Symphonic: Harmony in Nature and Why It Matters by Jim Crumley review: 'profound'
Nature writer Jim Crumley’s new book quietly urges us to lean into our instinct for wonder, writes Katharine Hay
Sitting alone in Rackwick, Orkney, watching waves lap pebbles the size of boulders, I found myself humming. It was no tune I recognised, no residue of an earworm, but a wandering thread of notes that gradually morphed into something of a melody.
Perhaps I was a little unhinged at that moment. Perhaps it was the ghost of the late composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies – who lived near the bay – lingering in my imagination after I had been reading about him. But it felt as though the melody came not from me but from the sea itself.
That sensation – of feeling and hearing the landscape as composition – lies at the heart of Symphonic by Jim Crumley. Long regarded as one of Scotland’s finest nature writers, Crumley’s latest book is like a companion across the table who quietly urges you to lean further into your own instinct for wonder.
Drawing on more than six decades of immersion in wild places, it is little surprise that he has the ear – and the authority – to liken encounters in nature to pieces of music by the great composers. Finnish composer Jean Sibelius is a recurring presence in the book, invoked not as illustration but instead as analogue to help understand the score of nature’s movements, such as wind, migration and silence.
Crumley’s powers of observation are in full force in Symphonic. From the magnificence of sequoias on the American west coast to a disgruntled, white little egret inadvertently marooned among a flock of chattering black brent geese, his fluent descriptions and forensic attention to detail transport the reader into the landscapes of his memory. This book is a joy to read when yearning for some of nature’s spectacles.
His particular gift, to me, lies in fusing sound and sight. At several points, when Sibelius is explicitly referenced, I found myself rereading passages while listening to the corresponding music mentioned. The book begins to feel less like a sequence of written chapters and more like a multi-sensory work of art.
Crumley is, and says so himself, cautious of anthropomorphism. Yet flashes of warmth and humour slip through his writing when it comes to the animal kingdom. There is the moment when something passes between him and a humpback whale in Alaska as they hold one another’s gaze – an admission of connection that risks sentimentality but never quite succumbs to it. Crumley also includes an excellent passage on Capercaillie aggression by Tom Weir, who is best known for his long-running television series Weir’s Way, who describes being attacked by a cock bird that the gamekeeper won’t even go near. It can certainly be read in a humorous way.
Crumley’s work is not neutral writing, nor does it pretend to be. Like much contemporary nature literature, Symphonic carries an undercurrent of argument. There are familiar swipes at “men with guns” – a broad-brush reference to the shooting world that may jar with readers aware of the ambitious and pioneering work some estates engaged in field sports are doing today. Crumley’s framing can occasionally feel binary. There is clear reverence for beavers in his writing with no sign of acknowledgement of the plight some farmers have found themselves in while trying to live and produce food alongside these newly-reintroduced “nature architects and ecological engineers”.
At one point, Crumley writes: “It’s about rediscovering ourselves as animals”, which some who hunt, particularly stalkers out crawling on the hill all day, are very close to. Yet to dwell there is to miss the book’s real message and the magic of Crumley’s profound connection to the land and animals. If there is a slight sense of separation in his worldview – a tendency to cast humans as observers rather than being part of the food chain – it appears deliberate.
A powerful message I took away from this book is quite simple and it is to stop and listen to the land. In today’s climate, saturated with political, digital and ideological noise, Crumley offers something that is at risk of being eroded in the modern world but that we must hold onto: attunement. He encourages us not merely to defend wild places in the abstract but to experience them so deeply that defence becomes instinctive.
The author notes a couple of times that he gave up a salaried career in journalism to write about nature full-time. We should be grateful he did. In Crumley’s hard-earned sense of wonder – grounded in decades of close, patient observation – he reminds us that a sense of enchantment is not naïve but in fact necessary.
Back in Rackwick, humming into the Atlantic wind off the coast of Hoy, I briefly wondered whether I was losing my grip. After reading Symphonic, I am more inclined to think I was, for a fleeting moment, feeling in tune.
Symphonic: Harmony in Nature and Why It Matters, by Jim Crumley, Saraband, £12.99
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