A Tiger in the Sand
Mark Cocker Jonathan Cape, 180pp, £10
ISBN 0224078828
Mark Cocker truly loves all creatures great and small. In A Tiger in the Sand, a collection of pieces on nature originally written for the Guardian, all manner of creatures are covered. There are articles about tigers, elephants, whales and many birds. But he also looks at the more unpleasant characters of the animal world, from the rat (Britain's brown rat saved it from the plague-carrying black rat) to the black-backed gull (a monster that eats tiny lambs: "I cherish its magnificent meanness").
This simultaneously highlights the book's weakness and its strength. Because all animals are given equal treatment, each article carries the same weight: the book has no narrative arc. But each piece functions on its own almost like a haiku. Cocker is a magician with words, and he evokes beautiful images of even the most ordinary living things.
About swifts, he paints this picture: "that half-metre wingspan collapsing down, scraping the gutter edge as it folds away and the bird vanishing into its improbably small hole. The swift's conversion from black meteor to terrestrial flesh-and-bone always has an air of the miraculous."
Book form doesn’t quite suit this writing style. Like poems, these individual tales of nature shouldn’t be read in bulk. One a day, at most, allows a reader to dwell for a bit on each ephemeral image.
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