Between the winter and summer solstices, spring moves across Europe at about 50km per day. “We could call that four kilometres an hour for 12 hours each day,” Tim Dee writes in Greenery. “Spring, therefore, moves north at about walking pace.” The book tags along with that green edge as it advances from the Sahel, south of the Sahara, to Scandinavia between December and June. Other writers have followed a similar impulse – famously Edward Thomas in his pursuit of spring from London to the Quantocks in 1913 – but never on this scale. As the months and latitudes pass, it is clear that Dee’s journey is not just terrestrial but a bid “to live so as to avoid winter” – to outpace time itself. What’s miraculous about Greenery is that you finish it feeling he’s almost succeeded.
The citational tendency in nature writing can seem less about humility than insecurity, but Dee’s approach is that of the dinner-party host. His real-world travelling companions are frequently writers; here are Heaney, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Coleridge (who coined “greenery”) and Rilke – who, we are reminded, believed “most happenings are beyond expression”. At the head of the table, expressing everything, is DH Lawrence. “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move”, the first line of his great travel book Sea and Sardinia, might have been this one’s epigraph. Dee knows that migratory ache.
In Chad (11˚ north) he seeks out the birds ekeing life from the Sahara’s oases and crossing its sands for Europe – honeyguides and barbets, olivaceous warblers, honey buzzards and, yes, swallows. The desert does to Dee what it does to every writer, in the end – makes him laugh at his own hubris: “What use was my little green book to this epic sand world?” Rilke had a point. Bird-counting in Gibraltar, Dee watches the brink of spring “flying in, arriving dressed as a black kite”. The German island of Heligoland, historic heartland of bird-migration studies, is an oasis for migrants taking sanctuary from the sea. In Madagascar and then Romania Dee sits for hours and manages “to see more, or to see further, by seeing nothing”. Neither nightjar nor bear grace him with their presence, but there’s profit in that “good dead time”. “If I had seen a bear, I would have seen nothing else; without the bear I could see everything.” A few pages later, in South Africa, Dee gazes up at the Coalsack, “a nebula of thick interstellar dust that occludes our view of the celestial topography beyond”. Absence and incipient loss cloud Greenery. Swallows have started wintering in Portugal, we learn – climate breakdown means “they aren’t bothering to go any further south”. As a child Dee asked: “If a snowdrop has died what possibly could be happy about a cuckoo?” The book records his race both to answer that question and to absorb the spirit of spring – of freshness and rebirth.
One of the effects of Greenery is to prompt the reader to see the world through the eyes of the overflying swallow: “Birds don’t carry bags. Nor passports. That is often the first thing I say when people ask me why I like them so much.” Despite its south–north bearing, the book is cyclical like the seasons or the movements of the birds that are its lodestars, flitting in time as well as space, drawn back to moments – often bird-encounters – from a lifetime’s latitude-crossing, and from the author’s three bases (the book is signed off “Bristol, Swaffham Prior, Cape Town”).
“People are made up by places,” he writes. “So are birds.” For Dee it’s also true that places are made up by birds. He remembers a tale from Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Doctor Dolittle, in which a flock of swallows band together to tug a becalmed ship. Throughout Greenery, birds propel both the narrative (such as it is) and Dee’s life. “Birds are themselves,” he insists – more than “dim analogies” in the service of poets, in William Sotheby’s phrase – but they are also how he’s known the world. “I see through them; they see me through.”
Here, as in Dee’s The Running Sky, Four Fields and especially his book about gulls, Landfill, birds are not species but individuals. A woodcock, in his creepily vivid portrait (has anyone written a woodcock more deeply or funnily?), is supernaturally strange: “What workshop could new-fangle a woodcock? How would it look? A Kelmscott smock? A Leach pot splashed with telluric glaze? An artisan pie? ... Might you steampunk one from worms and wood waste, a whittled stick for its hard bits, mud and leaf rot for all else apart from a pair of ripe blackcurrants for eyes?” Birds might lead you not only into the fairytale forest, he seems to promise, but far beyond, to a new (better) dimension altogether.
Ardent, playful, quietly subversive – this is how Dee has always written, but his originality and learning mean he never needs to resort to the devotional swooning that has always plagued writing about the non-human world. There are interludes when the air is released from the prose and the book loses its vernal bounce, but a few longueurs feels like a fair exchange for that steampunked woodcock or, say, the near-hallucinatory observation that “the way an ants’ nest seethes is congruent with the way a wryneck moves”.
If the swallow is the species to which Dee’s ship is hitched, closest to his heart is another species, the redstart. Since he was 11, he tells us, he has loved it for its “trembling tail ... which is half the bird, and half what it does”. “Every redstart, arriving into the European spring, will have already crossed [the Sahara] twice. Every one: south across it the previous autumn, north across it in the spring.” As the book unfolds through space and time, and the seasons turn as they must, the bird and its “tail-shiver” take on an unforeseeable talismanic significance. “One day I’ll see my last redstart,” he writes (but not with sorrow).
Having arrived in July in Hardangerfjord in western Norway, 60˚ north, he describes the shivering that, incrementally, has begun to afflict his own body – also “the limp, the imbalance” – and the diagnosis of Parkinson’s those symptoms augur. Glimpsing his own autumn, he telephones his wife, Claire: “I could hear her crying in Tanzania, and she shook with her words. Her sympathy set me off. We trembled together.”
It’s a deeply affecting arrival, partly because we recognise the integrity of its treatment: reserving the disclosure for the book’s end allows our knowledge of it to bleed back across the preceding pages and latitudes. There is happier news, too. The effect is like a painter’s varnish, deepening shadows but intensifying colours. You go back to the start. I was reminded of the closing pages of In Pursuit of Spring, when Edward Thomas reaches the Quantocks, four years before his death at Arras in the spring of 1917: “I had found Winter’s grave. I had found Spring, and I was confident I could ride home again and find Spring all along the road.”
• William Atkins’s The Immeasurable World: A Desert Journey is published by Faber. Greenery is published by Jonathan Cape (RRP £18.99. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
