, is a personal account of one man’s life long passion for observing birds.
It is a series of 12 essays, one for each month of the year, where he travels to sites throughout Great Britain and further afield (California and Africa).
Dee interweaves observation, autobiography and personal reflections on what birds mean to him in a very poetic yet readable way.
The Snow Goose is a work of fiction set in England in 1930 within the flat drama of Essex salt marshes. It is a poignant tale of an ugly man with inner beauty who loves a pretty and shy young girl who brings him the injured snow goose of the title.
I will be looking at how both books use the landscape (including its inhabitants) as a device to explore human emotions and relationships.
First up The Running Sky…
Dee uses the landscape (and the birds within it) to reveal different facets of human existence, in 3 ways.
Firstly he talks about the direct physical effect the environment has on him.
To give an example from the book, he starts the chapter in July by walking through a wood in Wicken Fen. He describes a hot day where a combination of factors of warm wind, spiders’ webs and cuckoo spit make a “claustrophobic broth” which he likens to “putting on a wet pullover on a hot day”. He feels he is driven out of the wood to the open fen where it is easier to breathe and while reading it you almost sigh with relief…
I have chosen these images as I feel they capture both of these feelings experienced by the author on Wicken Fen:
Left = painting by Barbara Harlow “entrance to the brick pits at Wicken Fen”
Right = photo Paul Tuli on 23rd October 2005.
The second way in which Dee uses the landscape to describe human emotion is by connecting it to personal memories from his childhood.
Dee often does this in a way which reveals a melancholy reminiscence of summers gone by. On seeing a white egret sailing by he recalls a “30 year old thrill and relief” at seeing his first egret when he was a “teenage rarity hunter”.
This gives us an insight into his ongoing fascination with birdwatching – with it maybe being a chance for him to recapture moments in time.
Image on Left = Moon over Wicken Fen by David Bishop - an evocative representation of Wicken Fen
Image on right not related to Dee’s book but illustrates the point. Its me (at front with flower) with my two brothers and my grandad. We used to spend lots of time walking in the peak district so when I return now as an adult I always have floods of memories returning - in much the same way as Dee describes.
Finally, Dee explores the human condition through anthropomorphism – something, at which he is very skilled. And it is perhaps this tool, which allows the reader to identify most with what he is saying.
[Anthropomorphism being when one gives animals or non living things (such as the weather or a landscape) human characteristics]
To give an example from his day on the fen, as dusk sets in, the day itself is personified when he says it was “reluctant to finish”. Sleepy cormorants flying into the heronry are described as having “ragged wings black with a used sheen like an old mans’ suit”.
For Dee the birds are the landscape, and when describing the birds he sometimes imagines they have a spiritual or supernatural quality that underlines their connection to their environment. Observing the swallows that sing as they fly, he imagines they are “mediums channelling the sounds of the sky”. When he talks about an elusive bird called the grasshopper warbler, that is only active in twilight hours, he says it sounds “as if it was drawing more and more dark up to the surface of the fen”.
He devotes a few pages describing a comical and intriguing bird – the woodcock that is introduced to us with a wonderful description:
“He came with the kerfuffle of a Dickensian clerk, hunched wheezing and crabbed. He looked more as though he was carrying a heavy ledger up Threadneedle Street”.
This is not a woodcock – it is - for those old enough to remember – Professor Yaffle from Bagpuss. I chose the image because when I read Dee’s description this is what came to mind.
It is through these poetic observations that Dee not only succeeds in teaching us about the birds themselves but about ourselves too.
Before telling us how tasty woodcock are, Dee once again imbues the birds he is observing with a supernatural power:
“Woodcock can slow time. As I watched… the fall of light was stalled by the slow rocking flight. Night waited for them as if in some ancient ceremony, they were the ushers of dusk”.
Dee devotes the remainder of the July chapter to his experiences on the Wash. Here he focuses more on the landscape than its inhabitants. He paints a picture of a complex, strange and impermanent place. A place he calls the last wilderness in England.
His descriptions of the Wash allude to the never-ending cycle of nature and our own mortality.
