Book review: The Light in the Dark by Horatio Clare

As a boy growing up on a Welsh hill farm, Horatio Clare loved winter. Getting snowed in for weeks at a time became an adventure. But in recent years, since moving to the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire, he has learned to dread the onset of winter for the seasonal depression he knows will come with it. The year before writing this book had been his worst to date, and he decided to keep a journal to help get him through it, a “torch” raised against the engulfing darkness.

“I am aware of gathering every sign of life and nature,” he writes, “as though assembling charms and touchstones against a lowering threat.”

The first thing one realises about Clare is what an outstanding observer of nature he is, seeing the landscape around him with the eyes of a painter and capturing it with the skill of a poet. Beginning in September, when he still feels “alive in the weather, the light and the colour”, The Light in the Dark opens like a love letter to the natural world, summoning up vistas of “yellowing greens like moulding broccoli and vapour greys” and keenly following the subtle plays of sunlight.

As the signs of his seasonal affective disorder begin to show – Clare’s increased sugar consumption, his obsession with domestic tasks, the ratcheting-up of tension at home – his attentiveness to the countryside around him intensifies, bringing to the page some deeply personal nature writing.

His affinity with nature is, in fact, the lifeline that will keep him attached to the human race as he’s needing it most. A walk up the conical, snow-covered Castell Dinas, for instance, connects him not just with his own five-year-old self but with Iron Age people who would have gazed out over the same view and with the same sense of wonder.

His eagerness to connect with the past can sometimes seem tenuous or desperate, as when he pounces on the fact that porridge is something Europeans have eaten since the Palaeolithic, or imagines that a February afternoon indoors in Yorkshire probably resembles a typical winter day for the Brontë sisters. But he strikes a more universal note when he invokes the Venerable Bede’s accounts of 8th Century winters, seeing a direct line between shivering Anglo-Saxons huddling together in solidarity against the cold and the people of Rochdale throwing a mid-winter party in their town hall. As much as he cherishes spending Christmas with his wife and family, it’s his recognition of the “networks of deep understanding” underlying a community that keeps the chill from his soul.

Clare’s journal is notable for the seamless way it segues between lyrical descriptions of the countryside and family crises, income tax worries, the anxieties of his young Creative Writing students and occasions like an uplifting and inclusive carol concert in Hebden Bridge, framing winter as a tough endurance test but a positive one which strengthens the bonds of a community. Just reading it may go some way to banishing the winter blues, or at least understanding them better.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT