Pastoral Song by James Rebanks

Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey
James Rebanks
HarperCollins, 2021

Unlike the traditional pastoral songs of the past, from Theocritus to Milton and Shelley, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey (previously published as English Pastoral in the UK), is written by a real, lifelong farmer. Rebanks’s new book, like his first critically lauded work, The Shepherd’s Life, aims to immerse readers in a realistic depiction of a farmer’s life, from the harsh physical labor of tending fields and livestock to the emotional turmoil of worrying about the consequences of a bad crop yield. The birds do not sing madrigals in Rebanks’s elegy for traditional farming; instead, the curlews begin to disappear.

Broken up into three sections, “Nostalgia,” “Progress” and “Utopia,” Pastoral Song tells the story of one family’s journey during the rapid transition from rotational crop farming to large-scale “factory” farming that took place in the latter half of the 20th century. It documents the personal and environmental effects of this momentous change in human history through three generations of Rebanks’s family. The first section details Rebanks learning, as he calls it, “the old way,” of farming from his grandfather over the course of a year; the second is concerned with his father’s reluctant modernization of the farm, partly due to rising financial concerns; the last details the author reclaiming “the old way” of farming and promoting it as a more sustainable and environmentally friendly option than industrial farming.

Within each section, Rebanks’s narrative has a dual purpose. It is both a memoir that exposes readers to a way of life with which they most likely have no experience and a social commentary on the modern agricultural system. While his critique of the new system of food production is succinct and well done, the narrative is strongest when it describes the particulars of farm work. Whether he recounts handpicking a field full of weeds or herding pooping cows back home down a country road, a sense of place is engagingly captured in stark, readable prose.

At the beginning of the book, Rebanks describes sitting on the back of a tractor as a child, watching seagulls follow behind, eating worms in the upturned soil. He writes:

The gulls fall upon the virgin soil and grab worms from atop the loosened surface. And then they quickly take to the sky again, racing away, in a mad wing-flapping dash, gulping down their catch as fast as they can before they are mobbed. When they have the feast stuffed safe in their bellies, they are a hundred yards or more behind the plow.

This image illuminates the book’s central point without any preaching or platitudes: mainly, that the old way of farming is part of a complex, mutually beneficial ecosystem. Later in the book, the lack of gulls following a tractor on a “modern” factory farm signals that the soil composition has been badly degraded by fertilizers to the point that worms can no longer live in it.

As the narrative progresses, more and more space is given to banal calls to action, which, if backed up with deep insights or genuinely new ideas, would be tolerable. But Rebanks has nothing new to offer, and what inarguable points he does make—biodiversity is good, eating locally grown food is beneficial to the environment—he does with vague sentiments.

Near the end of the book, as he catalogues all the changes that must occur to combat the farming crisis, he implicates the reader by switching to the pronoun “we.” His rhetoric fails to inspire because unlike the memoir portions of Pastoral Song, he discards concrete details for abstract ideas. He writes: “We are all responsible for the new industrial-style farming. We let it happen because we thought we wanted the sort of future it promised us. Now, if we want a different kind of future, we need to make some difficult decisions to make that happen.” What decisions need to be made? How will they affect the future? Even in the climax to this section, he drifts into generalization: “Some of the solutions are small and individual, but others require big political and structural changes.”

The main problem with the book is the unevenness between its dual parts: the memoir aspects are fascinating; the essayistic parts are bad. This narrative duality is encouraged by a style that uses short vignettes grouped together through page breaks denoted by a squiggly line. This creates too many jarring transitions that prevents the narrative from being a cohesive whole.

Pastoral Song gives readers an insider’s perspective into a part of society that is extremely important yet persistently overlooked by a public that takes for granted the labor—and pain—that goes into keeping their bellies full. Unfortunately, lazy prose and a fragmentary structure make for an inconsistent reading experience.

Connor Carrns is a writer and bookseller living in Stoneham, Ma.