"This is a recognition of what it's like to live in the Anthropocene."
The Reporter. Review by Carla Billinghurst.
“There are moments that can change your life,” Abel Richards’ mother tells him, when he leaves Western Australia with his dog, to pursue his dream of being a journalist.
In Devon UK, Abel finds a job as a reporter. He’s expected to tell stories that will sell the paper and satisfy the shareholders; but the mystery of a missing woman is also the story of a rivalry between two families. These two families represent two philosophies: the Lynches treat land as a commodity and the Trants have farmed the same land for generations and are looking to find a solution to changing circumstances … a way to keep land in the hands of people who have worked it for generations.
The Lynches are poised to cash-in on everything, including climate change. Their clients play big money to control food production from seed to shelf, "complete control... ownership of the upstream, midstream, and downstream sectors...a fully integrated food company.” Can they be stopped?
There is a sense of Dartmoor as a whole world, a complete ecology including the humans comes through very strongly. The Farm itself is a character. "The Farm as a fourth presence...a personality larger and more dominant than any single individual." [MOU1] The Farm doesn’t speak but every part of it has a story and the farmers know the stories: who died here, what happened under that hedge, where each lamb was born. Plants and animals, rocks and rivers are there in every description, not anthropomorphised or given intelligence or emotions outside their sphere, just present. That presence giving them rights, making them as much part of the story as any of the humans. We are shown a way of life that is inclusive, a way of being in the world that allows people to take other life into consideration. A sense of the place of everything in a network of living beings. What that gives the text is density – you need to read it slowly to take in all the layers of story. But you want to read it quickly to find out what happens.
This is a book about change: how a small, rural community can find ways to change and ways to protect itself. On the surface it’s a simple story about how one particular group of people, in a specific place, work out how they will manage the impacts of climate change. Below the surface it's not simple at all.
To be able to change we need to be able to imagine the change we want to see. And when we face something like climate change, a thing that is so big and complex, we need to find stories that stretch our imaginations into what is possible.
I can't stop reading. I'm trying to dip in and out now to find quotes for this review but then I'll start a description of a river, how it starts up on the moor as "little more than an idea" to end up miles wide when it reaches the sea. I mean to stop and think about that, follow that thought the way the description follows the river from spring to sea but the next minute I'm two chapters on because the story is as compelling as the flow of that river.
"My family are farmers and we feed people."
says Maureen Trant in Chapter One.
Most of the people likely to read this book buy their food in a shop or supermarket. Even if we grow some of our own food, the immense effort makes it hard to imagine that other people do this on a large scale and make it work! I am surrounded by wildlife that regards me and my veggie patch as part of their world - the local bower birds bring their new chicks to my garden every year for grapes and seedlings, the parrots and possums and bats play in my fruit trees, wallabies eat my womboks and lettuces - if I wanted to feed us, I would have to put the whole garden in a cage! I just finished reading The Overstorey by Richard Powers. He talks about, "the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience." The inconvenient lives that farmers lead give the rest of us the convenience of 24/7, all year-round availability of any food in any season.
The other thing that keeps happening is that I'm curious about a quote at the start of a chapter, so I go to "take a quick look" at what Donella Meadows has to say and hours later I'm looking at a diagram of my home as a system with all its inflows and outflows and wondering when, exactly, I started sending so much of my hard earned input to supermarkets...oh, yeah, COVID, that's right. One tiny microbe that changed us all so deeply.
Abel’s story revolves around the mystery of a missing woman. The search for the missing woman resonates with the search for solutions to climate change. A key part of finding a solution is unpacking how economics guides and controls us. Supermarkets are the key buyers from farms. Environmental changes in farming have associated costs but supermarket buyers push down prices. The supermarket chains lock farmers into contracts, forcing down prices and dictating the size and shape of the fruit and veg that ends up on their shelves.
"Maybe you should be lecturing them for a change," says Maureen Trant to the government advisor.
In Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes the central character talks about how the body yearns with “a terrible epigenetic ache for an ecosystem I had never known but wanted, always wanted.” I’m not living in an artificial environment on Jupiter, but reading The Reporter leaves me with an ache to be there, in that ecosystem.
Farmers everywhere are at the sharp end of the challenge to act for the long term whilst surviving the current economic situation. In the story of the vixen and the gypsies, the gypsy chooses to go without quick profits and to build something that will last for the future, the gypsy trade lines, a system that lasted thousands of years. The Reporter is suggesting we need to consider the long term.
It's not a rant or a polemic. It's a deeply felt story about people who feel deeply. In Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes the central character talks about how the body yearns with “a terrible epigenetic ache for an ecosystem I had never known but wanted, always wanted.”
Reading The Reporter, I want to be there living their lives - up at dawn to ride the horse out to check on walls and sheep; walking the dog at dusk and seeing bats and hedgehogs. It's a long way from the office cubicle and escalators full of commuters. I’m not living in an artificial environment on Jupiter, but reading The Reporter leaves me with an ache to be there, in that ecosystem.
This is a recognition of what it's like to live in the Anthropocene. In a small community. In England. On Dartmoor. And while the property developer is a dangerous, unstoppable villain if one farmer faces him alone; when the entire community works together, the story changes.
In most of the writing emerging now about how to deal with climate change, the end point is always that it’s up to us. Each one of us. Individually. There are bad people in The Reporter but don’t expect their punishment to be the solution. Change is always possible. The vixen finds a way to keep her cubs safe, the gypsies see the value in having a multitude of paths, diverse options, more choices than between just three whiskies, as many choices as the cleverest of us can find.
We are shown how the language and methods of marketing can be used to mould our ideas and actions for either good or evil. The mechanism of "choice" in capitalism is only ever an apparent choice. This is nicely represented by the 3 whiskies - do they represent a true alternative to commercial products or are they just another cleverly marketed commodity? We're never told. We're left to decide, to choose how we want to perceive them.
"You have to choose," says a character, but the choice is limited to three whiskies. How many paths, by comparison, did the vixen find?
If Devon farmers and WA Shearers can maintain production for generations without losing soil, nutrition levels and quality. And if they have done that by maintaining their relationship with natural systems then... Can we re-discover a way of working with natural systems that lets us take out the food we need?
"...by making a personal choice, we buy into the story." The Reporter is asking us which climate change story we are choosing.
Carla Billinghurst lives in NSW, Australia. She is the author of “Halibut, Herring and You” and “Special Offer” which are available on Amazon. Carla is currently studying creative writing with the University of Tasmania.
[MOU1]Credit Bella Bathurst
The Reporter is £10.00 in bookshops, and available for bookshops to order through Gardners. ISBN 9781 399981774 or email me to buy online slantpub@gmail.com or rachelzzzyx@gmail.com
More here:
https://www.long-acre-rfrancis.com
Please note: The Reporter is not for sale on Amazon.