I’d listen to a squabbling pair of blue tits see-sawing behind me… And each sound was a rung that took me further upwards, and in this way it was possible for me to get up really high, to climb up past the clouds, towards a bird-like exuberance, where there is nothing at all but continuous light and acres of blue. I would listen to a spider coming through the grass towards the blanket. I would listen to a small beetle skirting the hairline across my forehead. And then, after lunch, I’d take a blanket up to the top garden and I’d lie down under the trees in the top garden and listen to things. However, it is nature that she enjoys in her cottage. One time, after sex, she says I would lie in bed next to him unable to sleep and think of the potatoes and spinach and broad beans out there in the dark. Indeed, vegetable growing seems to affect her love life. She is not very ambitious in her vegetable growing – As with most mensurable areas of life I demonstrated no ambition whatsoever as a grower and selected to cultivate low-maintenance crops only. She finds out who owns it – the Catholic Church – and persuades the local priest to let her cultivate it, which he does. We first see her interest in the natural world when she discovers, by chance, when younger, an abandoned plot. Neither will I set down any of the things that scudded across my mind when the earth’s trajectory became so discernibly and disarmingly attested to, yet does go on to say that it has an effect on her. For example, when she sees a beautiful sunset, she says Everyone has seen a sunset-I will not attempt to describe the precise visual delineations of this one. She certainly likes nature but is not too romantic about it. But our narrator is no Thoreau and does not pretend to be. The title of the book, presumably intentionally, reminds us of Walden Pond and Thoreau’s book on his life there. She has a sex life and speaks to the landlady and her sister and to others. However, while she is often alone, she is no hermit. She has decided to live in a fairly remote cottage (Bennett herself lives in Galway). The unnamed narrator may well be quirky but she is more than that.
In a way, it can be described as quirky but that is both a simplistic and lazy evaluation. As such, I think it can be considered as a novel, despite what the author thinks, so it is here. This book is subtitled Stories and though it may be seen as a collection of stories, it could more accurately described as scenes from the life of an English woman during the three years she lives in rural Ireland but that would probably have been too complicated as a subtitle.
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