Horatio Clare

I was 100% loving this book, until a certain point. It should be said that it's less nature book and more travel book, in that the swallows and their routes help determine the author's route but that's about it; there isn't a book's worth of swallow in there, they are more like highlights.

Now for the spoiler:

This book was fantastic until the Gibraltar chapter. At that point the author has some sort of freakout for what really seems like no reason at all. He arrives in Europe and it's too show more quiet so he throws all his possessions into the sea? The hotel staff are less than fawning when he shows up "thin and brown and dirty" so he throws all his possession into the sea? There's too much military presence and so he throws his possessions into the sea? It's just too absurd for words. What it really sounds like is that he had a wonderful time being a white traveller in Africa, with all the novelty and attention this brought him, and now that he's back in Europe he's just another white dude and nobody is paying him a bit of attention and so he has a hissy fit and does the most destructive non-harm thing he can: he throws all his possessions into the sea.

Also note that "all his possessions" includes his notebooks in which he was documenting the trip. So this means that everything in the book that happened before his tantrum, and probably much of what happened afterwards too, is just his memories. Now I know that most popular non-fiction is actually a framework of fact that is then filled in with paraphrased conversations, half-remembered/ half-invented scenes, and outright fabrications for fun and interest; unless it is scholarly research, non-fiction is actually light on "just facts". That being said, it was really disappointing to find out that the author was making up basically everything. show less

One of the most important things that make modern life possible (for better or worse!) is the way we can ship practically anything around the globe quickly, reliably and inexpensively. And astonishingly invisibly: A few generations ago, our schoolbooks (especially in Britain) would have been full of pictures of ports and merchant ships and the miracle of world trade, major novelists like Conrad, Kipling and Melville turned naturally to the sea for their subject-matter, and most people would show more have had some sort of family connection with seafaring, but nowadays shipping is largely out of sight, in remote terminals on the edge of town, no-one we know works at sea, and most of us know far less about life on container ships than we do about the sailors of Nelson's time.

Clare tries to correct this a little by spending a year as writer-in-residence with one of the handful of big shipping companies that control the world's container trade. He sails on two of their ships: from Felixstowe to Los Angeles via Suez and China on the new and efficient Gerd Maersk and for the sake of contrast, on the rather less prestigious North Atlantic route from Antwerp to Montreal on the Maersk Pembroke, a ship that clearly wasn't in a very good state when he travelled on it and has since been decommissioned after a fire in 2017.

Clare evidently set off on his voyages with the idea of writing about his own confrontation with the elemental power of the oceans, but soon finds himself more interested in the people who work on ships and in the peculiar kind of community that a ship's company becomes. Crew members might spend anything from three to nine months working together in a small group of 20 or so people, largely isolated from the rest of the world and with little or no time to go on shore during the ship's short spells in harbour, but then be shuffled around arbitrarily by the manning agencies who employ them to sail with another group of complete strangers on their next contract. And, although it looks as though it's hedged about with all sorts of regulations, shipping seems in practice to be an area where labour law has little real impact: companies pay their employees what the market will bear, meaning (for instance) that Europeans, Indians and Filipinos get widely different rates for doing the same job on the same ship. And that companies and individuals rarely have to take responsibility when things go wrong out of sight of the authorities. Clare describes some truly horrible accidents and cases of abuse that he's been told about, most of which have led - at most - to a token compensation payment to the family and to the renaming of the ship concerned...

Clare puts the work of modern seafarers into the context of the history of the profession, telling us about the hazards that faced earlier generations (during the North Atlantic crossing there's a lot about U-boats and the Battle of the Atlantic, for instance) and also about the things that haven't changed. He does seem to have a rather odd fascination for the "masculinity" of seafaring, something he perhaps doesn't investigate as much as he might have - there are passing mentions of women at sea, and a suggestion that the breaking-down of the gender barrier in seafaring has been a failed experiment, but the only woman crew member he actually meets during his travels is the cook of the Pembroke, so he doesn't have much in the way of direct testimony from women to report. (The Gerd apparently previously had a woman officer, but she left some time before he comes on board, so he can only speculate about her.)

Clare also tells us quite a bit in passing about the (astonishingly tight) economics of shipping, and doesn't try to conceal the negative effects that the ships themselves and our reliance on moving stuff about are having on the planet. In port after port he gives us a synopsis of the manifest of the containers loaded and makes us ask ourselves why on earth that particular product or commodity should have to be shipped such long distances (three hundred tons of cocoa powder shipped from the Netherlands to Chile...).

This is a very interesting insight into a largely closed world and a lively travel book, spoilt occasionally by a bit of over-heavy writing (tip: don't immerse yourself in Conrad and Melville before writing a book about the sea). show less

Horatio Clare writes across several genres but is perhaps best known for his travel writing. This memoir is his first book and also the first book of his I've read, and wow - what a talent.

Clare's parents were working for newspapers in London when they decided to buy a country bolt-hole to get away from the city at the weekends. Not one for doing things by half measures, his mother Jenny fell in love with a decrepit farm house high up in the Welsh mountains and their second jobs as part-time show more sheep farmers began. This is not farming for the faint-hearted; the elevation up to the house is so steep it can be impossible to get even deliveries of oil at times, the weather is severe in winter and all year round there are heavy, intensive jobs to do with the animals, from lambing to sheering and dipping and moving the flock around the mountain. It quickly becomes obvious to Clare's father that they have bitten off more than they can chew, yet Jenny falls in love with the mountain solitude and before long they have drifted apart and Jenny is left single-handedly raising their two boys whilst managing the farm.

Part memoir, part fictional dramatisation from his parents' diaries, this book was more than I expected. Clare writes with unflinching honesty about the highs and lows of their extraordinary setting, not just from his childhood memories but also with an adult perspective of his mother's steely determination to hold onto her life on the mountain. Whilst he pays homage the idyll of his wild, outdoorsy childhood he equally doesn't hold back from facing square on the utter madness of his mother's decision to stick it out despite the financial and physical hardships they faced. She's a wonderful character under Clare's penmanship - eccentric, funny, wilful and brave, and he recognises that really hers is the true story to be told.

A wonderfully written book, and highly recommended to those who enjoy books set in nature.

4 stars - I'm looking forward to reading more by this author. show less

I'm not a regular reader of non-fiction so when I do pick it up it's usually because there's something specific about it that captures my interest. With The Light in the Dark, it was Horatio Clare's thoughts on winter, a season which has an adverse effect on so many. Personally, I quite enjoy the dark nights and the dismal weather (I'm a strange sort!) but I completely understand how just those things can induce depression and sadness.

Clare suffers in this way and so writes a diary from show more November through to March, to the first signs of spring. It's a beautifully written and lyrical look at the winter months from his point of view, following him as he deals with it on a day to day basis, covering his life in the north, trips to see his mother in rural Wales, family life and, most tellingly, his own feelings.

Despite the fact that he's obviously suffering, Clare's prose is stunning, even about the things that are depressing him. He's obviously able to see the beauty in nature, the weather and his surroundings, even if that beauty cannot penetrate his mind.

It's quite an introspective read and I'm not sure that it would help if your thoughts on winter are in a similar vein to that of the author's, although maybe seeing it through another's eyes would be beneficial. If you want a book that focuses on winter and the changing of the seasons then this poetic and melancholy read is perfect. show less