The Farm: the story of one family and the English countryside Richard Benson Hamish Hamilton, 230pp, £15.99 ISBN 0241142229

This is not the book you might fear it is. Written by Richard Benson, former editor of The Face magazine, it charts the rise and eventual fall of his farming family's fortunes. It could have been a treacly eulogy to lost dreams, but Benson is too smart for that. The Farm has a peppering of nostalgia, but there's plenty of grit to go with it. Perhaps Benson's greatest asset in the telling of his story is that he was clearly such a hopeless farmer himself. As a child, he was clumsy, clueless about animals and baffled by machinery. He escaped to London as fast as he could. His younger brother Guy remained on the farm to grind a living out of the soil, keeping alert to any chance of a fight when the prodigal brother returned.

Guy Benson, a brilliant study in barely controlled fury, suspects that his city brother is a nostalgia tourist. "You just want me here keeping it all nice and green like it was in t' old days, so that when you come to visit in summer it looks all pretty and nice and you can buy your lovely free-range pork and then fuck off again. But why does it have to go back or stay t' same? You like to think you're making progress, so why can't I?"

He is right. The author is prone to wistfulness, and on one trip home tells his father that he would have liked farm- ing better if it had still been done using horses. "Tha wouldn't say that if tha'd to get up at five o'clock in winter to harness them up," his father replies, teaching his son in five seconds everything that anyone ever needs to know about nostalgia. Later, Benson attends the funeral of a farmer and former schoolfriend who killed himself. Nostalgia has no place there, either, just deep regret at a life wasted.

One of the finest images in the book braids together Benson's farming fecklessness and his Romanticism. He decides to plant an organic wild-flower meadow on what remains of his family's land. His father, brother and just about every pragmatic farmer in Yorkshire tell him to spray the field with weedkiller first, but he's not having any of it. He ploughs, digs and toils by hand until his dad turns up with a mechanical digger and does the job properly. Finally he scatters his organic seeds on the ground, in the best tradition of the Church of England's pastoral hymns. And then he waits. But rural tradition likes to bite the hand that feeds it. "Weeds grew back and smothered the first seeds we sowed on the rough ground," he admits, "and so I used a glyphosate herbicide to kill them off, and sowed some more." So much for organic farming. He's honest enough to realise that, in the end, he is "just another city person imposing a set of ideas on the countryside that the countryside had never claimed for itself".

Being the magazine editor he is, Benson has an eye for a good picture. His mother doesn't just do the washing-up, she stacks the plates "in a corner cupboard which also contained a shotgun, pig medication and some small bottles of certified boar sperm". Blink in his mother's kitchen for a moment and the next thing you know, "a white, silky newborn piglet" tumbles out of the bottom oven of the Aga and sits blinking on the carpet.

There are times when Benson's desire for an image gets the better of him. He spots his father's friend Mal, the man famous in Yorkshire for having had a fist fight with a bull, but Benson doesn't just see him, he writes a thesis about him, reading in the man's expression "a blend of despondency and kindness that had always reminded me of a lone raindrop slipping down a window-pane".

Benson's father comes from a farm- ing family, but his mother, Pauline, is a miner's daughter. The landscape around them combines the two dying traditions. "All around the views were crowded with collieries, farms, villages, factories, coal trucks and hills sloping up to the horizon." The sympathy reserved for Britain's decaying farms and struggling farmers has rarely been extended to Britain's dead mining communities. The difference is that one community provides a pretty view that we selfishly want to protect for ourselves. The other, with no views or rural dreams attached, has been discarded quicker than you can say Michael Heseltine. I hope that Benson will turn to the old pit villages for his next book. They deserve his acute eye and a little of his nostalgia. And there will always be Guy around to set him straight if he starts coming over all mushy again.

Charlie Lee-Potter is a columnist for the Daily Mail's Night and Day magazine

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