THE PLACE OF TIDES, privileged man has mid-life crisis in the Arctic

THE PLACE OF TIDES
JAMES REBANKS
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: We are all in need of lights to follow.

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on.

Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly—and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island.

This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, building little wooden huts that will protect the ducks come spring; to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for the woman to gather, like feathered gold.

Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not at all what he had previously thought. As the weeks pass, what began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Rebanks, "an expert advisor to UNESCO on sustainable tourism", tells us an amazingly convenient story of going to learn the old folk ways of Anna, an elder who has made her life as far away from others as she can get; has devoted herself to maintaining a lifeway that, should any significant number of just this book's readers attempt to emulate would result in environmental devastation; but which fuels the itchy sense the world is enshittifying everything worthwhile without offering any remotely practicable solution to that real and accurate feeling.

I admit I'm a grouch, an also am in existential crisis about the world's horrifying trajectory. This book's pretty, nicely turned and selected sentences, all supporting a beautiful fantasy of life utterly in harmony with nature, are NOT A HELPFUL HOW-TO. They should not be read as anything inspiring you to reproduce the actions the author took. Inspiring you to look into ways to work with local nature-preserving groups? Absolutely. Don't think it's going to be like the author's time with Anna.

There are not a lot of ways to experience the thrill of being able to immerse yourself in unmediated nature. The author does it as long as it suits him, and his emotional needs. Then he returns to his 21st-century life. That's a whole huge pile of unexamined privilege there, sir. The majority of us can't find an Anna, still less go spend a lot of time not doing what people with lives and families must. After all, that was what drove you to seek Anna out.

“Anna’s example was simple: if we are to save the world, we have to start somewhere. We just have to do one damn thing after another. Hers was a small kind of heroism, but it was the most powerful kind. The kind that saves us. We all have to go to work in our own communities, in our own landscapes. We have to show up day in, day out, for years and years, doing the work. There will be no brass band, no parade. And we have to accept and keep the faith in each other, and somehow work together. It is the only way we can make our own tiny deeds add up to become the change we all need.”

As lessons go, this one is hard to fault. It applies to all people everywhere. If your pretty sentences do good for the world, this is the good they do. It was, however, a lot more like a very good Longreads piece instead of a resource-heavy printed book; hence my mingy rating.

Just don't think it's going to look like an isolated life in a beautiful Arctic setting. See the message not the movie, and set out to make a small, undramatic difference wherever you are, however you can.