Book Review: Tarka the Otter, Henry Williamson.

7 Jul

*Tarka the Otter, an honest book review.*

Tarka the Otter has been released as a Puffin Classic, meaning two things: It’s now available bound in a beautifully textured hardcover, printed with generous line spacing, and it was published with young people being the intended audience. All Puffin releases are for children.

I picked myself, a 34-year-old woman, up a copy because I felt the need to read earlier examples of nature writing. I wanted to fill a little void in my patchy-at-best pop culture knowledge; this is a story all my parents’ generation are familiar with.

The thing that struck me the most, was that children used to read books crammed full of language they might not have been familiar with. That children would take the time to navigate to the 3-page glossary. I was awed by Henry Williamson’s bold use of words like ammil, dimity, channered and ragrowster rather than their intelligible counterparts (frost, twilight, tracks, boisterous play). I revelled in the diversity of his lexicon. Especially disarming, was his use of the onomatopoeic “Hu-ee-ee-ic!” and “Ic-yang!” to capture the way Tarka and the other otters communicated.

As this is a review, I’m going to be honest; This book was a hard read. It took an emotional toll. Maybe I’m too sentimental, maybe I’m a sucker for seemingly cuddly creatures… Whatever the reason, this book had me crying and cringing at more than a couple of points.

The story is about an otter called Tarka, and the first few years of his life. It’s an intimate portrait of survival that pulls no punches when it comes to describing the harsh ways otters kill and are killed. My heartbeat quickened ever time I saw a “Tally Ho!” on the page. The otter hunt is described with a ruthless detachment that makes it even more emotive.

This book is masterful in depicting the impact both seasons and humans have on animals, how hard-won a life in nature is and, frequently, how momentary. The more engrossed I got in the unfolding descriptions of the countryside between Dartmoor and Exmoor Forest, the more it dawned on me how little I really understood about what our native creatures endure. The more it dawned on me how fraught their relationship is with us, humans.

There’s a moment that made my fist clench, where Williamson describes fishermen killing salmon in spite of legal restrictions. They don’t eat them, they just club them to death and leave them for the fishing wardens to find, a sign of displeasure.

The senselessness of it conveys a gulf of incongruity between those who enjoy nature and those who rely on it. Patrick Barkham has been on the receiving end of similar pettiness just this year, two dead crows were left hanging from his gate in retaliation for his support of the Wild Justice campaign.

Tarka the Otter is a timely read, despite having been first published in 1927. It resonates with me now. Our political landscape seems to have been in free-fall for the last 3 years, discussions about how Britain will move forward with Brexit are rife. Conversations about the impact leaving the EU will have on our environmental policies are fraught. More and more young people are engaging in the Extinction Rebellion and civil disobedience is spreading as we consider David Attenborough’s stark plea to stop polluting our oceans.

This book felt important. It felt healthy for me to read something that was neither narrated from a person’s point-of-view nor anthropomorphically. It allowed me to engage more objectively and consider ways we could make our ecosystem more stable and humans less destructive.

*A photo of the words that are contained in the glossary of Tarka the Oter*

An example of Williamson’s style:

“It had been a cannibal trout and had eaten more than fifty times its own weight of smaller trout. Tar from the road, after rain, had poisoned it. A rat ate the body the next day, and Old Nog speared and swallowed the rat three nights later. The rat had lived a jolly and murderous life, and died before it could fear.”