Findings - Kathleen Jamie

I first came across Kathleen Jamie in an article she wrote deriding Robert MacFarlane for being a 'lone, enraptured male'. There were other factors involved in her attack, but this is what I took away. Another contributor to the genre of nature writing, I was therefore interested to see what Jamie was writing herself. Findings is a collection of 11 relatively short essays, or musings, on different aspects of nature in her Scottish homeland. These range from a visit to the Orkney islands, bird watching in Fife, investigating a Hebridean beach, or viewing the skyline of Edinburgh City. Her style is a lot more personal than MacFarlane's and Cocker's, she seems less engaged with the scientific aspects of her focus and more intent on drawing out what things signify to her on an intimate level. In this regard, her work reads more as poetic reminiscences on the landscape, or else a kind of travel journal.

My edition of Findings was saturated in typos and in some cases, misplaced paragraphs. At one point I was forced to mentally shift passages around like a jigsaw until they made sense. Was this a genuine printing error or bad structuring? Hard to tell. Despite this persistent problem, I did enjoy parts of her book, although a little less attention to her personal life would have been better. There was a whole section devoted to her husband catching 'cold agglutinin disease' for instance, not at all relevant in my opinion. Domesticity constantly creeps into the text, jarring one's immersion with nature by recalling the mediocrity of everyday life. There is a gruesome chapter called 'Surgeon's Hall' which has our narrator on a macabre museum tour of jars containing dismembered human body parts. Overall I found her tone slightly irreverent and she failed to get suitably excited about corn rakes. Really I'm just envious that she can spy on peregrines from her window.

Rating: 3/5