Timothy's Book: Notes Of An English Country Tortoise

Verlyn Klinkenborg

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Review

In 1740, a Cilician tortoise was acquired by Mr Henry Snooke (‘who carried such a stoup of belly before him’).  For forty years the tortoise lived in a brick courtyard in Sussex, until Mrs Rebecca Snooke died; whereupon her nephew, Mr Gilbert White, took charge of the reptile, transporting it to his famous garden at Selborne where the creature lived out its remaining earthly days in the care of the celebrated naturalist and curate.  Not very promising material?  Imagine the story told by Timothy, interpreted by Mr Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Like its owner, Mr Gilbert White, for whom it has affection and respect, this tortoise is an acute observer.  But clever as the naturalist is, he doesn’t even know his tortoise’s sex, whereas Timothy knows where she comes from and where her own pulse is (‘as if I would keep it where humans could find it!’), and she has spent many years observing the follies and oddities of her human hosts.  She is used to being thought slow and sheltered and stupid, but her double perspective endows her with a robust sense of irony only suspected – perhaps – by White.

Timothy is impressed by the ingenuity of humans, their faculty for ordering things.  But she is also conscious of their conceit and the limitations of their anthropocentrism.  ‘My voice would shatter his human solitude,’ Timothy remarks of the complacent Mr Churton.  ‘The happiness of his breed depends on it.  The world is theirs to arrange.  So they tell themselves.  A word or two from me – “Now, then” – and they would have all that arranging to do over again.’  Then there is the matter of propagation, about which ‘there is a degree of dubiousness and obscurity,’ White notes with due humility, ‘attending… this class of animals.’  But ‘to a reptile,’ Timothy observes, ‘it is as plain as day.  No more obscure than the propagation of humans.  Vastly less dubious, since the question of costume – getting into or out of in a timely fashion – never arises.’

Klinkenborg’s language and observations are derived from White’s Natural History of Selborne, but he has reinterpreted that classic text and made something new of his own.  It is possible to admire a book and yet peevishly wonder, ‘If only I’d had the idea, and been paid a decent wage, then couldn’t I have done this just as well?’  But sometimes one thinks, ‘Even supposing this radiant inspiration had visited me, I could never, in my present mortal frame, have written such a book.’  To this admittedly long list I would now add Verlyn Klinkenborg’s sublime Timothy’s Book. I shall not forget that the stars are 'unhedged' or the climate having 'unsprung my vitals'. - review by Johnny de Falbe