Roger Scruton's latest offering is a mischievous alternative to the "preposterous socialist utopia" of William Morris's News from Nowhere. The "Somewhere" of the title is Scruton's farm in the Wiltshire clay lands, where he has lived for ten years. The book's argument is a rational one - we should all settle and belong somewhere. But beneath the logical, sober exterior, Scruton reveals an unsettled temperament. In this oddly mournful essay, he makes a powerful case for us all to be tied to the land, although he doesn't seem able to make that commitment himself. He has done all the right things: he's bought a farm, he's found a wife, he has two children. Even though he can't make a living as a farmer, he describes himself as a meta-farmer - someone who makes money writing about farming. But in the way that meta-fiction self-consciously comments on its status as fiction, Scruton self-consciously comments on his status as an outsider in farming.
Scruton has the intellectual brilliance to argue just about anything he likes. While I disagree passionately with nearly all his views on the countryside, that is a large part of the pleasure of this book. The trick is to relish the glorious prose while keeping your wits about you.
Take, for example, his elegantly written, but ultimately daft, defence of fishing: "Fishing brings father and son together, in the kind of silent masculine intentness that uniquely ties the paternal bond . . . For man and boy to do exactly the same thing for three hours, that thing must be a no- thing, a cessation, during which the separate rhythms of their bodies can slow to a single pulse, and their separate thoughts be pooled in one all-dissolving interest . . ."
In Scruton's countryside, animals have an almost religious understanding of who is boss. "The horse consents to be mounted by a human being, and to surrender his will entirely to the thing above, because that thing is his true divinity." Sheep and dogs, too, understand their place. "We are their angels, and their human master is also their god." But when Scruton moves on to the subject of two cats, abandoned by their owner, true divinity goes out of the window. Cats are "destructive by-products of our human domination, a disease brought by man, from which man alone can defend himself".
While Scruton may be far too sentimental about the people he encounters, he isn't squeamish about the realities of rural life. He is no eco-tourist, hunting down the rural idyll inhabited by Laurie Lee. He relishes the way his uncooperative and sulky clay soil is designed to defeat him. And when he takes his pigs Snowball and Napoleon to be slaughtered, he petitions the slaughterhouse for all the extra bits from their bodies. He asks in vain for the blood, trotters and intestines, but when "the head and liver were delivered at last to the factory door, something in the frozen half-smile that looked up at me from the bloody packet suggested that this was not the Snowball with whom I had exchanged so many greetings".
Scruton is touchingly open about his wife and his childhood. And it is in these passages that he reveals why he is so desperate to belong, and why he probably never can. His is a curious mix of certainty and vulnerability, which stems, perhaps, from his father's "regime of vindictive punishment" towards him as a child. No doubt Scruton would disapprove of my desire to know more about the strange and dislocated little boy he must have been. And he probably feels that he has revealed quite enough about his love for his wife Sophie, but I would have liked more. "I fell in love with a girl whom I had seen poised aloft in the Beaufort colours, a free but disciplined, lively but discarnate being, presented by the hunting uniform like a painted angel in a frame."
As a panegyric to the countryside, News from Somewhere leaves me longing for the city. But as a eulogy to the life its author would like to have had, it is a glorious and intelligent triumph.
