Book review: The Flow - Rivers, Water and Wildness by Amy-Jane Beer

 

HOW about this for a description of a bird foraging among fallen leaves in autumn?

"Furtive rustles of a blackbird fossicking in the crispy beech leaves: toss and pause, toss and pause - quick movements that appear bad tempered but probably effect a need to listen for danger between bouts of noisy rummaging."

We have all seen such activity and, given the familiarity of the species, probably not deemed it worthy of a second glance.

But to author-observer Amy-Jane Beer, a prose-poet if there ever was/ were one, it provides a magical moment.

Here she is again, this time describing a much smaller and more elusive bird:

"Two impish forms helter-skelter around the trunk of a tree.

"They alight just long enough to glimpse a lick of flame on each head, then off again a dizzy, spiralling chase. Goldcrests!"

Why is that women are able and willing to write so colourfully, but seldom men?

The recently-published book from which these passages are taken is The Flow - Rivers, Water and Wildness.

It is an impressive 400-page exploration of the significance of rivers (and water) in art, literature, science  history, politics, scripture, mythology, folklore and more.

Beer is not, strictly speaking, a birder. She is mistaken in describing dippers as "widespread across the length and breadth of Britain" - they are seldom seen in, for instance, Lincolnshire, East Anglia and the South-east.

But it is easy to forgive an  author who describes so vividly a flock of 60 or 70 lapwings "flying in close formation, then exploding apart as though each bird were suddenly overwhelmed with an urge to freestyle.

"They slew and tumble, scattering across the sky."

Alas, birds figure relatively infrequently in Beer's narrative because she has so much else to cover.

Early on, for instance,  there is an intriguing but all-to-brief section on "atmospheric rivers".

These, she explains, are invisible "gas rivers in the sky - conveyors of moisture across, for example, the Atlantic to the Caribbean, bringing rain to Britain and providing a reminder that a river is not necessarily a bounded entity, merely a ribbon of water in a channel."     

Beer's spotlight also falls on a tragic incident that occurred in August 70 years - a flood in the North Devon town of Lynmouth that claimed 34 lives.

This followed an episode a couple of days earlier when Staines in Middlesex had its heaviest rain in years.

Could either or both be linked to Project Cumulus, an Imperial College-backed experiment in which the RAF had been engaged to spray salt into clouds over Bedfordshire in an attempt to "manipulate" the weather to create rainfall?

Is there a springboard here for more research - and perhaps another book?

It would be a challenge,  not least given, as the author notes, "the alleged disappearance of classified files".

The author's research was far from being desk-only - she travelled extensively all over Britain to talk with a wide range of people and to explore rivers, both wild swimming (her passion) and from on board a kayak.

Around Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, she was evidently unimpressed with the extenside man-engineered modifications to the River Welland which she says, most perceptively, "lends a sense of nowhereness to the place".

It was hereabouts, of course, that King John famously lost his treasure - said to have been "sucked down by the whirlpool". It would be interesting to know her take on this famous event in English history - perhaps she is saving that up for a future piece of writing.

The Flow contains another fascinating section in which the author visits the Hogsmill river, near Epsom in Surrey - scene of a famous and disturbing 1852 painting by the Pre-Raphaelite artist, John Everett Millais.

Based on a scene in  Shakespeare's Hamlet, it depicts the floating body of the drowned Ophelia.

 

Beer notes that Millais broke with tradition in painting the river's flow from right to left, "spurning the convention that regarded leftward orientation as literally sinister".

While on the riverbank, she detects two bird that would definitely not have occurred there in Victorian times - little egret and ring-necked parakeet.

Of the former, she writes: "To my eye, egrets  are exotic and reminiscent of improbable assemblages of wildlife adorning religious paintings and trendy wallpaper."

Such is their "angelic whiteness" that she doubts if Millais would have been able to resist including them - plus the parakeets and orange carp - if he were to revisit the same spot today. 

The author has obviously referred to Shakespeare's play to compare the flowers he references in Ophelia's speech with what she sees, but she disregards, either by accident or intent, Millais' depiction of a robin on the left of the painting.

Why did Millais include the bird? In recognition of Ophelia's pre-death utterance: "For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy." 

But the artist is mistaken to have included it. If the playwright had been referring to the bird, he would have used the terminology of the time - "ruddock" or "robin-redbreast".

The line sung by Ophelia would almost certainly have been borrowed from a bawdy song of the day - and, incidentally, a clear indication that she and Hamlet had enjoyed a physical relationship prior to their break-up.   

Any complaints about Beer's book? Just one - the patronising section in which she bosses readers on the need to be sparing with their use of water - "to choose low-volume flush, to wash bedding and clothes less, to use grey and ranwater on garden instead of sending it down the drain . . ."And so on, and so on. 

As if educated readers would not be aware of all this anyway! 

This is such an admirable and stimulating book that it will doubtless and deservedly be reprinted in paperback - but, please, only  after the sermonising has been removed.

The Flow is published by Bloomsbury at £18.99 and is available wherever books are sold.

                                                 

The robin (left) is identifiable, but are there other birds (or hints of birds?) in  Millais' famous painting (which resides in London's excellent Tate Gallery)