This was never likely to be, in any sense, a critical biography. Roger Deakin – the former ad-man who rebuilt a tumbledown house in rural Suffolk, wrote a book, Waterlog, that redefined a genre, and died too soon, at 63, from a brain tumour – is still seen as a reverend godfather to the New Nature Writing movement (nobody, of course, admits to writing New Nature Writing, but it persists nevertheless). His biographer here, Patrick Barkham, writes books in more or less the same line, and in a curious preface makes no bones about his admiration for his subject: Deakin’s writing was dazzling, Deakin a ‘poetic hero who wooed us with his stories’, the house at Walnut Tree Farm ‘a magical kingdom’; ‘Roger,’ Barkham writes, ‘was one of the most compelling members of perhaps the most distinctive generation that ever lived.’ This seems a big call – Deakin was born in 1943 – but in any case it means we go into the book with no expectation of close interrogation, either of the work or of the man. We aren’t disappointed.
Barkham’s big gamble here is to have Deakin himself play the part of narrator (the conventional biography form, Barkham explains, ‘ill-served the fluid spirit of an unconventional man’). In some places this means we are reading, with a swimming sense of deja vu, repurposed excerpts from Deakin’s own work, published and unpublished; in others we are reading Barkham’s supplementary information – narration, additional research, factual detail – ‘in Roger’s voice’, while in the opening chapter Barkham is ‘imagining how Roger might have started this book’. This would be fine in a modern novel, but in a biography it seems a presumptuous move (from a writer, by the bye, who never even met Deakin).
The resulting Frankenstein’s narrative is in some places intercut with and in others entirely replaced by verbatim contributions from Deakin’s friends – ‘chums’, invariably – and acquaintances. Barkham explains that these testimonies ‘provide multiple interpretations of the same events, and cast doubt on the idea of life as one simple flow’. For a little while there’s some wry fun in this, as this or that romantic recollection butts up against some other chum’s flat contradiction. ‘My childhood unfolded during an era of austerity … Money was a constant worry for my parents,’ says Barkham-as-Deakin, only for Deakin’s cousin John to chip in: ‘He never went without, I’m sure of that. I remember an awful lot of stuff at their house.’ Later we hear about the Waterlog launch party, which was either ‘a buzzy, great event’ where ‘we did really naughty swimming’ or ‘[not] a really riotous evening’ where ‘we were all standing around rather awkwardly’. It’s an interesting, lightly mischievous approach and at moments we wonder what exactly Barkham is up to. At other moments, though, we wonder if he is up to anything at all.
‘Serena [Inskip, Deakin’s partner in the 1980s] and Roger came over,’ recalls one friend. ‘He’d hit her on the head with a frying pan but he was contrite.’ On the same page another contributor weighs in: ‘I think Serena tormented him by being half gay.’ Inskip herself remembers furious rages and instances of physical abuse. Suddenly the magical kingdom doesn’t seem so magical, the Puckish prince loses his shine – and Barkham is nowhere to be seen. Having fretted in the preface that, in his relationships with women, Deakin might seem ‘an impossible man’, he ducks out of sight when it becomes apparent that ‘impossible’ wasn’t the half of it.
No-one requires a biographer to lay down the moral law, but one might hope, here and elsewhere, for some additional insight, comment or context, some guidance in coming to terms with the character of the man; none is forthcoming, which – particularly in view of the author’s willingness to step into Deakin’s shoes elsewhere – seems an abdication of responsibility. Barkham writes in the preface that in adopting this form he is seeking to ‘shrug off judgments and labels’. At times like this it feels less like a shrug than a squirm.
Much of Deakin’s writing and therefore much of this book is aspirational literature, in the same way that a Boden catalogue or Farrow & Ball colour chart is aspirational literature. At every turn there are ‘pots of bean stew on the Aga’, there are people having ‘fabulous, exciting, dynamic conversations’, there are marvellous times with sparkling people, and again we could often use a sober biographer’s steadying hand. There’s a good deal of unexamined privilege; it can feel like being trapped in a too-small tent at the Port Eliot festival while people who keep talking about Rog’s marvellous curly hair won’t let you leave. It’s all rather a pity, because Deakin was a significant nature writer, who merits proper contextualisation (even if his influence has mostly been felt at one remove, through his electrifying effect on the young Robert Macfarlane). What’s more, Barkham has done a remarkable job of research here, gathering together the raw material for a colourful oral history of the man and (to a far lesser extent) his times. The pity is that, having emerged from the archive with a groaning wheelbarrow, all he does is tip it out all over the floor in front of us: ‘What do you make of this, eh?’ That such a deeply researched work should be published without an index tells us a great deal.
The narrative itself – the story of Deakin’s life, which was complicated but not that complicated, interesting but not that interesting – has a lopsided feel. We are told far too much about his boyhood and Cambridge days (very middle-class people have odd ideas about what constitutes a funny story, a problem compounded by the fact that ‘Deakin’ has to tell so many of the stories ‘himself’, giving an impression of inflated self-importance); we are not told nearly enough about his work with the charity Common Ground, which he co-founded in 1983 with a view to ‘motivate and help people to conserve their immediate environment’ and to ‘encourage people in the arts to overtly celebrate and defend… the countryside and its wild life’. Common Ground is still going strong, and may be his most important legacy, even more so than Waterlog and the wild-swimming movement it fed, and certainly more so, for those outside his circle of friends, than Walnut Tree Farm (there might have been more room to explore, say, Deakin’s writing or politics had we forgone some of the pages about pegged joints and thatch). Barkham’s abandonment of the traditional form is at least a bold move of which Deakin would, in principle, surely have approved (though Barkham is probably right to suppose, as he does in the preface, that Deakin would have been ‘outraged’ by the book itself – one might look for evidence to the recollections here of Rebecca Carter, who edited Waterlog and was left deeply shaken by the experience). The problem is that Barkham’s boldness with the form isn’t matched by an equal boldness in the handling of the facts of the man, the facts of the life. If a story is to be told – and who’s to decide, really, whose story is or isn’t worth the telling – then it needs a storyteller who is willing to step out and tell it. A life story can’t be an elegy full of awkward pauses, hurried-through embarrassments; a storyteller is not allowed to hide.
This review was originally published in the Literary Review in 2023.
Richard Smyth 