Sunday book review – The Flitting by Ben Masters

What a book! I have devoured this book since it arrived a few days ago;  using early morning writing time to read it, muting the television commentary of the Olympics so that I could read in peace (and thus missing some events I wanted to watch) and snatching moments here and there. It’s a great read.

I should tell you that if any book is going to captivate me then it ought to be this one as there are butterflies written through the book, but also because the author lives a handful of miles from me (I learn) and visits many places I know well or remember fondly.

The author’s father is dying of cancer during 2020, the covid year, and the book is about that period of the author’s life, but also his overall relationship with his father (and others, but mostly his father). The author has shown no interest in his father’s passion for butterflies until his father is stuck at home (mostly), ill and under the covid restrictions. In this period, Ben Masters discovers, rather late (too late?), an interest in butterflies that he could have shared with his father but he becomes his father’s eyes sharing sightings of butterflies as gifts to his parent. This is a very moving and apparently honest account.

We flit from Lulworth Skippers at Lulworth Cove, to Purple Emperors at Fermyn Woods, to Chalkhill and Adonis Blues in the Chilterns and Brown Hairstreaks nearby (all the last three will be flying this August Sunday, I guess). These accounts are wonderful and capture well the difficulty of looking for something one hasn’t seen before (how to look and what, exactly, to look for) as well as the delight and triumph of a successful hunt.

We also flit from ‘BB’ to Nabokov and Virginia Woolf to John Clare as the author is a novelist and literary critic and has spotted the butterfly writings of others. These flits work very well too and I have to admit to feeling about Virginia Woolf as the author did about ‘BB’ (Denis Watkins-Pitchford) although with the same slight handicap as the author admits at the end of page 32.

The author is roughly the same age as my kids and I am roughly the same age as his deceased father and the poignant account of their relationship had me thinking ‘I felt that!’, ‘I wondered that!’ and ‘I said, or didn’t say when I should have said, that!’ about my relationship with my father but even more so my fairly recently deceased mother. The matter of fact, and sometimes almost offhand, account of this relationship chimed very strongly with me and I felt close to the author and to his father throughout the book. I’ll be gently suggesting that my children read this book at some stage.

Of course it wasn’t, but this book felt as though it had been written for me, I related so strongly to it. It helped that the places were local and/or familiar but that wasn’t the key. It was the mixture of writing about nature and writing about feelings that worked so well. And this is a man writing about his feelings (mostly) for a father. That makes it a rare thing in nature writing. And Ben Masters writes so brilliantly well, in my opinion.

I’ve been saying to people for the last few days that I’m reading a great book so of course I recommend it to readers of this blog. There are several months to go, but The Flitting would be my book of 2024 if I were forced to choose one today. I recommend it to you if you are into butterflies but also if you are an offspring (and you obviously are). If you are a son with ancient parents I recommend you read it soon.

There are some inadequate black and white photos in the book which could simply have been omitted.

The cover? Appropriate but not arresting. I’d give it 7/10.

The Flitting by Ben Masters is published by Granta.

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