Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15828 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

BBC Wildlife Magazine
'The Peregrine should be known as one of the finest works on nature ever written'

Synopsis
With no prior knowledge of birds, Baker is seized with an unexplained longing to track the peregrine falcons that hunt in the river valley behind his home each winter. Though his subjects are far more elusive than the pigeons and gulls on which they prey, on rare occasions he sees a peregrine roosting or bathing, or spots a fresh kill in the grass. He outlines their strict hunting ethos and as the winter approaches, he resolves to shun the world of men in fierce pursuit of the falcon's inner life. As the landscape thaws, Baker shares the hawk's absolute terror in the face of the stumbling, erratic human beings encroaching on its territory. Veering swiftly from the mundane to the miraculous, Baker's self-effacing diary of a long winter in the wild is a triumph of pure and immediate description.

Customer Reviews

Superb, distinctive and unforgettable
I haven't ever reviewed anything on Amazon before but felt compelled to seeing that this astonishing book has not yet had one. The Peregrine, written by the reclusive librarian and naturalist J.A.Baker is a unique work, and certainly the best modern prose nature writing I have encountered. It should take its place beside Manley Hopkins notebooks and poems and the poetry of Les Murray and Ted Hughes. It is the last of these is that it most resembles with its intense distillations of natural violence, of planetary process seen in the local and nature seen without romantic overlay, functioning beyond human consciousness. The book consists of a short essay on the natural history of the peregrine falcon followed by an edited diary of days spent watching a few individuals over one winter and spring. There is therefore a repetition of days out watching, dawns and dusks, which becomes deeply hypnotic. Baker eschews any autobiographical writing; it is the inhuman drama of the birds lives that the reader becomes immersed in. He has a facility for metaphor every bit as good as Hughes' and, as in Hughes, the effect produced is of shockingly vivid arrest of the natural world. It is simply some of the best prose I have read.
In short, The Peregrine is unlike anything I have read before, a book that I will continue to live with and quite probably reread once a year. Do not delay before discovering this remarkable work.

my absolute favourite book
The first time I read this book, it jumped into my list of top five best books ever read. By the third time it was at number one.

The whole thing is lyrical, mesmerising and full of a strong sense of drama. All Baker does is go out and watch the peregrines. The birds exhibit normal bird behaviour: they fly, they hunt, they feed, they rest. Baker's prose infuses this daily ritual with a constant breathless beauty, and it sticks in your mind for ages after you've finished the book. He describes a nightjar's call as "a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask"; an owl's face as "grotesque, as though some lost and shrunken knight had withered to an owl"; the winter, when it arrives, as so cold that "Layers of ice seemed to shatter across my frozen face." Every single sentence in the book is beautiful and deeply affecting. It completely transcends category--it belongs in every library. I only wish there were an audio version so I could listen to it every day as well.

Nature writing at its best
Recently I have read birdlife described by birders, a stand up comedian and a prize-winning journo. The beauty of this writing surpasses them as the Golden Jubilee Diamond does cubic zirconia.

It relates the author's obsessive stalking of a peregrine falcon and its mate across the East Anglian countryside. He transforms the insouciant weather, landscape and falcon into interlocking metaphors of each other.

The falcons soar and stoop over their territory, their progress tracked by the clouds of birds that burst up as they pass. Sometimes foolhardy crows, jays and blackbirds pursue them, but they are dropped by the disdainful wing flicks of this the world's fastest creature.

At times the descriptions of savagery are simultaneously beautiful and breathtakingly visceral. Almost every paragraph contains a gem in a carefully crafted setting:

"...The kingfisher shone in mud at the river's edge, like a brilliant eye. He was tattered with blood, stained with the blood red colour of his stumpy legs that were stiff and red as sticks of sealing wax, cold in the lapping ripple of the river. He was like a dead star, whose green and turquoise light still glimmers down through the long light years."

A book to be read slowly and enjoyed with full visualisation.