Book review: Otter Country by Miriam Darlington

Otter Country

by Miriam Darlington

Granta, 363pp, £20

It has faded a bit, for sure, like an old photograph, and the Disneyesque Jack Couffer film (Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, 1969) muddied its crystalline images in the minds of the public – but the literary vigour of Maxwell’s most celebrated work is still crisp and clear more than half a century after it was written.

Those images have, of course, metamorphosed; they can no longer be seen outside their charged moment in time, just as the Highlands he graced with such elegant descriptions have changed almost beyond recognition, but to those who were enthralled by their seductive charms in the 1960s and 1970s, it has never dimmed. One of those people is the prize-winning poet and Exeter University creative writing tutor, Miriam Darlington, whose first work of prose, Otter Country: In Search of the Wild Otter is published next week.

What is it about the otter, I have often asked myself? That secretive and elusive water weasel of which Maxwell wrote: “His speed was bewildering, his grace breath-taking; he was boneless, mercurial, sinuous, wonderful. I thought of a trapeze artist, of a ballet dancer, of a bird … but in all of these I was comparing him to lesser grandeurs… He was the most beautiful thing in nature I had ever seen.” It certainly isn’t familiarity – few people ever see a wild otter and when they do it is often a fleeting glimpse. Nor is its rarity the draw, because thanks to the clean-up of our rivers and protective conservation measures the once severely endangered species is now no longer rare at all and has returned to most of Britain’s wetlands. Yet the allure persists. Ecotourism didn’t exist in Scotland in Maxwell’s day; today it’s a jostling industry. Folk often ask me where they can see a golden eagle or a red deer stag, where’s the best place to see dolphins or seals, but if I mention an otter – eyes widen and their whole demeanour changes. “Is it possible to see an otter in the wild? We’d looove to see an otter.”

You don’t have to be an otter fanatic to love Darlington’s book. It is another worthy spur to the renaissance of British nature writing, a genre that seems to have bubbled up out of the ground over the last 15 years, and Otter Country is proper nature writing, revealing as much about the writer’s obsession with otters as of the animal itself and leaving us in awe of both. This is no buttercup-twirling furry animal idyll, far from it; nor does it attempt to be a semi-scientific monograph, although there’s plenty of meaty fact about otters. Rather, it is a journey, a deeply personal journey back to Darlington’s childhood on the river Ouse where her interest first sparked and taking us the length and breadth of Britain to find otters and ottery people: poets, writers, photographers, keepers, researchers, conservationists, and even a scientist who had examined the livers of 237 dead otters for fluke.

Early on she leads us by the hand into the stark high granitic tors of Dartmoor near her present Devon home. “The valley of the River Dart rolls south through hobbit-shire roundness, meandering extravagantly towards the sea.” It is there, in Henry Williamson country that she exposes her second mentorial fixation. In Tarka the Otter, the famous saga of the hunted otter first published in 1927, Darlington writes that “Williamson, attempting to pass on the spiritual understanding he had of the natural world, paints beauty and savagery, heroism and destruction.”

Refreshingly, Darlington never presents herself as an expert, yet if she wasn’t when she set out on this quest, she surely is now. “Other than the snatched sighting in Scotland, I’d still never seen a wild otter,” she admits early on, at once banishing any suggestion that she belongs to some sort of elite natural world cognoscente.

And then again, how many writers so self-depracatingly own up to the weighty influences on their words? “Williamson’s writing certainly changed the way I thought. Even now, reading it quietens my mind’s clamour, as the meandering calligraphy of the water and its inhabitants are drawn into sharp  relief.”

The narrative breaks down into a series of otter habitats and haunts as she explores each one in turn: “A plan formed in my mind. I would explore the places in this land that hid my grail.” Watershed, Marsh, Source, Stream, Hunting Ground, Holt. “I would embark on a water-level odyssey around our small archipelago … the undulating mesh of blue veins that are otter country.”

Few of us would choose to sleep out in the cold and the rain, rise before dawn to track otters in the snow, sit shivering through fruitless hours of waterside watching, trail through marshes and their muddy tangle, test the loyalty of family who turn out over and over again to bring her flasks of tea and sustenance, all to glimpse a ripple or shadowy swirl of this mercurial mammal. But I am very glad that she chose to do it for us and to share her deeply intimate and frequently transcendental experiences with such lucent clarity. For me the triumph of Darlington’s book is the way she makes otters accessible to us all through her deftly crafted imagery. Whether it is breeze ruffling water, reeds shimmering in the wind, a glimmer of last light or an incipient rain squall, she lifts us out of our apathy and brings us tantalisingly close to the nature we so freely take for granted.

At her best, the poet cannot be kept at bay. “He watches me like a shadow, a spark in his eyes, something about him drawing the dark out of my unconscious.” “Low sunlight bathes the world into a frosted graveyard.” “Where the sun touches the water, twists of steam rise and billow in frail breaths.” “The earth is a crackling sculpture lit with ice; spider webs are spun like sugar.” “The farm lake bloomed with a curdle of frogspawn.” But you never get the feeling it is lyricism for the sake of it. Her images grace the narrative, never burdensome, never overpowering it.

Well on in the book, in the chapter “Stream”, Darlington turns a blank foray into a mesmerising revelation of selflessness, which seems to me to be the hallmark of this nature writer, a redefining of the genre in which she so evidently revels. “In the trails of dew at dawn I find … that an otter has …visited the lake. It has been and gone with barely a ripple … a ream in the water, a subtle wake… I know I will not see this one… Whether I see it or not, holding it in my imagination requires something of me that is greater than all the experience I’ve been accumulating here. I look at the track of the otter and know that its life will be short, like every bird, insect and leaf that dwells here. Like all things, it will eventually let go and give itself wholeheartedly back to the earth. My senses kindled, my two feet rooted, I can only ever bear witness to this.”