A couple of years ago, two nature writers carried out a polite but pointed exchange in the pages of the New Statesman. They were Mark Cocker and Robert Macfarlane, and the argument – which came first in an essay by Cocker, then in a lucid response by Macfarlane – was about “the new nature writing”. Cocker’s contention was that the successful books published by the likes of Macfarlane, Helen Macdonald and Kathleen Jamie were products of the library rather than the field – they privileged poetry over hard science. Macfarlane’s riposte spoke of the transformational power of good nature writing, of the way a well-turned sentence can “revise our ethical relations with the natural world”.
I thought of this reanimation of CP Snow and FR Leavis’s old “Two Cultures” argument as I was reading Marianne Taylor’s The Way of the Hare. It’s a beautiful book, with a striking woodcut cover, gorgeously illustrated with Taylor’s own sketches and photographs. The whole package summoned a certain expectation, that here was another chapter in the development of “the new nature writing”, an H is for Hare, if you will. I expected the book to do what this modern genre does best – to deliver ecstatic encounters with the natural world, each of them filtered through centuries of literature, each of them effecting some profound change on the author.
We get little in the way of personal narrative or poetic reverie, but we learn a hell of a lot about hares
This is an autho who feels most at home in the world of scientific fact, who’d rather be writing about taxonomy
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