This must be the most plotless, but definitely not pointless, book I have ever read. It is our choice, picked out of a hat of suitable books, for the Allotment Book Club and I know there is at least one reader who really only likes books with a good plot! There is also no typical narrative structure but I will come back to that later on.

The narrator, a woman in the middle of her life, is locked down in London, stuck inside where she feels safe from the invisible danger of the virus and reflecting on the ‘fatally interconnectedness’ of the world through recollecting her childhood in Yorkshire. The book then moves backwards and forwards between the past present following trails and threads that reveal the interconnectedness of the world, sometimes quick and pointed, others more languid.

How to read this book

At about page 70 I had read enough to see how the book worked and so went back to the beginning to read again and pick up on the elements I had missed first time round. You need to relax into the book and go with the flow, following it where the narrator leads and, like a river, it moves constantly. There are no line breaks between paragraphs, no chapters and so as a reader you don’t know where to stop or even if you can stop. It is relentless.

This flow provides the threads that hold stories and events together so Hildyard moves us from a spider jumping out of a bunch of bananas when she was a child to travelling in Nicaragua and seeing banana plantations and finally to sitting in a pop up coffee house built out of containers with the banana logo painted on top of the container. It is this move from local to global that is so fascinating and one of the main themes of the book. Is it an emergency that we can’t see that what happens with us in our own lives also has consequences for the rest of the world?

The quarry

Near to the narrator’s childhood home is a quarry and this is a repeating motif throughout the book. I imagine where the child lives is on the edge of the village in that inbetween space that is neither built nor wilderness, if such a thing exists. The quarry is the first place that the narrator comes across that moves her out from the local. It is taken over by a Canadian company and gravel is mined to build a city in China and motorways in Norway.

The place was dynamited apart and distributed throughout the world in vanishingly small splinters and particles.

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We then read about the hair and skin particles from the workers that are also distributed all over the world with the gravel and then you realise that shutting down airports was never going to contain a virus. There are other connections that will take over.

The quarry shuts down with employment consequences and nature takes over again. It floods and is drained and again nature changes. It completely disrupts the idea of a rural idyll and it disrupts the idea that we can have no influence over what happens globally. The local/global idea is a two way street of constant interconnectedness if only we could see it. Ah yes! That might be what the book is trying to show us.

Another motif that highlights the interconnectedness between humans and nature is death seen as ‘only recycling’. We have the death of foxes, I think, and also of the narrator’s best friend from cancer with comments about pollution, the quality of air and products used in the home . And then we move on.

The connections between nature and humans

Sometimes these can be quite harsh. After watching a fox and her cubs over several weeks, the narrator spots the male fox who marks the rotting fence post she has been sitting on and then,

. . . made his way to the end, strained on his haunches and shat. It wasn’t so different, in its place, to a form of human domination, which articulates itself in the flow of toxic effluent from the most powerful bodies and corporatons through pipes, outlets, dumps and treatment plants into places where the most vulnerable make their home.

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Other times they are gentle and show acceptance such as the mother fox eventually allowing her cubs to play near the narrator if she keeps still.

The observations of the natural world highlight a way of seeing by a person who is not ‘nature blind’ which most of us have probably become. Is that another emergency? I share the narrator/author’s thoughts about Leylandii.

Nobody plants lelyandii out of a love for their form or flourishing, they’re living expressions of passive aggression: live walls.

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What is the emergency?

It isn’t one big emergency, it is thousands of little ones, I think, all easily ignored or passed by. Because the book does not have a traditional structure building up to one big emergency, which is what I was expecting, it does not happen. The emergencies are throughout the book and its insistence that there is not a distinction between humans and their environments. The narrator describes a rabbit as very human ‘in the way her principles forced her to self-destruct and in the scale of her appetite, which far exceeded what she needed to survive’ after she had eaten her babies which had been handled by the narrator despite being warned about what would happen.

I am conflicted about the structure of the book. Is it a river flowing or ripples on a pond or a spiral? None of these visual metaphors show the backwards and forwards of the interconnectedness. We start with a vole and a kestrel and we end with the Grenfell Tower fire and inbetween we see recorded for us some of the connections in our world.

I feel the book is a call to action but I just don’t know what that action is. Is that deliberate? Is it just about noticing and making connections myself, or is it something more? This is a book where the reader must work hard but it is worth it.