“All is temporary on the Wash…Its tides live for 12 hours; it is born and dies twice a day. All life and all energy is in the great estuary’s tidal movement from mud disappearing to mud reappearing … from sea to sky to cloud to rain”
And in describing the relentless power of this place he underlines our insignificance in the face of such forces:
“You only have to be on the Wash for a day to realise the futility of human plans for permanence in the place… This is a place that is no place that is never what it was or will be. Everything gives and takes, slides and slips”.
Dee ventures out on to the mud and sea with a local man - Peter - to catch fish from a net he had set earlier. When returning with their catch Peter tells Dee that he wants his ashes scattered there on the threshold of the marsh and sea.
Dee describes this as “oblivion beyond oblivion” and in a moving passage seems to sum up many of the books’ recurrent themes. He considers the physicality of ashes mixing with mud, thinks of old age and remembers childhood all in a “wild place empty of people”. And he takes comfort in the prospect of: “joining loved things, a passage into this world of constant becoming, breaking waves, rising tides, mullet arriving, geese commuting overhead, knot coming and going”.
Like the swift, the grasshopper warbler, the woodcock and all the other birds he writes about, Dee seems to welcome a fate of becoming one with the landscape.
Which brings us to the second book - The Snow Goose...
For the purposes of this presentation – i.e. examining how the environment is used to explore human emotions and relationships I will only look at the first half of the book which features most of the descriptive prose about the landscape – I also don’t want to spoil the eventful ending for those that haven’t read it.
As mentioned in the introduction, this is set in the Essex Salt marshes. A landscape that shares many similarities to the Wash and the Fens described the Running Sky.
The basic story is centred round Philip Rhayader a hunchback whose physical deformity has isolated him from other people. He lives alone in an abandoned lighthouse on the coast and paints and looks after the birds that inhabit the desolate marshland by the sea.
One day a young girl named Frith brings him an injured snow goose and through a shared concern and desire to nurse the bird back to health they develop a relationship. Once returned to full health, the Snow Goose leaves in the summer but returns to Rhayader’s lighthouse every year. The relationship between Rhayader and Frith is governed by the Snow Goose’s seasonal visits as Frith only visits the lighthouse when the Snow Goose is there.
Early on in this moving story Gallico describes the landscape as “desolate and utterly lonely”.
He also poetically captures the beauty of the place in the following passage:
“Greys and blues and soft greens are the colours, for when the skies are dark in the long winters, the many waters of the beaches and marshes reflect the cold and sombre colour. But sometimes, with sunrise and sunset, sky and land are aflame with red and golden fire.”
I felt this description was captured in this painting by Peter Scott (a famous painter of birds and conservationist – and illustrator of the 1st edition of The Snow Goose)
And it is in this lonely yet beautiful place that Gallico places the central character – a man who is very lonely and who holds an inner beauty - a connection that works but to me seems a little too obvious.
Rhayader who has been shunned by society for the way he looks takes solace in nature and the landscape. He keeps tamed wildfowl by his studio as a kind of sanctuary. Gallico tells us:
He was a friend to all things wild, and the wild things repaid him with their friendship. And this made Rhayader happy, because he knew that implanted somewhere in their beings was the germ knowledge of his existence and his safe haven, that this knowledge had become a part of them
Through this friendship Rhayader attains companionship but also recognition of his existence – something that eludes him with other humans – and something he craves deep down.
There are 2 main metaphors in the Snow Goose that drive the narrative. The first, I have explained, is about Rhayader himself: his loneliness, beauty and compassion, which is mirrored by the landscape, which surrounds him and the creatures within it.
The second metaphor is told through the arrival of the Snow Goose. On a literal level both Rhayader and Frith eagerly await the return of the Snow Goose when it leaves every summer. But we soon come to realise that it is Frith herself that Rhayader craves the company of – a girl (and later on young woman) who – like the Snow Goose do not see his deformity but his kindness and compassion.
As I mentioned earlier – I do not want to spoil the rest of the story so will conclude by saying he Snow Goose is a lovely story which is very moving and features some evocative descriptions of the landscape.
However in terms of using the environment as a device for exploring human relationships and emotions I did not find it as subtle and thought provoking as The Running Sky. It is a children’s book so perhaps this assessment is a little harsh.
Both books were very enjoyable and would recommend them to anyone.
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