Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 01 May 2024
The Peregrine by J.A. Baker
I can’t remember where first I came across the name of J.A. Baker and his strange, enigmatic book, The Peregrine, but some years ago, having read T.H. White’s wonderful The Goshawk a couple of times and Barry Hines’s Kes, I was on the hunt for other books about the human relationship with birds of prey and must have seen mention of Baker’s The Peregrine. The only edition I could find at that time (it was the early-2000s) was the New York Review of Books version pictured, which was published in 2004 (there is now a Collins edition too).
Looking at my copy again I see that in 2004 so little was known about Baker that the NYRB biography on the flyleaf shows his date of birth as 1926 but has only a question mark for his date of death. (It was in fact 1987.) Since then a full-length biography has been published (My House of Sky, Hetty Saunders, Little Toller Books 2017) and Baker’s book seems to have become much more widely known, his work now championed by a new generation of naturalists and environmentalists.
But none of this makes The Peregrine any less enigmatic. Very quickly, the background to the book is this. It was published in 1967 and takes the form of a diary of hawk-watching – more accurately, of peregrine-watching – during a single unspecified winter from October to April. The setting is the creeks and marshes and saltings of coastal Essex, with one brief foray into the Cotswolds. In fact, as Baker makes plain in a short introduction, while he saw everything he describes, the rigorous, ascetic, self-punishing, obsessional hawk-watching routine he describes actually spanned not one winter but ten.
And apart from a passing reference to an unspecified illness there is no suggestion of any particular reason for this obsession, other than the elegance and fierce beauty of the peregrine: ‘Everything he is has been evolved to link the targeting eye to the striking talon.’
But what makes the book so extraordinary – its mysterious, obsessional purpose aside – is the language, the vision, perhaps, that Baker invented in order to convey what he saw. It is intense, lyrical and exacting, but at times also paradoxical – the sky sometimes seeming as liquid as the shimmering landscape; the world ‘pouring’ past like air streaming behind a ‘stooping’ peregrine; the vast skies and horizons immeasurable, and in one memorable passage, Baker himself as big as a galaxy:
‘At the side of the lane to the ford, I found a long-tailed field mouse feeding on a slope of grass. He was eating the grass seeds, holding the blade securely between his skinny white front paws. So small, blown over by the breath of passing cars, felted with a soft moss of green-brown fur; yet his back was hard and solid to the touch. His long, delicate ears were like hands unfolding; his huge, night-seeing eyes were opaque and dark. He was unaware of my touch, of my face a foot above him […]. I was like a galaxy to him, too big to be seen. […] I gave him an acorn. He carried it up the slope in his mouth, stopped and turned it round against his teeth, flicked it round with his hands, like a potter spinning.’
It becomes increasingly apparent, I think, that Baker is not simply seeking the experience of some kind of extreme bird-watching: he is adopting the perspective of the raptors that obsess him:
‘I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts.’
And within a sentence or two it ceases to be a matter of writer and peregrine: it is ‘we’ – a shared life, a common worldview:
‘I looked into the wood. In a lair of shadow the peregrine was crouching, watching me [….]. We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces.’
I think that The Peregrine may be one of those books whose wonders either delight or entirely elude the reader. I suspect there is little middle ground. I can’t quite explain why I love it so much because other ‘nature writing’ often leaves me cold. In part it is because there is something about Baker’s ecstatic undertaking that seems as other-worldly as the raptors that obsessed him; but most of all, it is his astonishing prose. It is an endlessly quotable book but I’ll just give two more examples. On November 30th he spots two peregrine kills half-submerged in the flooded grass, a snipe and a kingfisher. ‘[The kingfisher] was like a dead star, whose green and turquoise light still glimmers down through the long light-years,’ he says. And on January 9th he sees a dead, frozen heron: ‘The gale did not rock him; his long grey feathers were unruffled. Regal and frozen and dead, he stood to the wind in his thin sarcophagus of ice. Already he seemed to be dynasties away from me. I have outlived him, as the gibbering ape outlived the dinosaur.’
The Peregrine is perhaps best read a little at a time, like poetry, for its moments of astonishing, heart-stopping loveliness and its occasional dark, despairing depths. I haven’t read the recent biography because I think I prefer to maintain Baker’s anonymity and mystery – the glittering, visionary prose of his classic account emerging much as it must have done in 1967, suddenly, without precedent, from the surrounding darkness and silence.
Alun Severn
May 2024
Birds and nature writing elsewhere on Letterpress:
I’m sorry but I really don't do bird books…or do I?
H is for Hawk : Helen Macdonald’s story of personal tragedy, depression and obsession takes flight
The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris