Tom Cox’s latest foray into non-fiction is, he tells us, “the result of my stubborn conviction that something that a lot of people told me wouldn’t be ‘marketable’ enough to work would be a much better book than the marketable stuff they recommended that I did instead”. He was right – but spare a thought, if you can, for the publishing types to whom he’s referring. Consider the thing from their side: in an industry where the first essential of marketing consists of being able to distil your author’s work into a pitch of a single sentence, Cox’s book presents a formidable challenge. Although superficially it shares characteristics with the nature writing-cum-memoir subgenre that’s been giving the medical writing-cum-memoir subgenre a run for its money in recent years, it quickly becomes clear that while nature writing and memoir are both present here, they’re merely two ingredients in a rich, strange, oddly glorious brew.

Take, for instance, cats. Cox’s profile as an author is due in no small part to his chronicling of his cats’ lives; 21st Century Yokel is dedicated to two of his most famous felines, and they feature heavily in the text, too: sidling through the background in some chapters; taking their place in the spotlight in others. Fans of Cox’s oeuvre will also be delighted to learn that his father makes his inimitable presence felt. For the uninitiated, Cox’s father is a man of such exaggeratedly comic lines (Cox conveys the volume and velocity of his speech by PRESENTING IT IN BLOCK CAPITALS AT ALL TIMES) that you’d suspect him of making him up, were his anecdotes not so well evidenced. In one particularly diverting episode, Cox describes his dad waving off the concerns of his family to run the London marathon “after two decades of doing almost no exercise of a conventionally athletic nature”, while dressed in the costume of a superhero, Johnny Catbiscuit, of his own invention. On the morning of the race, Cox’s mother wakes at 6am in a hotel room to find him “standing by the window, already fully dressed in his outfit for the day: bright orange cape, black tracksuit bottoms and grey Lycra top emblazoned with the orange letters JC”. I allowed for a degree of forgivable hyperbole, until I turned the page and was confronted with a picture of Cox’s dad performing a demented mid-air leap in full fig. By this point, it was clear that we’d lost the true path of nature writing some time ago.

When it comes to the publishing business, though, the best books are often those that resist classification, forge paths of their own – and 21st Century Yokel certainly does that. There are chapters on insects; on Cox’s nan; on swimming; trees; on the “esoteric agricultural spookiness” of the regiments of scarecrows that “lurk in the soft creases” of rural Norfolk. Even that summary implies a level of orderliness that doesn’t, in fact, exist: while the chapters are vaguely thematic, once inside them you find that they too weave and loop like streams in high country, switchbacking seamlessly from paragraph to paragraph through the death of a beloved grandparent to the solace of the sea to the relative merits of the South West peninsula and the East Anglian coastlines to the virtues of solitude. His book feels, in the reading of it, like nothing so much as listening to the conversation of a close friend after you’ve both had a glass and a half of wine; it travels at its own pace, comfortably assuming a shared history and outlook, meandering easily from subject to subject.

But if 21st Century Yokel is closer in spirit to an old-fashioned miscellany than a conventional nature chronicle, the natural world nevertheless acts as the bedrock. It’s the landscape of Devon to which Cox returns most often, interrogating and exalting it in more or less equal measure. A relative newcomer to the county (he moved there four years ago in the wake of a set of personal and professional crises that cast a shifting shadow over the book), his writing on it is an act of learning, too. “If you are not a walker,” he says, “and you want to write believably and truthfully about rural life, you are off balance, on the back foot, before you even begin.” It’s good advice, and by taking it he achieves an up-close, ground-level sense of his new home, in which people and practicalities are as important as waterfalls and clifftop vistas. Descriptions of high hills and bluebell woods are interspersed with yarns about the crowning of the Lustleigh village May queen; the smaller of Torbay’s two owl clubs (started because “there was lots of backbiting at the other one”); where to get the best wood.

Cox’s writing is loose-limbed, engaging and extremely funny, and time in his company is time very pleasantly spent. But what elevates this from a collection of essays into something more coherent and compelling are the currents that run beneath. Cox returns repeatedly to the idea that the abundance of summer has the effect of concealing the land, whereas in winter it “strips itself back and … you feel you’re getting a glimpse into something special behind everything else: intangible, ghoulish, a necessary dark pigment”. In this, it seems to me, there’s an echo of the book itself: the ebullience of the writing sweeps you along, but occasionally the foliage is blown back and you can see the rocks beneath. For all its playfulness and joyfulness, 21st Century Yokel is a midlife book, and, though the journey that led Cox to this solitary life perched on the edge of Dartmoor is only hinted at, in throwaway references to a marriage that ended, a career he forsook, a sense of shock and dislocation lingers. oneliness lurks at the edges; chosen, perhaps, but nevertheless tangible. It’s telling that, in the final chapter, he focuses not on Devon but on Derbyshire: the landscape of his childhood; the place that, at root, he seems to consider home.

In the end, Cox stuck two fingers up at the doubting establishment, and published the book himself via Unbound, the online crowdfunding publisher. 21st Century Yokel concludes with 16 pages of acknowledgments: the names of Cox’s readers who pledged their support before the book was written. In the context of this book, the list proves oddly moving: a rich and human coda to a book in which the author reveals himself to be entranced by the world, but struggling to determine his place in it.

• 21st Century Yokel is published by Unbound. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.