Common Ground review – Rob Cowen searches for the animal within

This memoir about the columnist’s move to Yorkshire works best when he loses himself to the forces of nature

The wild and rather unusual book tethered inside this one is about what it is to be animal, how that might feel. By imagining his way into the lives of the creatures he discovers in the course of this memoir about his move to a Yorkshire town and the edgeland around it, journalist Rob Cowen uncovers a story more interesting than his ostensible subject. “I can’t say what imperceptible force drew me there, only that I needed to reach it,” he announces at the beginning of Common Ground. “That frontier called me. Maybe a speck of soil carried in a starling’s foot had been drawn down deep into my repository system… Whatever it was, I felt a sense of returning, like a bee to a hive.”

Common Ground is stuffed with writing like this – portentous and pronouncing, full of forced metaphors and fanciful mixed similes that have us flying from bird to bee in one paragraph. “Sensitive, thoughtful and poetic,” Michael Palin has written ominously on the cover – but are Rob Cowen’s thoughts and poetry what we want in a book about the natural world?

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