The Spectator - February 08, 2018

BOOKS & ARTS

Wise old birds

John McEwen

Owl Sense

by Miriam Darlington

Faber, £15.99, pp. 343

The Secret Life of the Owl

by John Lewis-Stempel

Doubleday, £7.99, pp. 88

Owls, frontally eyed and nose beaked, look

the most human of birds. Accordingly, they

have for millennia been prominent in mythol-

ogy and literature and their image contin-

ues to be commercialised beyond compare.

They offer an author rich pickings, but in

a competitive market a strong personal

subtext is helpful. That improbable bestseller

H is for Hawk told of a bird consoling and

inspiring a daughter grieving for her father.

Owl Sense has a mother finding a healing

source in owls for herself and her worryingly

ill son Benji. His Non-Epileptic Seizure Dis-

order (NEAD) took a disconcerting time to

diagnose and is frighteningly unpredicta-

ble. Just how frightening is illustrated by his

collapse on a bus as a 6ft,

16st student. For the

remainder of the journey

he lay motionless, stepped

over and unreported by the

passengers, with no

alarm raised until arrival

at the depot.

Dr Darlington, who

gained a PhD research-

ing her last book, Otter

Country, spent four years

on that quest. When she

embarked on owls, Ben-

ji’s serious illness inter-

vened. She was reminded

of the famous opening

line of Dante’s Inferno:

‘Midway along life’s jour-

ney, I found myself in a

dark wood, and the path

was lost.’ She had a choice:

shelve the project or work

it around Benji, with the

help of her rarely men-

tioned but clearly vitally

supportive husband and

daughter. Fortuitously,

Benji liked owls. They

proved therapeutic for

son and mother. Indeed

Benji’s alarming illness

made them all owl-like. It

brought them into com-

munion with the wildness

of the birds: ‘The family

gained a new attentive-

ness, a kind of listening

sensitivity.’

The world has 216 owl species. Darlington

originally confined herself to our five native

birds: tawny, the most urban and numer-

ous; barn, now dependent on bird boxes

for a third of its nests; the diurnal little owl,

emblem of the goddess Athena, introduced

in the 19th-century but today officially in

‘rapid decline’; and the two scarce, in part

migratory, wilderness species, the long-eared

and short-eared. Difficulty in finding the last

two forced Darlington abroad and brought

Eurasian owls within her scope. She did not

find them all, but added the largest, the eagle

owl, the smallest, the pygmy owl, and the ulti-

mately elusive snowy owl to her list.

Her book, as a result, is in part an enter-

taining travelogue. She discovered that Ser-

bia is the world centre for long-eareds; her

unintended camera flash caused 100 to

erupt from a pine tree. In France, in search

of the tiny pygmy owl, her liberal sensi-

bilities were affronted by her jovial guide

Gilles’s enthusiasm for Benny Hill and the

discovery that birders — ‘les ornis’ —are

deeply unpopular nationally for wanting

to protect all those birds treasured by the

French — any species seems to qualify — as

culinary delicacies. Having despised twitch-

ers she became a convert: ‘like all the best

birdwatchers, Gilles loved people as well as

birds’. Similarly, the vulnerability of a mas-

sive eagle owl reminded her that ‘without

family, we are nothing’. So, she found her

path, as this book triumphantly testifies; and,

although Benji’s NEAD persists, the end of

her quest finds him happily employed in a

bakery.

Readers should nevertheless be warned

that, despite being a prize-winning poet and

lecturer in English and creative writing at

Plymouth University, her prose reveals a

weakness for painting the lily, slack repeti-

tion, twee anthropomorphisms (‘owl foot-

sie’) and such infelicities as ‘a woosh of

adrenaline flooded me’. She wonders how

she can ‘wrench any if it into words’. There

is too much wrenching — though nothing an

editor could not have remedied.

John Lewis-Stempel is the hottest nature

writer around, having won the Thwaites

Wainwright prize twice in the past four

years. His book is described in the press

release as ‘perfect for the gift market’,

which it is. It is too short to bring much of

the earthy authenticity of his life as a work-

ing farmer to bear. Much of its contents,

factual and mythological, inevitably dupli-

cates Darlington’s; but there is still enough

to silence a dinner party: an owl’s eyes

fill half its skull; and its heart, placed on the

left breast of a sleeping woman, will make

her tell all.

Time to lighten up

Ian Thomson

Brit(ish): On Race, Identity

and Belonging

by Afua Hirsch

Cape, £16.99, pp. 367

In parts of Africa and the West Indies

women are so anxious to ‘whiten up’ that

they use skin-lightening creams. The British

writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch sees this

as a regrettable consequence of the aristoc-

racy of skin colour as instituted by British

merchant-capitalists during slavery. (Skin

must first be bleached before it can be con-

sidered beautiful.) Of mixed Jewish-African

parentage, the 36-year-old Hirsch is proud to

call herself black. In this much-hyped book

she sets out to question lingering obeisance

to the idea of colonial Britain and to that

ghost of the British Empire, the Common-

wealth. Why does it persist so?

Affection for Britain remains surpris-

ingly strong in Commonwealth countries.

West Indian pseudo-colonials of the sort

portrayed by Sam Selvon in his 1956 novel

The Lonely Londoners survive in the

colonial-era law courts of India, in the

Sandhust-educated echelons of the Jamai-

can army and in the Nigerian civil ser-

vice. Black and mixed-race British people,

The elusive snowy owl in flight

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