What Book Are You Reading Now, Round 2.

The Peregrine by John Alec Baker recounts a single year from October to April from the author's ten-year obsession with the peregrines that wintered near his home in Chelmsford, Essex in eastern England. The writing is lyrically charged, as the author's role of diligent observer gives way to a personal transformation, as Baker becomes, in the words of James Dickey, "a fusion of man and bird”

The story of The Peregrine’s writing is remarkable, and has a mystery at its heart. For around a decade – from 1954 to 1964 – a myopic office worker from Essex tracked the peregrine falcons that hunted over the landscape of his county. He pursued them on bicycle and on foot, watching through binoculars as they bathed, flew, stooped and roosted. He carried Ordnance Survey maps on which he marked in ballpoint pen the locations of his sightings, with circled capital letters – P, SH, HH, BO – recording raptors by species (M is for Merlin, K is for Kestrel).

He learned to predict the peregrines’ locations by means of an intelligence that began as logic and ended as instinct, and in a relationship that began as fascination and ended as obsession.
Even the savage winter of 1962–63 – when the sea froze for two miles out from the shore, and spear-length icicles hung from eaves and trees – didn’t deter Baker from his quest. After a day in the field, he would retreat to the spare room of his Chelmsford terrace house, and write up the details in journals that together run to more than 1,600 manuscript pages.

In the mid-1960s, he compressed those journals into a book fewer than 60,000 words long, and written in ecstatic, violent, enraptored prose. The journals were coal to The Peregrine’s diamond: crushed, they became the book. He collapsed 10 years into a single “season of hawk-hunting”, and “stripped” the narrative “down to the livid bone”, to borrow a phrase from one of his early poems. Instead of plot, he deployed pattern. The same actions recur across the book’s course: man pursues falcon, falcon pursues prey.

In the words of Baker: “I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger”

Robert Mcfarlane writes that Baker’s Essex is "landscape on acid: super-saturations of colour, wheeling phantasmagoria, dimensions blown out and falling away, nature as hypernature.”

Gunkie, let us know when you get through ALL of the Gulag. It gets rather repetitive. But then that rather fits the theme.

Crazy how that many millions of people just disappeared and next to nothing was ever said or done about it.

Now I'm onto this, "The Goats Of West Point"

If you haven't yet, suggest The Long Gray Line, Rick Atkinson.
Extremely well-written, tracks easily despite following multiple men over three decades. I've got two others of his, In the Company of Soldiers and An Army at Dawn up next