“Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified. ”
The peregrine is a book of transcendent obsession. Of a man and his own personal grail. A man who wishes nothing more than to leave the filth of humanity behind, and instead fly in the same rarefied airs as his beloved peregrine’s. And on both of these front’s it can be said that he succeeds, at least as much as any man possibly could.
“I am as solitary now as the hawk I pursue.”
Baker is just as fearful of the noise and stench of death of humans as the birds he follows, and yet is at all times away that the very same profane smell is forever coming off of him. He only speaks of other men as a living death, “we are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.” It is only under the influence of the land, sea and sky undisturbed by humanity, given wholly to nature, does he begin to be purified, to become as the birds that surround him. Only then is he able to “learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must become the thing he hunts.”, and through that become able to truly exist as part of the unchanging and non-threatening landscape for the peregrines
As you read there is nothing you can do but be ensnared in Baker’s obsession. There is nothing but the peregrine and the peregrine’s domain, especially with Baker himself, we leave the book knowing as much about the man writing it as before we ever picked it up. There is no feeling, no eating, drinking or subjective emotion coming from him, there is only following the peregrine and only think to remember the peregrines of years past. I cannot name another author who gives so little of what makes them human, yet so much of what makes them alive in any work of literature. Baker’s use of language is a huge part of this, his prose at times seems to have very little to do with any human convention or understanding, especially in those parts where his words are purely focused on the birds around him, the language becomes much less human, as if a “part hawk, part man” was taking over.
The Essex landscape which Baker describes is at all times shimmering with a beauty which at any time can be cut through with an extreme bout of violence, usually at the hands of one of the peregrines whose domain the estuary are farm and woodlands are. As much as the peregrine is revered by Baker, and its majesty always expounded upon in great poetic detail, there is no hiding the terror, horror and violence it inflicts upon the landscape when the hawk begins hunting in earnest. So many times Baker describes the hawk turning a seemingly almost playful chase become imbued with a rage for survival “as though the hawk had suddenly gone mad and had killed the thing it loved.”
And by the end it could be said he succeeds in his mission, at least in part. Throughout the winter and early spring we can clearly track the changing relationship he has with the falcons, who at first have nothing but fear and hatred as they have for all of mankind, yet through his persistence he becomes an object of almost indifference, perhaps losing some of that all too human stench of death, punctuating their daily existence as much as the birds to Baker’s. In the end, as the peregrine’s are spending their last days in Baker’s Essex before migrating, and as “the last light flakes and crumbles down. Distance moves through the dim lines of the inland elms, and comes closer, and gathers behind the darkness of the hawk. I know he will not fly now. I climb over the wall and stand before him. And he sleeps.”
“Few peregrine’s are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals.” From what I understand, since the publication of The Peregrine there has been quite the conservation effort in the following decades, the banning of certain poisonous pesticides causing the population to rise for the first time since the early 20th century, and yet, the land which Baker describes to us 50 years in our past, if not already nothing but a mere memory surely will be in the next 50, as humans shape the land to suit their own designs, needs and purposes, there is really no guarantee for just how much thought and action will be given towards the peregrine’s survival in a future Britain, or whether they too will be forced out of the world of the living and left residence only in our dreams and memories.
This is a book which I don’t think I’ll really be able to call finished until I see a peregrine for myself, though if that ever does happen maybe by then it’ll be too late and I too will be caught sharing in Baker’s fanatical obsession.
“The greater the beauty the more terrible the death.”
by marqueemoonchild