It’s been a time around the bookconscious household, with two members of the family — one here and one far away — having surgery in the last couple of weeks. As I’ve mentioned before, my grandmother always said a mystery is the thing when life is stressful. I don’t usually write about sequels, and Clown Town is Mick Herron‘s ninth “Slow Horses” book. But I will recommend the series and say that this was the ticket — absorbing and at the same time not too taxing, intriguing and also familiar.
I also want to point out that I think New York Times critic A. O. Scott might be mistaken about Diana Taverner. I loved his breaking down of a scene from the new book, but I have been pondering this opinion: “Jackson and Diana seem to share a cynical, self-serving outlook, but what really unites them is that they care enough about the job to do it right.” I think Jackson is only self-serving on the surface but underneath that cares deeply about his slow horses and his work; conversely, Diana doesn’t care about doing anything right unless it consolidates her power, and if you’ve read the whole series you’ll know that she most definitely does some things that are quite wrong in order to do so. One could argue that there is a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing, and she does wrong things well, I suppose. Anyway, check out this author interview in the New York Times book review, which may give you a sense of Mick Herron’s sensibilities, if not his characters’.
I had been wanting to read/listen to Raising Hare since late last fall when I first started hearing the buzz about this wonderful debut by Chloe Dalton. My library only had a large print copy, so finally I reached out and asked if they could get any other formats. I was impressed that I heard back same day, and was happily listening to the audiobook on the library’s app.
I absolutely loved this book; it was one of those times where the book lived up to all the hype. It’s a kind of hybrid memoir/natural history, one of my favorite types of book, about the author’s coming across a leveret — a baby hare — on a walk, leaving it for its mother to find it, realizing it was still there many hours later, and determining that she wanted to help it. I listened to an audio extra, which I don’t usually do, which was a conversation between Chloe Dalton and Louise Brealey, the actress who narrated the audiobook, and Dalton said she didn’t really realize she was going to write about the hare, which makes the book even more extraordinary to me.
The hare, which Dalton never named, came into her life while the pandemic had interrupted normal activities and she had more time and space to pay attention. And that’s what makes Raising Hare special — the way Dalton takes readers along on this intensifying attentiveness and all that it leads to, including a growing appreciation for and commitment to the wild inhabitants of the land surrounding her home. Even though she goes to great lengths to ensure that she treats the hare as just that — wild — and steels herself from the start for the inevitable end of their time together, Dalton clearly loves the hare, and conveys a sense that the affection and esteem are mutual.
Besides learning a great deal about hares and admiring the beauty of the writing and the threads of history, culture, and science that Dalton draws together in her narrative, I really appreciate how Dalton was open to the hare’s changing her and her life. Even when the world opens up as the pandemic wanes, she realizes she is drawn to staying close to home where she can observe the hare and eventually her offspring.“Through the leveret, I had rediscovered the pleasure of attachment to a place and the contentment that can be derived from exploring it fully, rather than constantly seeking ways to leave it and believing that satisfaction can only lie in novel experiences,” she writes.
By the end of the book she is actively working to manage the landscape to benefit hares and other creatures, and is planting and planning to lay a hedgerow. As you can see on her author website, she also worked hard to advocate on behalf of hares, and helped to get a law passed limiting the season they can be hunted. You get a real sense of her transformation as the book unfolds, and her willingness to learn from the hare. Dalton notes, “Under the subtle influence of the hare, my own wants have simplified. To be dependable in love and friendship more than in work. To leave the land in a more natural state than I found it. And to take better care of what is to hand, seeing beauty and value in the ordinary.”
Which is a major theme of the other book I finished this week, What If We Get It Right by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Like All We Can Save, the anthology Johnson edited with Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson, this is a collection. There are poems and short essays but the heart of What If We Get It Right are interviews. Johnson talks with all kinds of people working towards a future where we got things right about what is happening to our planet about what is possible, and how we get there. Together with these people — who are not only experts, but clearly people Johnson delights in speaking with — she explores climate science, finance, policy, culture and the possibilities ahead. The final section is called “Transformation.”
In that section, Johnson addresses the everpresent handwringing in our culture over “hope.” Like me, she appreciates Rebecca Solnit’s views on hope (“Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an axe you break down doors with, in an emergency,” from Solnit’s Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story From Despair to Possibility). And like Solnit, Johnson notes that things can be bad and at the same time, we can be joyful even as we resolve unflinchingly to do something.
Johnson writes: “For who are we to give up on this planet or one another? We simply do not get to quit. Also, how do we keep moving forward despite the intimidating odds? . . . . Here’s the thing: Octopuses and rainbows and music and dinner parties and love and snow flurries and the aurora borealis all exist! The world is full of delights even as it may also be spiraling toward conflagration and deluge. So when people perceive me as hopeful, I think what they are actually seeing is that I am joyful. And thank goodness for the human ability to decouple hope from joy.”
For me there is a growing sense that this is not only a human ability. I think what Chloe Dalton discovered as she got to know the hare, and what Robert Macfarlane saw when he researched Is a River Alive, what Amy Tan writes about as she observes the more than human visitors in her yard in The Backyard Bird Chronicles, what Daniel Cooperrider explores in Speak With the Earth and It Will Teach You, Zoë Schlanger illuminates in The Light Eaters and Suzanne Simard, Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Peter Wohlleben have written about, and long before them, Wendell Berry and actually even farther back, the Psalmist(s) explore, is that the more than human world, our kin in creation as theologian Ellen Davis calls them, are also joyful.
Do I literally mean that leverets and hares and trees and birds and plants and rivers and insects and boulders and the very earth feel joy? I think I do. I think we can recognize this, when we feel a connection in the natural world in a way that makes our hearts beat faster. I think we observe it, when we see behavior that appears playful in other species, or hear the sound of water rippling over stones in a creekbed. I don’t think it’s anthropomorphizing — I think the rest of the created world feel and express joy in their own ways that are mostly beyond human perception, But to think we’re the only ones who get this? Inconceivable to me. Theologically, because I believe that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that’s in it” and that God delights in, and is reflected in, all creation. But also practically, since joy has all kinds of physical and mental benefits, why would it only develop in us and not in other creatures?
Anyway, get yourself What If We Get It Right, which is a joy to read, and don’t miss Raising Hare, also a delight.
bookconscious 
