In his latest book, James Rebanks, the Lakeland shepherd turned bestselling author, sets off for the Arctic Circle in search of an elusive creature and an almost forgotten way of life. We find him in a rain-lashed house on a lonely island reading Moby-Dick. Is this a clever literary device? Are we in for a magnificent obsession and a baggy monster of a book that shouldn’t really work but somehow does? The perhaps surprising answer is: we are.
Rebanks made his name with accounts of his love-hate relationship with farming: love of the land and the old ways practised by his grandad, a shepherd before him; hate for the mechanisation and pharmacology of Big Agriculture. His prose is deceptively unvarnished with flashes of colour: bright birds’ eggs in a well-found barn. Our best observers of the world around us are farmers, not only Rebanks but John Lewis-Stempel – nature writers with dirt under their fingernails.
