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Excellent, Victoria, you touch on many of the points I found annoying. Here are a few of my peeves...
The opening made be angry because it appears to be a 40yo man making excuses for his 13yo being an arrogant and ill-mannered thug who was violent, petty and ignorant … and proud of it! The blame is placed on the teachers and their ignorance of the Lake District culture - an “abyss of understanding”. Cop out!
As we read on it becomes apparent that the real problem was three living generations of male isolationism. Grandfather didn’t trust schools or outsiders, and son worshipped his grandfather so of course he had no respect for school or it’s intentions, and no repercussions for his appalling behaviour.
We read on about the life he led and we see many of the difficulties, but the view remains noticeably narrow. For example, we’re told how the government doesn’t understand, but we aren’t told about the subsidies that exist to keep this culture going. We’re told about how close they came to losing the Herdwick breed, but never acknowledges what outsiders did to help protect them. But all this is so obvious that I wonder if the isolationism has been intentionally exaggerated for effect.
Given his education and wider experience, I suspect cleverness. This book is a neatly put together assembly of linked essays that mingle time in a way that never really gets confused but contrasts different parts of his life while still offering a forward progression. That much, I think, is real and intentional, and very well done.
But so much of the book is convincing in its aggressively defensive stance, and the conservative conceit that his traditional life is so much more meaningful than all those other people he goes out of his way to learn nothing about. That a people foreign to us “all look the same” is such a truism that it has become a joke, and yet time and again through this book he describes outsiders as all the being same. And then I come back to the work he did away from the farm and that apparent ignorance doesn’t quite fit either.
The end result is that I don’t really know what to make of the author as he is now. I feel as if I know the grandfather better, because I did (and do) know a few people like that (and I’m not thinking complimentary thoughts here). And I certainly knew people like the 13yo author, which is probably another reason why the opening made me so angry.
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