Discussion, August 5th 2021
This book is seen as a classic of nature writing. When the book was published it received many plaudits being described as “masterful, fascinating, excellent” by the Guardian’s reviewer, the Financial Times called it “an excellent read – lyrical and literate”, and the Sunday Times suggested reading it was an “elegiac experience”. It is an exploration of wood in nature, our culture and our lives. Roger Deakin was an English writer and environmentalist who died in 2006. This book was published posthumously and describes a series of journeys across the globe he made to meet people whose lives are intimately connected to trees and wood. The reader accompanies Deakin through the woods of Britain, Europe, Kazakhstan, and Australia in search of what lies behind man's enduring connection with trees.
JH enjoyed the book the more he got into it and once he realised that it should not read it as a start-to-finish book, but more a pick-up and put-down book. He thought it was full of fascinating information and insights, and some remarkable vignettes, as well as introduction to some wonderful groups of people whether it was the walnut gatherers of the Kyrgyz forests to the legendary meetings of the Essex moth group (260 species of moth in one night? With names such as willow beauty, dingy footman, or flame shoulder). He also enjoyed the way it highlighted the diverse skills and artistic endeavours of wood folk whether be the Norfolk man making willow frames for guardsmen’s bearskins, or the Essex folk selecting the right willow for the best cricket bats, or the artist David Nash’s wanderings of his Wooden Boulder.
JH saw the writing at times as romantic and ethereal, but at other times provocative and harsh, such as:
“Alice Springs, in some ways a deeply tragic place, seemed to us like a big desert waiting room” - a Janus like place with an alternative culture, a "desert Totnes”, but also where the “aboriginal women with one arm in plaster, always the left arm because it is the one that they instinctively raised to ward off the blows of their abusive drunken men”.
SC finished reading this book in Portugal and was able to rekindle his enthusiasm for it having struggled with the early chapters. In the hills in the northern Algarve two woodland cultures collide. Turn a corner on the wonderful road from Monchique to Aljezur and you find yourself deep in rich dark cork oak forests, still cultivated as they have been for hundreds of years for their unique bark, but under increasing threat. Turn another corner and you’re confronted by hill after rolling hill of eucalyptus monoculture. As one of the fastest-growing sources of wood pulp, it was subsidised and encouraged to support the Portuguese paper milling industry. But the knock-on effects have been awful. Eucalyptus suppresses other species, virtually nothing else grows, so there’s very little diversity of fauna existing under its cover. And eucalyptus is highly resinous so in prolonged dry weather it almost explodes into flame when ignited and fire devastated much of the remaining natural woodland around Monchique. People regularly lose property, livestock, even their own lives. And not much seems to have changed yet. So being reminded of all this gave SC a much-needed kick to restart his reading of Wildwood. He enjoyed the book.
SC said it was always rewarding to read the words of a true enthusiast (especially when they can write proper). There are fascinating passages about apple trees, walnuts, buying wood, seasoning, steaming and bending wood, hedging, sculpting, collecting, and growing it. He enjoyed some of the descriptions, and he learned a lot, but overall thought it was a long and at times difficult book. This was partly because there was much repetition that needed editing out, and that the book suffered from a lack of self-control and self-editing - particularly when talking with/about artists. He was not sure you can write a convincing piece of art criticism if you don’t show examples, and there are no pictures in this book. These passages, mostly around the three Nash’s encountered, plus the driftwood lady, were too long and not as informative as they could have been. As a result, for him it lurched into pretension too often. Which is a shame because the link with art is truly important. Ingrained, even... SC was also concerned about references to the authors prep school and his useful pals created an impression of an old boys’ network - a sorry state of affairs when knowledge this important is restricted to so few. CW also felt he went on a bit too long about his schoolboy days and his biology teacher and all of the experiences he had in The New Forest. In contrast MT loved the chapters on the New Forest and the way the author highlighted special places.
SC suggested it was not a book to be force-fed in a month – more a brilliant book to pick up and put down over years. Both WM and CW felt it read more like a collection of essays. WM recognised that it had some lovely passages it would have benefitted from more editing. CW felt that this was not a book to read from one end to the other like a novel but rather one which could be dipped into from time to time - a chapter at a time.
