I have always wanted to read J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine ever since I came across a reference to it in the achingly lovely exploration of loss in H is for Hawk. I finally got to my NYRB copy. There is much to admire in Baker’s nature writing in The Peregrine.
Over a period of one year in the book, Baker walks about in the dewy woods of early dawn and late dusk, watching birds. Baker discusses the hunting habits of two peregrine falcons in the winter woods abutting rural towns of East Anglia. Apparently, Baker tracked the birds and the fauna every day over a four-year period, and then carefully edited and culled his notes as if they cover a span of one year.
Every day, he traverses the same woods, watching the same hues, and tracking the same two birds. Any such repetitive setting is usually a recipe for boredom, but here the writing is wild and incandescent. The metaphors and adjectives thrive in his descriptions of the blood that is shed in the snow, the haze of the skies, the streams and the weeds by their shores, the forest with its undergrowth, the calm and the agitation of the birds.
As I read this book, I thought about writing and the act of describing minutiae in research papers. As researchers writing papers, we often fall in love with replicating our past successes. Hence, we become habituated to repeating those past patterns. In the process, our language loses its reckless rhythm and becomes stilted. Even the brilliant ideas, captured in mathematical precision get muddled in the predictable flow of the text. We clad our precision in drudgery, and wear its dryness as a badge of honor. We should say no to this artlessness. We should fight the rigidity of the regimented structure. For, drudgery obfuscates novelty. It renders the best insights inchoate and tentative.
So, I am interested in the act of beautiful descriptions of repetitious actions. How can we narrate those actions that we do over and over again, make them interesting? (On this note, see the excellent book on Surfing).
For instance, I compare two passages in Peregrine. Both describe Baker seeing a bird at close quarters, eyes locked, face to face. First, Baker notices an owl three yards away (pg. 78) –
In the middle of the wood, I stopped. A chill spread over my face and neck. Three yards away, on a pine branch close to the ride, there was a tawny owl. I held my breath. The owl did not move. I heard every small sound of the wood as loudly as though I too were an owl. It looked at the light reflected in my eyes. It waited. Its breast was white, thickly arrowed and speckled with tawny read. The redness passed over the sides of its face and head to form a rufous crown. The helmeted face was pale white, ascetic, half-human, bitter and withdrawn. The eyes were dark, intense, baleful. This helmet effect was grotesque, as though some lost shrunken knight had withered to an owl. As I looked at those grape-blue eyes, fringed with their fiery gold, the bleak face seemed to crumble back into the dusk; only the eyes lived passing on. The slow recognition of an enemy came visibly to the owl, passing from the eyes, and spreading over the stony face like a shadow. But it had been started out of its fear, and even now it did not fly at once. Its face was a mask; macabre, ranged, sorrowing, like the face of a drowned man.
Short staccato sentences set the mise-en-scene and the longer sentences zoom in, like a telescope, into the plumes and colors of the bird with precision and care. And, those semi-colons, pausing us like a flash of summer lightning!
Later, Baker spots a hawk four yards away, just after it has pinned its kill (pp. 120).
I can see the black blood dripping from the gleam of the hawk’s bill. I move out of the dark of the wood into the paler shadows of trees. The hawk hears, looks up. Four yards separate us, but it is too far, a distance as unspannable as a thousand foot crevasse. I drag like a wounded bird, floundering, sprawled. He watches me, moving his head, looking with each eye in turn. An otter whistles. Something splashes in the cold, piky depths of the brook. The hawk is poised now on the narrow edge of curiosity and fear. What is he thinking? Is he thinking at all? This is new to him. He does not know how i got there. Slowly, I mask the pallor of my face. He is not afraid. He is watching the white glitter of my eyes. He cannot understand their staccato flitter. If I could top them moving he could stay. But I cannot stop them. There is a breath of wings. He has flown into the trees. An owl calls. I stand above the kill. Red ice reflects the stars.
Thoroughly enjoyable narrative of a man in his solitude. H is for Hawk was a poetic exploration of recovery from a tragedy and a search for absolution. Peregrine is about inner obsession and observational science, ravishingly adorned in the words of grey dust and red snow.