Gerrit Jan Zwier

This is the kind of book you can only really get away with in old age, when you've got an established audience who are prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt for a chapter or two until they've worked out where you're going. It's a rather rambling assembly of memories from a whole host of different visits to England over a span of half a century, an improbable number of chapters start with "Many years later...", and he bafflingly goes straight from visiting the "Peter Rabbit Experience" with grandchildren to camping on a Cornish beach with his student girlfriend ca. 1967.

The linking theme is the way English writers (mostly, but not all, children's writers) have used the English countryside in their work. He goes to the relevant places to talk about the books of writers like Richard Adams, Beatrix Potter, J R R Tolkien, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, A A Milne, Daphne du Maurier, Kenneth Grahame, and a few others (well, mostly relevant: sometimes the choices are rather odd, as when he talks about the characteristically Hampshire novel Watership Down during a ramble in Wensleydale).

Despite the randomness, he often has interesting things to say about the writers he's discussing: on Beatrix Potter, for instance, he concentrates on her serious interest in plants and animals, her skills as a botanical illustrator and her later interest in farming, and shows us how her famous children's books came out of that almost accidentally. It's also fun to see how he links Potter's and du Maurier's determination to keep messy tourists out of the regions they themselves were largely responsible for promoting (something that also applies to Wordsworth, a writer Zwier can't manage to like).

Zwier makes a lot of comparisons to Dutch writers, and there's a running gag through several chapters about how the photographer he's travelling with is obsessed with the writer, TV presenter and dodo-fanatic Boudewijn Büch, whom Zwier doesn't seem to have much time for, whilst he himself is fanatical about the poet and ship's surgeon J. Slauerhoff.

What Zwier has to say about Adams and Tolkien gets rather drowned in his contempt for the botanical and ornithological illiteracy of their translator Max Suchart — only a bilingual expert on wild plants would be likely to have the patience to sit through the long catalogue of mistranslations here — but the amount of detail in these lists does illustrate how closely both writers observed nature and how concerned they were to represent it accurately, even if, like Tolkien, they were writing about an imaginary place.

Zwier himself isn't immune to inaccuracy, and there are at least two major howlers that should have been trapped in proofreading. It's pretty obvious how your fingers would be inclined to type "Catherine Brontë" when you mean "Charlotte", if you've just been writing several pages about Wuthering Heights, but it's difficult to understand how that sort of typo could percolate through to a printed book. And as for saying that King John signed Magna Carta at Bury St Edmunds, that just suggests that you are relying on illegible handwritten notes you took on the spot and haven't bothered to cross-check in Wikipedia.

The publisher inevitably uses the "B-word" in the jacket blurb, and Zwier dutifully remembered to ask a few British people he met during his 2019 trips for their views, but in most cases he's only able to report that it's not a subject they want to talk about any more, least of all to a Dutch travel writer. On his own initiative, he mentions that he doesn't have a very high opinion of Boris Johnson. Nothing controversial there, then!

Despite its faults, an endearing and intelligent book from someone who is clearly passionate about literature and the natural world. And a book that gave me more than a few nudges towards things I really ought to read or re-read soon...… (más)