4.96/5

“Light moves out to the fringes of the wood and across the evening fields. A tawny owl calls from the wood’s dark hornbeam heart. He gives a vibrant groan; a long sensitive pause is held till almost unbearable; then he looses the strung bubbles of his tremulous hollow song. It echoes down to the brook, breaking the frozen surface of the air. I look out at the west’s complexity of light. A heron, black against the yellow sky, kinked neck and dagger bill incised, sweeps silently down into the brook’s dark gulf. The sky infuses with the afterglow.”

The above is from the December 23rd entry. I mention that because the brilliance of this narrative is in its execution. It is a journal J.A. Baker kept as he followed peregrine falcons near his home for an entire year. That is his goal; he has said that was his goal. This is his diary. Nothing more. Yet that is only what we see on the surface of what he has done. With methodical precision and like a cold surgeon, Baker has torn away superfluous adjectives in an almost entire descriptive novel. His prose is poetic and eloquent, and he has redefined the nature in his adept fusion of the Man Versus Nature. He views the narrative not as man versus nature, rather, man that eventually becomes nature. We see this when we notice how he has found himself thinking and observing things like a hawk. This is what differentiates it from The Snow Leopard or the movie "The Hunter". Note that both of those works are exquisite works that can be studied, and we could make the same arguments for those works that we could make about the general goal and reading of The Peregrine, but that would miss the mark on what J.A Baker does with the narrative in its entirety, not just its goal.

In the December 18th entry there is a mention of him coming across a kill:

“What was left smelt fresh and sweet, like a mash of raw beef and pineapple. It was an appetising smell, not the least bit rank or fishy. I could have eaten it myself if I had been hungry.”

Notice that he uses human adjectives to describe the palate. And what he describes is in fact delicious. Like a hawk he will not feed unless he's hungry, like a hawk the kill is there… like a hawk he moves over it. There is not a moment of reflection to think, "I’m a human, why am I finding this hawk's kill so appetizing." Yet this unreflective idea is NOT meant in a negative way. Rather, it is organic and nature. Meant to be as one fuses with nature and becomes it. This is in between the lines, the poetical lines that serve as an inspiration to ornithologists, poets, writers, and readers alike.