Reading this I knew little of Edward Thomas: I vaguely remember we did some of his poems at school – long, long time ago – and vaguely remember liking them, and I think I bought this on the strength of that when it turned up amongst Amazon recommendations and was just pence for a Kindle download

This is a book of prose writings on the countryside.

I didn’t believe in it. It read as if he was casting around for something to write about, decided the countryside might be a good idea, but didn’t really have it in his heart, or, at least, not the natural world part of it – which is the larger part of the book.

His descriptive writing was too self-consciously ‘poetic’, too self-consciously whimsical in its imagery and crusted with flowery ornamentation that really wore me down. Over and over I found myself wondering what he thought was the purpose of a particular adjective, metaphor or simile (if he did purpose anything other than ornamentation). ‘Ham-fisted’ came to mind, prose knee-deep in adjectives and with lumbering, awkward similes like wayward giants staggering drunkenly through pensively green fields of contemplative cabbages – oops! Sorry.

He didn’t, even when writing of aspects of the natural world most familiar to me, conjure those little flashes of recognition the best writing does. In fact, I often found myself thinking that such-and-such a tree just doesn’t look like that, or such-and-such a bird doesn’t sound like that, and so on – an effect of the writer stretching too far for original description and falling down.

I found it liberally sprinkled with ‘What the hell is he talking about?’ moments. I don’t mean disagreeing with him, here – I mean literally not being able to work out what he thinks he’s saying. An example, and this is a comparatively short one: I think I would take it somewhat amiss if a wind got uppity and ‘blew softly from over Lethe and breathed upon our eyelids, coming as delicate intercessors between us and life’ – quite apart that winds should leave the more delicate work to breezes, what does it mean? To use a long-winded and tortuous simile of my own, his prose was often like those little paths you find in ornamental woodlands, that wander in and out and up and down without particularly going anywhere, eventually turning back into themselves (on second thoughts, that’s a much more sensible simile that a lot of Thomas’s).

He often mixed chunks of philosophizing into his descriptions. It wasn’t impressive; it was mostly unconvincing and always tedious.

The work improved somewhat in the places where he dealt with country people, as when he wrote about meeting the tramp who claimed to have participated in a murder or the old man with the tragic love story in his past. There was the stamp of truth about these. They read as if they were, at least at base, memories of real-life encounters, told relatively plainly with the literary whimsy kept more or less under control. The book sparked into life in these places. However, the less directly the narrative voice was involved with these characters, the more the annoying whimsy crept back.

However, those high spots only served to more convince me that the broad mass of his verbiage and foliage didn’t stem from genuine involvement and observation.

I got the strong impression that his forte was people and the human condition, and definitely not the natural world. Unfortunately, the larger part of the work was description of the natural world ...

I was determined to finish the book and slogged on and eventually found it developing a sort of gooey, perverse fascination, like having in your fridge one of those sticky, sweet confections that you have to keep nibbling away at just because it’s there, even though you know it’s not good, healthy sustenance. And, of course, there was always the hope of another of those ‘real person’ anecdotes.

By the time I got to the unexpected Arthurian bit at the end, though, I just didn’t have any investment in the book left to me to wonder why it was there or what, in this context, it meant. I was just glad to be through it.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be re-reading this. There are plenty of much better writers on the countryside out there.

In the meantime, I shall drift away like a lonely barn owl fading into a misty distance like a defeated winter sun declining into the ghostly, soft greynesses of the – Stop it! Someone might read this! Just stop it!!! ( )