Ring of Bright Water

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I'm not sure whether it's due to the editing but I got the sense there's an awful lot left out. We get peaks and suggestions. His relationship (and subsequent fall out) with Kathleen Raine, his homosexuality, his mental health issues, his relationship with almost anyone else. Barely mentioned. Aside from Jimmy Watt (and later Terry Nutkins) we get a few names bandied around but it's really a one man show. The first time I read Ring of Bright Water must have been the 1980s. I can’t have been more than an early teenager, as evidenced by the faint impression of algebra indented in the book’s front cover, which I must have leant on during homework. It’s in tatters now, the glue of the binding falling away like dandruff from the spine. I osmosed the movie based on Ring of Bright Water as an animal-obsessed kid, and read the book not long after. While I imagine that some British neomarxist critics might furrow their brows at Maxwell's use of a pastoral escape device that drives the plot, I'm not coldhearted (or disentangled from ideology) enough to dismiss Maxwell's love of both the rustic Scottish seascape, and of otterkind. Maxwell wasn’t to know this, yet his curiosity and observation of nature was enough for him to spot the dissonance that occurs between an ancient, unyielding Atlantic coastline and the profligate activity of spring plants. He sums this up by saying:

Fifty years ago Gavin Maxwell went to live in an abandoned house on a shingle beach on the west coast of Scotland. A haven for wildlife - he named his home Camusfearna and settled there with the otters Mij, Edal and Teko. Maxwell was also selling a land and nature myth that I was all too eager to believe. Reading him again, I see that Camusfearna was a kind of extended summer retreat and not the lifestyle I thought it was the first time. And yet whenever he arrives there in the spring and describes the wildcats, or the deer, or the elvers in the burn, in words that shine, it’s possible to imagine for a moment that I am reading it for the first time and that it’s all true. Kathleen Raine, ‘In Answer to a Letter Asking Me for Volumes of My Early Poems,’ from The Lost Country (1971) Tatsächlich hat sich an meiner Meinung über Gavin Maxwell nichts geändert, aber ich konnte seine Suche nach einem Zuhause und sein Verhalten besser verstehen​. Nicht, dass ich gutheißen kann, wie er mit dem Lebewesen, die ihm anvertraut sind, umgeht. Aber ein anderes Verhalten war ihm kaum möglich, denn er hatte es nie anders gelernt. His writing is lyrical, on the nature-ish side. Here is his reason for writing Ring of Bright Water, taken from his foreward, written in October of 1959:

Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth What's so disturbing about the ROBW trilogy is that it's not fiction. Like, how would you feel about Lolita if it were an autobiography? Today the book is widely regarded as a literary masterpiece. But the deaths of the animals in Maxwell’s care, and the way in which he coveted them as pets, is also at odds with our modern attitude to wild creatures. Richard Mabey, author of Food for Free and our greatest living nature writer, agrees that a darker view of Maxwell needs to be put on record. “I read the books [Ring of Bright Water and its two sequels] when I was quite young and I was captivated; he’s a good descriptive writer, and the romantic idea of this immersion in a remote hideaway with his menagerie was compelling to me,” he says. Gavin Maxwell was a naturalist and well-known author in the 1950's, who lived in Northern Scotland, a sparsely populated part of the country with a harsh climate. This was his best selling book about that life and about the 2 otters that he adopted as pets. He wasn't a hermit, as he had a lot of visitors and also traveled widely. His writing about the natural world and the animals was descriptive and lovely.

I wanted to read this after having a go at Miriam Darlington’s Otter Country, which in many ways revolved around this book and the landscape described by Gavin Maxwell. He got much closer to the animals than Darlington, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his account is more interesting and vital. Otters were, not quite pets, but definitely companions for him, in a way that Darlington had no opportunity to understand. Ring of Bright Water chronicles Gavin Maxwell's first ten years with the otters and touched the hearts of readers the world over, brilliantly evoking life with these playful animals in this natural paradise. Two further volumes followed bringing the story full circle telling of the difficult last years and the final abandonment of the settlement. Along the way Mijbil's sub species is clarified as not previously named, and so it became Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli.An artistic temperament... Douglas Botting, Gavin Maxwell’s biographer, opines that Maxwell was bipolar. But Maxwell also drank a lot – which might explain those expansive evenings. I’m not sure Maxwell was an alcoholic, but drink was in his life (as it was in many more people’s lives in those less puritanical, post-war years). Hangovers make you crotchety, drink makes you contradictory. Also, by the time (and probably before) the house at Sandaig burnt down and he moved to the island, Maxwell was dying. Though he didn’t know it, the cancer that was to kill him was already eating away at him. When you’re facing an early death (Maxwell was only 55 when he went, in September 1969) or you’re in a lot of pain, there’s a lot of anger to deal with. And status and fame put pressures on people, and he was an outsider, in a world that was very tightly-wrapped. In my opinion, this single statement is one of the most remarkable in the entire book. To know and realise that there is something awry with the way plants function (Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. in ecosystems reveals more to me about Maxwell’s genius than almost anyone I have ever read. And it sets, for me, a context for his love of wildlife – including his companion otters – and everything that unfolds in his book from thereon. Field, Marcus (2014-07-14). "Gavin Maxwell's bitter legacy: Was the otter man the wildlife champion". The Independent . Retrieved 2021-09-14.

Award Winners". National Board of Review. New York City. Archived from the original on 16 December 2013 . Retrieved 24 June 2014.The film was released as a region 2 DVD in 2002, [10] and as a region 1 DVD in 2004. [11] Previously, it had been released as a VHS tape in 1981 and 1991. [12] [13] See also [ edit ] Dan Boothby had been drifting for more than twenty years, looking for but never finding the perfect place to land.