Tags
3.5 stars, Annie Proulx, books, Fen Bog and Swamp, first time read, nature writing, nonfiction, own book, read in 2023, reading, review
Title: Fen, Bog and Swamp. A Short History of Peatland Destruction and its Role in the Climate Crisis
Author: Annie Proulx
First published: 2022
Dates read: 21. 11. – 30. 11. 2023
Category: first-time read, own book, non-fiction, nature writing
Rating: 3.5/5
The book in five words or less: fascinating but a bit disjointed
My thoughts:
Annie Proulx has been a fiction author for several decades and is best known for The Shipping News and the short story on which queer cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain was based. In 2020, Proulx turned towards non-fiction in an attempt to understand rising global temperatures, increasingly destructive wildfires, and climate change. Fen, Bog and Swamp is the result of her studies.
Divided into four parts, the book covers both the importance of peatlands for the global climate in general and deep-dives into different types of wetland, their historic uses, and the specific challenges and threats to their preservation. Interspersed are anecdotes about Proulx’ personal experiences of wetlands, discourses on etymology, literary references, and landscape descriptions. This broad range of topics, all connected through an interest in a specific type of landscape, is what initially drew me to the book.
However, Fen, Bog and Swamp unfortunately did not quite manage to keep that promise. I often felt that Proulx’ topic shifts were a bit abrupt and the individual aspects and topics not fully explained or connected. Overall, the book would have benefitted from being fleshed out post-pandemic. There was more than one occasion where I got the impression that Proulx’ understanding of the science and/or political and historical contexts of natural phenomena, activist movements, or social complexities she was referencing was a touch superficial – something that could have been remedied by waiting another couple of months until more non-digital sources and contacts were available. In short, I like the book’s impetus and that is was born out of genuine concern, but I think that it was perhaps published a bit too soon. It is not that I didn’t like Fen, Bog and Swamp, but I’d hoped that I would be wowed in the same way as Rebecca Solnit and Robert Macfarlane’s works manage to, and I definitely wasn’t. The spark just never quite caught.
Read if you like: nature writing, personal approaches to landscapes, self-study, wetland preservation, broad scopes and references