The Stubborn Light of Things by Melissa Harrison
The Stubborn Light of Things is a collection of novelist Melissa Harrison’s nature columns for The Times. Arranged chronologically, these short easy-reading essays create a calendar of seasons and a mosaic of the English countryside.
The book begins in London. Harrison journals about red kites, life in the Thames, fossil-collecting, bird-friendly architecture, glyphosate, wetlands projects, and why we must keep nature words in children’s dictionaries.
Through her eyes, the city sheds its smog and concrete, and becomes a place of three million gardens, nature reserves, and chalk grasslands with species including foxes, seahorses, and avocets.
“Two-thirds of London’s landscape is made up of gardens, parks, woods and water, making it one of the greenest major cities in Europe.”
In the winter of 2017, Harrison moved to a cottage in the Suffolk countryside, and there begins the second half of the book. She writes of stonechats, barn owls, and bagged dog poo; bats, grass snakes, and dusk walks, and the importance of wild, messy verges.
Throughout the book Harrison builds towards one point: that nature is for the ordinary person to see, identify, and enjoy; it’s not the preserve of wildlife cameramen and ornithologists.
“But like anything, learning about birds is a process - one it’s never too late to embark on. Apps make it is easy to keep an ID guide on you; simple curiosity does the rest.”
By noticing nature around us, even in city hearts, we change our reality: “the things we choose to look at in life loom large, changing the version of reality we live in, whether it’s cars or fashion or the natural world.”
“If you live in a city and miss ‘nature’, the answer doesn’t have to be to move out; it’s to tune in.”
The book ends with the coronavirus lockdown which has given fresh urgency to our relationship with nature. Harrison notes that within this ‘fragile new awareness’ and ‘sudden love’ is ‘everything we need in order to transform the way we live individually and collectively.’
Melissa Harrison’s essays were originally published in the Nature Notebook column in The Times newspaper. The brevity of each piece - around 800 words - keeps the information light and the pace swift. Beware the thorns, though:
“We need to understand that the reason it can be hard to see, for example, glow-worms or yellowhammers, is … that we have, in this country, and within a generation, all but wiped them out.”
Spotted throughout The Stubborn Light of Things are black and white linocuts by Joanna Lisowiec, whose nature illustrations - in particular her birds - are well-worth admiring on her website.
The Stubborn Light of Things was published by Faber & Faber Limited in 2020. Melissa Harrison can be heard discussing nature topics, reading excerpts from her columns, and recording the sounds of the Suffolk countryside in a series of podcasts also entitled The Stubborn Light of Things.
Many thanks to Faber & Faber, Melissa Harrison, and NetGalley for my advanced reading copy.
Further countryside reading:
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn: When Raynor and Moth lose their home and business, they strike out along England’s 630-mile South West Coast Path with nothing but a tent, poor health, and an eye for nature.
The Outrun by Amy Liptrot: From Aberdeen, Liptrot catches the overnight ferry to the Orkney Islands, returning to the sheep farm of her childhood after drinking herself to destruction in London.
Bringing Back the Beaver by Derek Gow: Gow’s dogged attempts to reintroduce the beaver to the British landscape.
