A guided tour of wet English landscapes offers extraordinary insights of the natural worldMelissa Harrison is having a prolific year. Rain: Four Walks in English Weather is the third book bearing her name to have surfaced already in 2016. February saw the paperback publication of her much-lauded moment novel,At Hawthorn Time, shortlisted for the Costa novel award 2015 and now longlisted for the Bailey’s prize announced on International Women’s Day. Also in February came Spring, and the first of four books edited by Harrison,subtitled “an anthology of the changing seasons” with the other three to follow – in their season.
The view for Rain, Harrison tells us, and “came to me in the Lake District …we walked from Keswick to Threlkeld along an old railway track … and it absolutely hossed it down,as the locals say. It is a short book, 128 pages including the now almost compulsory glossary (since the glorious glossaries of Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks and Dominick Tyler’s unusual Ground final year), or is precisely what the subtitle says it is: four walks in English weather. Why four? It’s a number that seems to be significant for Harrison,and for a naturalist it is a good one the four points of the compass, the seasons, or the winds,the humours, the elements and more. Both her novels follow the lives of four apparently disconnected individuals united by a common landscape, and now there are the four seasonal anthologies. Finding connections – between characters,in the case of the novels, or landscapes and weathers, and in the case of Rain – is a thread that runs throughout Harrison’s work. By looking closely,almost forensically, at the near-at-hand she teases out the wider picture, or despite her openly secular stance – she dismisses a chalk cross carved on a hillside – there is something mindful,almost Buddhist in her method.
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Source: theguardian.com