Melissa Harrison is having a prolific year. Rain: Four Walks in English Weather is the third book bearing her name to have surfaced already in 2016. February saw the paperback publication of her much-lauded second novel, At Hawthorn Time, shortlisted for the Costa novel award 2015 and now longlisted for the Bailey’s prize announced on International Women’s Day. Also in February came Spring, the first of four books edited by Harrison, subtitled “an anthology of the changing seasons” with the other three to follow – in their season.
The idea for Rain, Harrison tells us, “came to me in the Lake District …we walked from Keswick to Threlkeld along an old railway track … and it absolutely hossed it down, as the locals say”. It is a short book, 128 pages including the now almost compulsory glossary (since the glorious glossaries of Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks and Dominick Tyler’s Uncommon Ground last year), and is exactly what the subtitle says it is: four walks in English weather. Why four? It’s a number that seems to be significant for Harrison, and for a naturalist it is a good one – the four points of the compass, the seasons, the winds, the humours, the elements and more. Both her novels follow the lives of four apparently disconnected individuals united by a common landscape, and now there are the four seasonal anthologies. Finding connections – between characters, in the case of the novels, or landscapes and weathers, in the case of Rain– is a thread that runs throughout Harrison’s work. By looking closely, almost forensically, at the near-at-hand she teases out the wider picture, and despite her openly secular stance – she dismisses a chalk cross carved on a hillside – there is something mindful, almost Buddhist in her method.
A kingfisher unzips the air and a shrew lies dead on the path, probably drowned. A sparrowhawk is hunched in an ash tree
Related: To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing – review
This is an unashamedly English book, yet one far away from the problematic associations of nationalism
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