Output details

Otter Country

Otter Country is a work of non-fiction which is invested in narrative story-telling, science, and the natural world. Research imperatives include the need to build on those nature writing texts which came before it: specifically the landmark novel Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson (1927) and the autobiographical memoir Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell (1960). Research into the treatment of the literary idyll – eg. Williamson’s use of anthropomorphism and his resultant visionary ideology, and Maxwell’s conjuring of romance and nostalgia – prompted Darlington’s Otter Country to aspire to render a new voice for the 21st century: one that is both lyrical in its subjective validation of the self’s occupation with its subject (an attempt to maximize ‘ecriture feminine’: ‘What does it mean for a woman to be alone in Nature, and to write about that which is still primarily the domain of men?’), and also ‘documentary’ in terms of its objectification of the subject within a problematic ecological backdrop. Paramount to Darlington’s Otter Country is an awareness of our contemporary backdrop whereby there is a real question of the wild animal’s survival in the landscape of Britain’s dwindling wetlands. This manifests in the book’s will to ‘expose the crisis in the environment … to reconnect the reader with nature by celebrating our relationship with one of the few predators left in Britain’ (as The Daily Telegraph reviewed it). Amidst all the myth and cliché which surrounds the otter, Otter Country aims to render a ‘new realism’ as it explores the history of how the British view their most treasured and mysterious nocturnal wildlife, using the animal itself as a barometer for human involvement with Nature.