It's not very often it happens, but this is likely to become one of those books that I will remember forever. It challenges the way the reader thinks about nature and the condition of being autistic, and I hope it has a positive impact on everyone who reads it.
Over the first few pages, I found the writing style a little clunky, and I wondered why the editor hadn't smoothed the wording over a bit, but then after about 50 pages or so, I realised that the text has to be left as it is because this is Chris. The way the language is used is how he thinks and speaks, and I had demonstrated the eternal problem he has with the rest of us when I expected him to change it just to make it better for me!
Once I got over myself, I allowed his language to do its job and he let me see the world through his eyes. Chris has a unique view of the world and he is truly interested in every bird, every creature and every creeping thing. As a child, he picked up dead things that he found by the roadside or in the woods, and not satisfied with examining the outer body, he would cram the bodies little birds in his pocket and take them home to investigate how the wings worked or what the tongue was like. He once ate a few tadpoles to see how they tasted, and another time he was quite happy when a giant beetle released a foul smelling liquid all over his hands - he felt fortunate to have the opportunity to memorise how it smelt.
When Chris was at school during the 1960s and 1970s, he was shunned and bullied by his classmates for being weird. He hardly spoke, and if he did, they laughed at him as he went on too much and gave too many facts about things like dinosaurs and birds that no-one else in his class cared about. He was frustrated by everyone around him, including his family, but really they were surprisingly tolerant of his obsessive desire to get to know the natural world around him.
When he was quite a young boy, he desperately wanted to raise a kestrel but the authorities wouldn't issue him a licence. After doing a great deal of research into the subject of raising and training kestrel falcons, Chris ordered the leather jesses, bells and hood and went to a nest he had been observing and carefully removed one of the chicks. I would never approve of anyone else doing this, but Chris really knew what he was doing, and he raised and trained that bird as well as any adult bird handler would have done.
The book is written in bursts of memories rather than being strictly chronological order, and sometimes Chris speaks as himself and in other chapters he writes in the third person. In between the chapters of his memories, he has written up some visits to a therapist and it is during these sessions that we learn some of his most painful history. Towards the end of the book he recalls a very dangerous event in his life when he chose to enter the freezing water of a river to reach a fox that had been caught in a snare. This episode is one of the best pieces in the book and the writing is beyond criticism. I think everyone would benefit from reading this book.
Comments
Post a Comment