![]() ![]() And this isn’t inevitable, as he points out. Sure, he has sought out a relationship with this wild creature. What the whole book recognises is the agency of the animals Delorme meets. He uses “we” freely, not only to tell us what he and the deer are doing but in ways suggestive of emotional and psychic entanglement. Eventually, he no longer lives “in” the forest but “of” the forest. And he takes less each time from his old life as his skills and confidence – and indeed appetite – begin to transform. But, over time, he returns less and less. At first, he returns a few times a month to shower and recharge his batteries (Delorme is a photographer, and his images hugely amplify the text). As the chapters unfold, Delorme recedes even further from the narrative, mirroring his gradual withdrawal from civilisation and home. That is the price.īy the end, I took pleasure in how the tight, spare writing conveys the inadequacy of language to properly render the experience of living in the wild. Yet one suspects this is the only kind of testimony that could come from someone who has, in many ways, eschewed the human world. Opportunities for development are lost throughout the book. Too often he skates over what must be fascinating territory for a reader. Admittedly, there were times when I found his distance frustrating. That is not what readers get in Deer Man, with its hallucinogenic brevity. Yet, in most books, the hook must always be human biography. Many, like Foster, who try to do this acknowledge that we need a disruption of power relations across the living world. Writing against recent trends in publishing, Mabey challenges us to “have more respect for nature’s own narratives”. The celebrated naturalist Richard Mabey has long railed against the impulse to use other animals as “some kind of mirror”. And yet we always somehow loop back to the human. ![]() Charles Foster’s Being a Beast saw him live like a range of creatures, from otters and swifts, in a tragicomical rejoinder to the challenge thrown out by philosophers: “What is it like to be …” Such books are encounters, more than anything else, with sentience. In Sooyong Park’s The Great Soul of Siberia, scientific scrutiny gives way to revelation in the face of his study subject, the Siberian tiger. ![]() More recently, we have Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk. The Peregrine by JA Baker remains one of the finest and strangest. There’s a long tradition of accounts by people who have tried to enter the domain of wild animals. Yet that is the power and charm of his book. Delorme never dwells on himself, stubbornly training the lens on the animals alongside him. We are only glancingly told that he survived hypothermia on several occasions, that he learned to sit with one leg tucked under him to keep the water from impregnating his clothes, that he wore three woollen jumpers. But we are spared the true privations he must have endured: Delorme is both stoical and tight-lipped. In his time there, he must survive the damp and cold and feed himself from the forest plants, differentiating the textures of leaves to forage in the dark. Yet the strength of this book is its singular focus on the deer.Īs readers, we yearn to know the nitty-gritty of how he made it in the wild. The lack of information about his life – the ruthless absence of autobiography – can seem odd to a modern reader. It’s fairytale stuff, both in its transformational force and its unspoken darkness. Yet a fleeting encounter with a young buck draws him into the woods around Louviers, France, and off he goes. And there’s something amiss in his relationship with his family. Exclusively home-schooled, the young man was clearly lonely. We discover very little about the events that preceded this decision. Deer Man follows the story of someone who turns his back on society and spends seven years living in a forest among roe deer. ![]()
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