Raising Hare. By Chloe Dalton. Pantheon; 304 pages; $27. Canongate; £18.99
A new memoir by Chloe Dalton, a high-flying British foreign-policy adviser, has leapt off bookshelves on both sides of the Atlantic. It sits at the confluence of two conventional story types. The first is “what I learned from wild animals”: in Ms Dalton’s case, a hare. Other authors have bonded with foxes, hawks, owls, magpies and snails—which have taught them important things about how to be human. In a new film, called “The Penguin Lessons”, a penguin instructs Steve Coogan, an unflappable comic actor.
The second story type is “career woman finds love, joy and wonder”, the basis of countless romance novels. True, love, joy and wonder usually arrive in the form of an attractive human male or female, but for Ms Dalton they come bundled in a four-legged, long-eared, skittish little package.
The story begins during the pandemic, as Ms Dalton finds herself adjusting to lockdown at her weekend country home. One day she hears a dog barking, investigates and finds a palm-size leveret (baby hare) lying on the grass strip between two tyre tracks. She leaves on a walk, but when she returns, the leveret is still there. Buzzards circle above; left alone, it would probably be run over by a car or eaten. So Ms Dalton takes the animal home, feeds it a few drops of milk and lays it down to sleep in a grass-lined shoebox.
Literature and folklore help her learn how to care for it (unlike rabbits, with which they are often incorrectly grouped, hares are rarely pets). A poem about a hare written by William Cowper in the late 18th century advises, “His diet was of wheaten bread, / And milk, and oats and straw”; indeed, Ms Dalton’s companion turns out to love oats. She grows increasingly fond of the animal but admits, “I downplayed my growing attachment to it. I had a sense that I’d be judged as unserious and overemotional, as if I had been swept away by a childish enthusiasm.”
But heart defeats head, as it must in these stories, and before long she is structuring her days and even her paths around her house to please and avoid disturbing the hare, for which she leaves the garden door open. “It was excessive. It was absurd. It was beautiful,” she writes. Any new lover or parent recognises that sentiment.
Ms Dalton’s book is surprisingly moving for two reasons. First, she is an elegant writer and sharp-eyed observer. Her leveret’s mouth is “a tiny sooty line…curved down at both corners as if [she] were already slightly disappointed by life.” A house full of hares smells “faintly like digestive biscuits”. Readers underlining memorable sentences risk running out of ink.
Second, the book’s message is not that love is nice (yawn) but that paying attention is contagious. Caring for the leveret opens Ms Dalton’s eyes to the natural world—as wild animals do for other authors of similar books. The cradle-to-grave rural writer is a rare beast; urban writers such as Ms Dalton need reminding that “nature” is not a pleasant place to go on weekends to get away from the city. It is everything and everywhere. Readers need reminding of that, too. ■
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