This novelisation of a
year in the young life of the poet John Clare is a testament to a lifetime's
groundbreaking commitment to folk culture. A renowned folk performer, but
a first-time novelist, Hugh Lupton is neither a prose stylist, nor a formal
innovator of fiction. But he is a master in two areas: storytelling and
English rural folk culture. Lupton knows Clare and his village of
Helpston, Northamptonshire, as well as anyone, and reconstructs Clare's times
with a rare conviction. The context, landscape, language and texture of
Clare's life and landscape are re-imagined in enchanting and accurate detail.
Clare has spoken to many
creative people across the years: poets Arthur Symons and Edmund Blunden at the
start of the twentieth century; Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and
Paul Farley more recently. Playwrights have taken different routes
through Clare's life: Edward Bond's play The Fool, revived brilliantly this
year in Kilburn after a 35-year hiatus, sets the poet in a world of violent
class war, while Simon Rae's play Grass, places an eco-warrior Clare in the
2001 foot-and-mouth pandemic.
Prose writers have also
had varying takes on Clare: Alan Moore gives us a magical, anarchic version of
Clare in Voice of the Fire; Iain Sinclair psycho-maps Clare's naturally
contoured mind in Edge of the Orison; Richard Mabey takes Clare as his
companion on a recovery from depression in the brilliant memoir Nature Cure.
Serious thinkers like E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Adam Phillips,
Roy Porter and Ronald Blythe have also been thrilled by the access Clare
provides to a long-forgotten, largely unwritten, world of labouring-class rural
life and working intimacy with nature. Even Christopher Hitchens starts
his polemic God is Not Great with an account of Clare.
But Clare's reach doesn't
stop there. A wide variety of musicians continue to perform and record
Clare's folksongs, fiddle music and ballads. The thriving John Clare
Society will be thirty years old in 2012. Clare's poetry is now included
in primary and secondary school curriculums. There are plans for TV
documentaries and Hollywood interest too. His cottage in Helpston is now
redeveloped into a glistening multi-million-pound Clare museum. This is
truly Clare's moment – he's everywhere. But why is this previously
obscure peasant poet of the natural world, born in poverty in 1793, who died in
an asylum in 1864, suddenly of any relevance to us now?
The Ballad of John Clare
provides the answer. Clare was born into a time of agricultural and
social change. We live in a time of impending environmental catastrophe.
The focus of this novel is enclosure – that massive reorganisation of the
use of agricultural land that took place, parish by parish, inch by mapped
inch, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The rotating
open field system of Clare's farming youth, peppered by common land, heaths,
woods, scrub and wetlands, was reformed by Acts of Parliament. Rigid
lines determined new ownership. Land was drained and reclaimed, hedged
and fenced. Ditches were dug, rivers straightened, woodlands erased, and
commons ploughed. Clare's horror at the abuses of the land around him –
and the sheer ignorance of natural wonder that allowed it – led to a loss of a
personal Eden from which he never recovered.
There is therefore a
direct relevance of Clare's poetic vision, and personal experience, to current
anxieties about the ongoing impact of our industrialised, alienated distance
from the earth and skies we continue to poison. Clare is now beginning to
occupy the same place in relation to green environmentalism that Mary
Wollstonecraft does in relation to feminism. Embedded within his
proto-green politics is a celebration of common customs and common land, and an
acute eye for an extraordinary rural life now all but gone.
Simon Kovesi
The Independent - Friday, 3 December 2010
The Independent - Friday, 3 December 2010
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