CW thought Deacon wrote beautifully and was able to describe his experience of the sounds and sensations of woods, forests and desert in vivid detail. CW particularly liked his description of his safaris in the desert in Australia along the Macdonnell ranges south of Alice Springs. His description of white Galahs and swarms of budgerigars took me straight back to my camping days in Aussie in my old Kingswood panel van sleeping out under the stars with the smell of eucalyptus from the bonfire. CW highlighted one passage:
“With the shortening of the days, the mountain is displaying its geology through the minerals in its leaves. Each species flags its terrain in a subsiding flourish of its colours. The chameleon leaves are litmus to the chemical changes going on inside them.”
He also loved some of his descriptions in the UK, for example of rooks and their habits living in extended family units just like the ones he shares his garden with, or his description of sleeping out to really experience nature particularly at dawn as the woods come to life. Although CW learnt lots from the book, he initially found it difficult to get into. He disliked the first few chapters as they seem to lose the point which I thought was meant to be about wood and things connected to wood. He felt the author would divert onto a tangent on issues that had very little connection to wood, and which felt it was more about him wishing to demonstrate his knowledge of poetry and English literature. However, by persevering things seem to pick up and CW enjoyed it more and more.
But others in the group were not so positive about this book.
AA had been looking forward to reading this book, as he is fond of trees and forests and wood, but Deakin’s journey through trees felt more like a journey through mud. AA was interested in what he read but didn’t enjoy reading it. He felt it didn’t take him anywhere, and it didn’t feel like a journey. It seemed structureless and wordy and repetitive without progression or development – long, even endless. AA felt it was an amorphous mass, devoid of signposts, which rapidly became a bog - so he finally gave up. It might have helped if it’d been broken down into much shorter chapters with clear topic headings. He recognised the author’s enthusiasm comes across, and AA appreciated some of the lovely descriptions and the writing:
"A wood fire in the hearth is a little household sun."
"No doubt you could play a dead rook like a bagpipe, all drone and no melody."
MW also found the book pretty heavy going and overly long. It seemed to be a book of two parts. The first part was a bit of a tour of the UK with the childhood New Forest stuff at the beginning, with various artists etc. The second part was a bit of a world tour with various woody connections. The second half seemed rather random with no real thread but just a collection of foreign jaunts with various acquaintances. MW enjoyed some of these chapters but found himself speed reading others, for example the Australian bits which were rather tedious and repetitive. It seems that the author was very enthusiastic about his subject, which is a very niche subject. While he admires enthusiasts as a rule but this one doesn’t seem to realise that not everyone is as enthusiastic as him so some of the minute detail could have been avoided.
CB who loves woods and walking through forests felt he did not really engage with this book – though he found it more engaging as the author travelled overseas and captured the atmosphere of different locales – especially the dense forests of Poland.
RV saw this as a book of contrasts, and one that he ultimately found difficult. On the one hand, he thought that Deakin wrote beautifully, and some of the passages where both extremely lyrical and very interesting, while on the other hand, he found it a very long book, and a very soporific book. The problem for me is that the plot in this book was very weak! He also found it (especially compared to the Robert MacFarlane book we might have read in its place) a very self-centred, self-absorbed book, not about places and nature and landscape as much as about HIS biography and HIS interactions with these elements.
But on the positive side, RV identified some thoughts and ideas that especially resonated:
“It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change.”
“The enemies of woods are always the enemies of culture and humanity.”
“Electricity kills darkness, candlelight illuminates it.’”
“The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we’re just passing through.”
“This is the pleasure of wood: that it warms you so many times over. First when you fell it, then when you cart it back to the woodpile, and again when you saw it into logs. Then it warms you again as you cart it and stack the woodshed to the roof with willow and ash, and again as you barrow it to the hearth. Then, at last, the final warming in front of the fire, the climax and finale of the whole exercise, the sum of so much work, so many hours lost in thought.”
Or the passages about the relationship between trees and the houses that were then built:
“The proportions of each room, and of the house as a whole, were predicated on the natural proportions of the trees available. Suffolk houses like mine tend to be about eighteen feet wide, because that is about the average limit of the straight run of the trunk of a youngish oak suitable in girth for making a major crossbeam of eight inches by seven.”
RV also highlighted some good stories –his descriptions of the river near Beaulieu and the New Forest, the descriptions of Driftwood Art, or the way that Stonehenge was originally built from green oak! But in conclusion RV saw it as a good book, but simply not one for our book club, and he supported SC’s view that this was “Not a book to be force-fed in a month - a brilliant book to pick up and put down over years.” He hoped that he would do that.
Scores: MT: 4.5, AA: 5, RV: 5, CB: 5, CW: 6.7, WM: 5.3, JH: 6.5, SC: 6.5, MW: 5.5
