History Scotland Magazine: Review - Landscapes and Lives: The Scottish Forest Through the Ages -John Fowler

Landscapes and Lives: The Scottish Forest Through the Ages

John Fowler

Canongate Books, 2002 ISBN 1 84195 326 1. Hb, pp.xi+292, 123 b/w illustrations, 16.99

This isnt conventional history it is lyric, it is elegy. Those were my first views as I read this book. I am not sure what I was expecting, but it wasnt quite this. Now, on reflection, I can say that this is a wonderful and compelling book, beautiful, evocative, insightful and disturbing but it still isnt history. John Fowler tells us how a friend, on reading the text, commented that it was a long love letter to the forest. And that it is. Fowler writes with a passion and compulsion that engages and enthrals the reader, interspersing his conventional narrative with personal accounts, observations and musings, like a lover wondering at his own condition. And therein lies, perhaps, the greatest frustration, for there are two texts intertwined like the very branches he is exploring squeezed between the covers of a single work.

This intermingling has a carefully crafted structure, with the italicised personal observations dropped in as word-pictures to illustrate, introduce or drive forward the conventional narrative. Each word-picture is, in itself, a powerful stimulant you can smell the scents of pine-resin, moss and bog-myrtle, sense the textures of the light on the land and the growing things and you are left wanting more. The main narrative is much more prosaic, but again uses powerful descriptive sections to move it on at a cracking pace. Nevertheless, it is left wholly overshadowed by the lyrical word-pictures that punctuate it. There is a danger that the conventional narrative will be left as the boring, dowdy wallflower while the word-pictures stalk the dance-floor like some attention-grabbing vixen!

But what is more important? The wallflower or the vixen? The latter demands attention and succeeds in fixing itself in the memory, but it is the former that carries the central message in this book. In the end, when trying to read this as a history of Landscapes and Lives: the Scottish Forest Through the Ages, I found my flow constantly interrupted by beautifully presented but ultimately irritating tangents and distractions until I finally blanked out anything in italics that I encountered, wholly defeating the point that Fowler has tried to make.

Environmental History is, in Britain, a very new subject and much in need of finding articulate and creative presenters. John Fowler very much fits this description and his book could do much to popularise the subject. It would do it even better, I suspect, if the woodland were disentangled from the trees.

Richard Oram, University of Stirling