IN SPAIN, during the early Renaissance, stonemasons developed a form of carving that came to be called “Plateresque”. The name derives from the work of silversmiths — plata is Spanish for silver. And the style has a fabulous filigree quality, abounding in detail: dragons, serpents, skulls, twining foliage. Spain’s buildings of this period, its churches, cathedrals, convents, and friaries, are all covered in lively and often grotesque reliefs and friezes — so much so that it is difficult to discern what the building is actually for. Is this really a house of prayer or devotion?
John Lewis-Stempel’s England: A natural history is an extended fireworks display of prose, Plateresque in its intricacies and convolutions. And, if you are coming, as I was, to Lewis-Stempel’s work for the first time, it is not always easy to see the subject through the style. On Spaunton Moor, the air isn’t pure: it’s “pure, clear-distilled oxygen-delirium”, and the heather is a “candy-coloured psychedelic dreamland”. Dew is “like birth-fluid”. “George Orwell” is not Eric Blair’s pen name, or even his nom de plume; it is his “pseudonymic patronym”.
My fastidious misgivings aside, I learned to go with the flow, letting my eye snag on the details, as you would if you were standing in front of a Plateresque cloister or gatehouse.
Lewis-Stempel writes to exalt, pleading for a connectedness with nature. He lingers lovingly on — among many creatures — the grouse, the adder, and the Arctic char, marooned after the Ice Age in Crummock Water in the Lake District. And who knew that the medicinal leech has 300 teeth, along with “ten stomachs, nine pairs of testicles, and thirty-two segments, each with its own brain fragment”? Maybe I didn’t need to know this, but I’m pleased that I do now.
So, Lewis-Stempel’s elaborate prose comes to mirror the profligacy and profusion of the natural world that he adores. Standards of “good taste” and grammar are rightly discarded — as in Plateresque decoration — for a glorying in diversity and variety. And diversity and variety are, Lewis-Stempel reminds us, under threat from the deadening effect of agriculture’s industrialisation. Our hedgerows (a positive — if unintended — consequence of the Enclosure Act) are grubbed up, our fields are sprayed with chemicals, and our soils are turned to desert through intensive farming. What is the opposite of “Plateresque”? A sterile aridity.
Lewis-Stempel leads us out of the lab and into wonder. Each creature is accorded equal merit, and it is this that gives his book its patchwork, Plateresque quality. Lewis-Stempel’s delight in all things is infectious.
The Revd Dr Colin Heber-Percy is a Team Vicar in the Savernake Team Ministry. He is the author of Tales of a Country Parish (Short Books, 2022).
England: A natural history
John Lewis-Stempel
Yale £25
(978-0-85752-647-2)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50