A strange, enchanting book ... Has the loose, elliptical quality of Tove Jansson’s beloved novel The Summer Book (1972) ... This is presented as a grand realization—though it is hard for this reader to receive the epiphany with grace. Can Rebanks really have been ignorant of how loud and condescending men can be? How little he must have listened to us womenfolk, keening our sad songs of frustration, all his life ... To his credit, he writes of his season with the duck women with elegance, acuity and a rare tenderness. And he thanks his wife effusively at the end.
Are we in for a magnificent obsession and a baggy monster of a book that shouldn’t really work but somehow does? The perhaps surprising answer is: we are ... His prose is deceptively unvarnished with flashes of colour: bright birds’ eggs in a well-found barn. Our best observers of the world around us are farmers, not only Rebanks but John Lewis-Stempel—nature writers with dirt under their fingernails ... With the patience of a man making his rounds of birds’ nests, Rebanks shows that degradation of the environment happens in small ways and faraway places, too.
A book of stillness, quiet, vigilance, and the kind of patience that is measured not in hours but in lifetimes ... A tender, diaristic, inevitably elegiac account of his apprenticeship with Anna and her friend Ingrid ... Each phase in this arcane process is meticulously described ... From the precision of these descriptions an exquisite, limpid beauty gradually emerges.
A quietly profound book. It is a story about a still-essential way of living in the modern world and finding a way to keep going. It is also a deft travelogue to one of the world’s wildest seascapes ... He has carved out a voice that presents an unfiltered picture of rural life but also one that recognises a deep desire to connect to something bigger than ourselves. He does so again in The Place of Tides ... It is fair to say that The Place of Tides covers a niche subject, but Rebanks’s modest and assured narrative paints a picture of a wondrous world. It is one that few of us will ever visit but are all the better for knowing about.
As in his previous books, his prose is simple and clear, his depictions of nature gorgeous ... Rebanks considers The Place of Tides—while nonfiction—to be a sort of fable, and the legends he includes add to that flavor ... This book, and Anna’s life, are inspiring in their simplicity, fortitude and elegance. Her example, Rebanks says, is profound.
Lyrical and enchanting ... The challenges are many, the uncertainties considerable, and yet as Anna’s strength grows with each passing day, it’s Rebanks, too, who discovers himself shedding ill-fitting skins. There’s a magical moment when he rows through shallows rich in sea-life and beauty; another where he sees a pod of orcas. Even the eggs of the eiders, small, green, speckled and hard, are in themselves things of wonder.
Rebanks is an extraordinary writer, and The Place of Tides will linger in the mind for a long time. As he shows us, we live in a remarkable natural world. How much sunnier its outlook would be if only we nurtured, respected and cared for it as deeply and passionately as the heroine of this book does.
Rebanks undercuts Måsøy’s narrative with a half-hearted through-line about how he embarked on this trip in an attempt to regain some 'hope and self-belief' after a realisation that he 'was a poor husband, father, brother, and son'. The self-reflection is well-meaning, but never fully explained, and verges into cliche ... It’s a shame, because in spite of modern publishing’s unsaid requirement for every book to take its author on a journey of 'self-improvement', The Place of Tides is not served better by it. Rebanks’s telling of the skilled work and cultural history that he learns from Anna Måsøy is all this otherwise enlightening book needs.
