James Rebanks is something of an unofficial spokesperson for the state of food, farming and the environment. His bestselling books The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral explore these themes from his home in the Lake District, where he farms regeneratively with his family.
His latest book, The Place of Tides, might at first seem something of a departure. In it, he recounts the spring he spent on a remote island off the coast of Norway working under the mentorship of Anna Måsøy, an older woman who nurtured a dwindling eider duck population by building and protecting their nests each year.
Rebanks had met Anna briefly years before. He was captivated by her. “I felt I had met someone who had made life on her own terms. I, on the other hand, had not.” He was feeling unmoored, carrying too much, looking for ways to be strong and tough it out. He thought this woman might show him how. “There was something still alive in her that had died in me.” He eventually writes to her to ask if he can visit and help. She replies, telling him to “bring work clothes and good boots, and come quickly”. It was to be her last season on the small island.
Rebanks is restless at first but slowly adjusts to life on Fjærøy, which is slower and smaller than his own life. He, Anna, and Anna’s apprentice Ingrid learn each other’s rhythms. As they work, and in the quiet of the evening, he listens to Anna’s stories and tries to see the world through her eyes. He wants to share that world, her stories, to make of it all “some kind of fable”. The result is a quiet book that gently unfolds and invites you into the magic of the island: the turn of the year from storms to summer light, the whales that play off the shore, the simplicity of Anna’s existence there, the trust the ducks have in her. Rebanks’s writing is spare, but still he makes the place sing with an ancient beauty. His writing is like a clear window into another world.
A story about tending eider ducks might seem niche. But in some ways it is not really about that at all. Through the lens of the place, its history, and the ducks (who arrive just as they finish making nests for them), Rebanks focuses on Anna and on the people she is bound to by blood, care, community. This, then, is the story of one woman, but also of community and of the generations – right back to the Vikings – who gathered eider down and tended the place before Anna. Here, it mirrors Rebanks’s story, and the generations of people who have cared for the land he lovingly farms.
Rebanks slowly finds something different from the escape he first sought. He sees that Anna is not the lone heroine he thought. She is tough but also forgiving, defiant but understanding. He begins to find his own redemption and sees that Anna’s work is upheld by a deep interdependence. His anxiety about his purpose in the world recedes like the winter’s cold. The Place of Tides is a story of renewal – of Rebanks himself, and of an ancient practice. It is about the people – the “nobodies”, as Rebanks has called them – who get on with the work of caring for the world to no fanfare, no recognition, and in doing so uphold old ways that are easily trampled. It is a fable for our time that transports and transfixes. It is a soft but lasting light.
The Place of Tides by James Rebanks. Allen Lane, 2024. ISBN: 9780241426937
