Ponies at the Edge of the World by Catherine Munro
A well-researched but affectionate look at the lives of Shetland ponies (and their owners).
I'd been wanting to read this for a while so when the author posted recently to say that it was on offer for 99p in a flash sale, I picked it up straight away. I had intended to read it slowly, but it's a very short book that draws you in, and is perfect for reading while you're waiting for someone, in a queue etc, so I really flew through this.
Catherine Munro is an anthropologist who moved to Shetland for fieldwork in her PhD on relationships between Shetland ponies and their owners and breeders. She had been feeling disconnected from nature in her life in a city and when she moves to Shetland, the friendliness and neighbourliness of the community and the immersion in nature give her a sense of belonging again. She has some personal hardships to contend with in the final third of the book, but overall, this is a story of renewal, community, and harmonious relationships in the natural world.
There's obviously a lot in here about Shetland ponies and their prized qualities of intelligence, adaptability and hardiness, and plenty of research quoted to illustrate those qualities. However, my favourite animal-human relationship in the book was probably the connection she experiences with Yoda, a "pet lamb" ("caddie" in the local parlance) whom she bottle rears. You get a real sense of Yoda's personality, and also of the Munro's love and care for him. This passage comes from a point where he has grown up and has assimilated into a flock:
"Seeing me, Yoda always left his flock, and raced down to stand next to me, grazing inches from my feet. When I reached out to scratch his cheeks or neck, he would put his head to one side, often resting it on my knee, and close his eyes as he peacefully chewed the cud."
Isn't that just lovely?
She's not sentimental about the relationships between the animals and those who farm them, but she sees the animal-human connection as more of a relationship in which people learn from their ponies and sheep, and the animals learn from them too. It's a relationship that's rooted in the natural world and a time-honoured way of farming, and a counterpoint to the argument that all farming is exploitative.
I also loved the author's way of describing nature. It was simple and direct, yet evocative. This passage is from early on in the book:
"During those first few weeks, the ever-changing quality of weather and light never ceased to amaze me. The sun remained low on the horizon, and on clear days it infused the air with golden light, so I felt suspended in perpetual sunset. The air was in constant motion, never falling below force 5 during my first few weeks on the island. Clouds, laden, low to the ground, carried with them fleeting rainbows as they sped past. Hailstones could suddenly appear from a clear sky, blown from distant clouds; whipped by the wind, they bounced and scattered before melting into the wet ground. The sea was continually changing shades from grey to blue and green, the motion of white-crested waves responding to signals from the sky."
A trigger warning: there's quite a lot about baby loss and molar pregnancies in the final third of this book, so if either of those topics is difficult for you, I would avoid it. Otherwise, I would definitely recommend it if you're interested in books on the natural world. It would make a lovely gift, too.
What I've been reading this week
I finished Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur. I grew to like Elle and Darcy a lot, but the writing style didn't really chime with me. Also, Elle demands that Darcy tell her that they're forming a relationship based on something more than fun after they've been dating for just a month, which seemed like a rather short timeline to me. How many people are really certain of their feelings for someone else after a month? Anyway, this book wasn't really for me, and I'm unlikely to read anything by the author again.
I also started Soldier Sailor by Clare Kilroy, which almost everyone seems to be reading at the moment. It's a monologue narrated by Soldier to her young son, Sailor. Soldier appears to suffer from post-natal depression, and her words envelop you in a suffocating sense of inertia, terror, resentment at her husband, envy of other mothers who seem to have things easier, anger, basically the whole gamut of negative emotions...It's brilliantly written, but her experience of motherhood is so different from how other people write of it that, as someone who has never been a mother, I am finding it both difficult to relate to and a revelation.