Review by Liz Dexter
The last humans will, like many of the first, hold to the coast, scratching a living from the sea and the shore. I imagine the last human on earth being a woman on a rocky shoreline. I met someone like that once, a woman right at the outermost edge. A woman still living after everything she knew and understood had ended.
Rebanks is known for being the author of the phenomenally successful farming books, The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral, and for extolling a simpler way of farming life, going back to older ways that preserve the land and its flora and fauna. Here we experience with him a foundational experience, when he’s able to spend a season with the “duck women” of the Norwegian islands on the edge of the Arctic.
Seven years before the events told in this book, Rebanks visited a Norwegian island with its one remaining duck woman, who tended the eider who nested there, kept them safe from predators as far as she could and collected the feathers for eiderdowns. He felt a real connection with the woman and wasn’t able to get her out of his head and, it turned out, she remembered him, the only Englishman who had visited her.
So it came about that he was able to write and arrange (in a hurry!) to stay with her for her one last season before she retired – along with her best friend Ingrid, who is a little younger and more well – and to help with the various processes involved. He’s clumsy at first but gets to grips with things, and also with the quiet pace of life in the small, simple house they live in, with books and pictures cherished and looked at over and over again. As well as the hard physical work, the simple food and the need to connect with the women and earn their trust, Rebanks shares his gradual realisation that he needs to connect back better with his family, calm down a bit in his work and take the days as they come; he also learns forgiveness and patience as he pieces together Anna’s story, discovering why she is now on this particular island and not the family’s original one, and fortitude, as she carved out this place for herself after having a career working in an old people’s home and raising a family without the time to do this, her family’s traditional work.
Of course there is some “nature red in tooth and claw” as we’re dealing with wild animals which live in harsh conditions and have predators, but it’s not too bad or vividly described for this sensitive reader. The three people’s relationship with the ducks is protective and mutual but not sentimentalised. Their lives are dictated by the work, the weather and the season, the sun staying in the sky for longer, meals taken more randomly. I really enjoyed the moments where the work Rebanks has done on the family farm carry over into this work – using a particular kind of hay fork, building dry stone walls – and he has the experience of being competent rather than very much an apprentice. The days pass slowly with quiet work and little distraction, and you sense it’s very much a new beginning for Rebanks as he moves back into the mainland world at the end.
The book finishes finally with an interesting note on the terminology he chose to use, and also emphasising that this is not history or reportage but an impression, a personal narrative, with some names and details changed. That’s as maybe: it’s still an immensely affecting and powerful read.
Liz Dexter has a friend who keeps ducks, and that’s as far as it goes. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com. This review is based on one originally published there.
James Rebanks, The Place of Tides (Penguin, 2025) 978-0141991924, 292pp., paperback.
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