Victoria, our fathers shared a birthday! Mine would have been 91 on Sunday. But he grew up in New York City; no farmer boy he.
I'm just going to quote one bit of the discussion about Rebanks as a schoolboy as a springboard for my own thoughts:
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Originally Posted by gmw
The 13yo I can (now that I'm well past school age) forgive. I am much less forgiving of a 40yo trying to blame his behaviour on the teachers. Maybe it was an awful school, but I'm not about to take the word of a 13yo thug, nor a 40yo adult who won't allow that at least some of the teachers might have meant well even if his 13yo self couldn't see it.
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Rebanks mostly expresses his own tunnel vision, it seems to me. It's a style, but if we're to excuse him by looking outside, then we're open to considering other points of view as well.
gmw made an excellent point about educating those who wouldn't be able to make a living on the family farm. How about the teachers themselves? Did they come from elsewhere? Some, perhaps, but I would imagine most of them had local origins. Either they weren't as bad as Rebanks claims, or they were bitter about their own experiences and lack of alternatives.
Certainly all the women seem ground down. His mother had a year at university, so why marry a semi-illiterate sheep farmer? And his adored grandfather was clearly another who oppressed his wife. (Did anyone else wonder what happened to the girl he impregnated?) And I think the attitude carried forward to the author as with much else. This irritated me:
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Some farmers' wives still compete with one another to put on the best clipping-time tead (no one has the heart to tell them that being full of cakes and scones is not great when you have to bend double all afternoon).
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Oh, really? There's so much wrong with this attitude on the author's part that I could write paragraphs about it.
I'm another in the mixed feelings camp. I didn't mind Rebanks's general yobbishness. (Although did anyone else cringe early on when he took a swig from the milk carton? That had to be deliberate in establishing his character.) I found the descriptions of the specifics of sheep farming quite fascinating. But really, he's a dreadful writer. I expect much more from a memoir, especially one with a rural setting. Ultimately this was polemic, the sense that he was harranguing us.
I also thought that much was exaggerated to the point of outright lies, to make a point. Seriously, they learned about Native Americans in his school to the exclusion of local history? Don't buy it.
His attitude toward his own education evidences a kind of two-faced superiority, as others have noted. He despises it on the one hand, but he also makes sure that we know he could pass the exams without even breathing hard once he felt like it, that he ran circles around his interviewers, and that Oxford was a sideline to his real life on the weekends at home. And, typically, his girlfriend supports him while he's doing all this.
One passing thought I had, on the economics of sheep farming, is that for all he dislikes outlanders, who are the end market for the meat? Lamb in the market here is astronomically priced. I have no idea how much it costs in England and maybe it's cheaper as closer to the source (here, it's either locally grown or imported from New Zealand), but I can't imagine it's priced exactly on par with ground chuck, or mince in British terms.
I tend to like this kind of thing and it was an easy and interesting read, but I think I read it rapidly because the prose was so stultifying. I usually take more copious notes on book club selections, but this time I pretty much bombed through. A decent editor could have helped a lot.