Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty review - miraculous memoir
I picked up Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist with a degree of trepidation. It’s a hard thing to review the work of a teenager, harder still when his writing has been praised effusively by nature writers and naturalists alike. The diligent reviewer feels the need to balance kindness with serious critical examination, to see past the novelty of the backstory. McAnulty’s book follows a year in his life – from spring equinox to spring equinox, from his 14th to 15th birthday – as he and his family move from their home in County Fermanagh to a new life on the other side of Northern Ireland, in the shadow of the Mourne Mountains in County Down.
Four of the five members of McAnulty’s family are non-neurotypical – only Dara’s conservationist father isn’t autistic. McAnulty was diagnosed with autism and Asperger’s as a child and his condition is intimately tied up in both his writing and his interest in nature. His prose is both spirited and spiritual, performing an intensive phenomenological survey of the wildlife around his home, bringing the reader into deep, occasionally uncomfortably close communion with the insects, plants and, above all, the birds of Northern Ireland.
Any concerns I had about McAnulty’s book were dissolved by the first few pages of careful, lyrical, closely observed nature writing. McAnulty admits halfway through the book that he doesn’t “have a joy filter” and the depth of his feeling illuminates every page of this miraculous memoir. It’s a book that succeeds in describing the deep and complex pleasure of immersion in nature, written by an author who describes himself as having “the heart of a naturalist, the head of a would-be scientist, and bones of someone already wearied by the apathy and destruction wielded against the natural world”. Comparisons with Greta Thunberg have been made, and Chris Packham is a fan and an obvious touchstone, but I reached back further for a point of reference. I was reminded repeatedly while reading Diary of a Young Naturalist of the work of the great WH Hudson – a brilliant and eccentric nature writer who lived and wrote with the same deep and authentic sense of emotional engagement with nature as McAnulty.
The move from the west of the country to its eastern edges prompts a psychological crisis for McAnulty. He finds change difficult and the loss of his favourite local nature spots – particularly the reserve at Big Dog Forest – is felt as a kind of wound. The story of the book is how the triumvirate of family, books and, above all, nature, conspire to help drag McAnulty out of his slump.
His portrait of loving parents raising three neurodivergent children on poetry, punk and puffins is profoundly moving
McAnulty describes his family as “close as otters”, and the portrait he draws of loving, enlightened, unconventional parents raising three neurodivergent children on a diet of poetry, punk and puffins is profoundly moving. This is also a book about the power of books to shape vision, and McAnulty regularly invokes the work of Seamus Heaney to help him summon up his world. There’s a lovely passage where he listens to a blackbird and then the blackbird stops singing. He feels the loss of the song and finds that he can only recover the beauty of the voice in literature: “books helped bridge my blackbird dream… reading taught me that the blackbird would come back”.
The most powerful passages in the book, though, are about McAnulty’s ecstatic moments of self-dissolution in the natural world. He longs for family trips to Rathlin Island, where there are seabird colonies and seals, although his time there is shadowed by the knowledge that he will have to return to his suburban home. He describes in galloping, joyful prose a field trip to survey goshawks in Scotland.
McAnulty is fiercely attuned to his own moods, and at a time when we’re increasingly aware of the health benefits of the outdoors, his ability to medicate with nature strikes a powerful chord: “my head is pretty hectic most of the time, and watching daphnia, beetles, pond skaters and dragonfly nymphs is a medicine for this overactive brain”. A few hours reading this intimate, sensitive, deeply felt memoir had the same effect on me, lifting my spirits and giving me a great deal of hope for the future, simply that young people like Dara McAnulty are alive and writing in the world.
• Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty is published by Little Toller Books (£16). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
