In The Place of Tides, farmer James Rebanks strays far from the land and work with which we have come to associate him. In the bestselling The Shepherd’s Life (2015) and English Pastoral (2021), Rebanks detailed his exploits as a sheep farmer in the north-eastern fells of the Lake District. Now, in his third book, he leaves the English countryside altogether.
The book is an account of the time Rebanks spent on Fjærøy, a tiny, usually uninhabited island in the Vega archipelago on Norway’s west coast, just below the Arctic Circle. He is there, from April to July, to learn the trade of Anna Måsøy, a wonderfully named “duck woman”, who each year travels from her home on the archipelago’s largest island to continue her family’s ancient tradition of gathering “a rare and precious product”: the down of the eider duck.
“Everything I knew about Norway could have been written on the side of a cinnamon bun,” he writes, warmly, at the start of the book. But soon Måsøy has taught him her dirty yet beloved work. They start by building little huts from stones and wooden planks to protect the wild eider ducks from predators – eagles, otters, mink. The birds come on land, lay eggs, sit on them for 26 days and hatch their ducklings, before taking them to sea. Then Måsøy and Rebanks gather and clean the eiderdown left behind. This cycle has been repeated annually as far back as the Viking era, but now it is even more crucial, as eider numbers on the island have dwindled from 1,300 in 1900 to little over 120 today.
Rebanks is in awe of Måsøy, in her 70s and less than 5ft tall, yet seemingly “unbreakable”, used to living alone in remote conditions, doing such tender work. She gives him a sense that it is “possible to step outside history” – to continue a traditional way of life even while oil-rich, modern Norway considers it “archaic”. It makes him reflect on his family farm and its future.
But Rebanks undercuts Måsøy’s narrative with a half-hearted through-line about how he embarked on this trip in an attempt to regain some “hope and self-belief” after a realisation that he “was a poor husband, father, brother, and son”. The self-reflection is well-meaning, but never fully explained, and verges into cliche: “I was beginning a journey back to the person I had once been – and needed to be again,” he writes.
It’s a shame, because in spite of modern publishing’s unsaid requirement for every book to take its author on a journey of “self-improvement”, The Place of Tides is not served better by it. Rebanks’s telling of the skilled work and cultural history that he learns from Anna Måsøy is all this otherwise enlightening book needs.
• The Place of Tides by James Rebanks is published by Allen Lane (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
