The Nature Of Autumn

by Jim Crumley

Saraband, £12.99

Reviewed by Brian Morton

NO critical-acumen points for detecting an “autumnal” tone to Jim Crumley’s latest, since that’s what it says on the cover. An unwary reader might be tempted to stretch into metaphor and hint that it also veers to the elegiac, almost as if 30 books were enough and Crumley was ready to hang up his walking boots and binoculars. There is a good deal of retrospection and self-quotation in The Nature Of Autumn. A key chapter looks back to the death of his father. And after all, autumn is a time of slowing and decay, a time to think of last things and the dark. Isn’t it?

Exactly the opposite. As anyone who gardens, farms or spends any amount of time out in nature will know, the nature of autumn is beginning and not conclusion. It is the season in which life gathers ready for the next surge. Spring, by contrast, is a frivolous, coltish season, all show and not much substance. And there is absolutely no merit in arguing that Crumley’s use of passages from his older books is a symptom of writerly fatigue. It is precisely what a naturalist does. There is nothing more fascinating than to note the passing of a bird or some intriguing example of animal behaviour and then to go back and consider the words used a year, 10 years, 20 years ago for exactly the same phenomenon. They change because we change, and nature changes – and never more obviously than at a time where every climatic and ecological certainty is up for discussion.

The title is, of course, gently ambiguous, suggesting that it covers the natural history one might expect to see in autumn – the deer rut, migration, arboreal firework displays – but also a more philosophical questioning of what autumn means. Crumley is too brisk for metaphysics. He lets observation win out over abstraction every time, and he bases himself in a physical environment – the Carse of Stirling and Balquhidder Glen – which has grown so familiar that each incremental change in flora and fauna, land use and weather is strikingly apparent to him at a glance. Not to say that he doesn’t range more widely. Some of the best chapters take him to Harris and Skye, and a brief closing chapter from Edinburgh serves as reminder that he’s also a fine writer on the urban landscape.

The Morning After I Almost Killed A Man (not to be a spoiler, it was a fallen motorcyclist on a slippy road) has little of the bucolic about it. There’s a political aspect to the writing. Crumley is a natural libertarian, in the sense that he doesn’t like to see nature constrained. His “Free the Fortingall Yew” campaign continues unabated. The iron bars and padlock that keep us from that great tree and that great tree from us are a vivid image of what’s wrong with our official stewardship of nature, which is mostly about fencing it off, providing parking and toilets, and selling it as an “experience”.

Nature writing is like trying to catch birds with cobwebs. Crumley’s just has a higher tensile strength than most. If you’ve never seen a green woodpecker burst into a patch of sunlight, you’ll have no inkling of how breath-shortening it can be. If you have, you’ll know that Crumley nails it. His mantra/methodology is “Wait. Watch. Listen. Learn.” It’s not complicated but not so easy to put into practice. The dips into poetry don’t entirely convince, particularly when placed in passages which render an observation so precisely that “poetry” seems to be transcended. His most resounding conclusion is sounded just as autumn is about to tip over into winter and with the death-defying yew in mind. “We used to be nature ourselves once. Now, every day, we find new ways to travel further away from it than ever.”

So, a book that quietly celebrates life, at the very moment life is most quietly celebrating itself. If you’re still tempted to think it represents a swan-song, check very carefully the ornithological veracity, or not, of that misleading phrase. This isn’t a curtain call but a writer still with his boots on.