Late Light: An astonishing account of the natural world

Early in Late Light, Michael Malay’s astonishing account of a journey through the natural world, the author peers down into a water-filled bucket. He has been invited by the fishers of the Severn Valley to join them on the river as they await the return of the eels. Each year for eons, millions of juvenile eels have journeyed east from the Sargasso Sea to the rivers of Europe: to rest, grow, feed, and at last swim west again across the Atlantic to spawn and die. The Sargasso is “a place they hardly know […] and yet it’s a seascape that’s written into their bodies, and to which they return with fateful precision.” Now, one eel swims in a bucket: Malay notes its inquisitive eyes, and the “dash of red” visible in its translucent body — the creature’s fluttering heart.

This book considers the miraculous life cycles of a small group of species — eel, cricket, moth, mussel — and explains in pitiless detail the reasons for their looming extinction at our hands. From these ostensibly discrete threads is woven a large, heartbreakingly resonant story: for Malay is interested above all in connectedness — in what these species tell us about the pasts and possible futures of the great world that pulses around us, and what their loss will mean for the other animals, including humans, who have evolved alongside them. Malay’s version of nature writing, indeed, is thronged with other presences — not for him the windswept, empty uplands so memorably described by Kathleen Jamie as the haunt of the “lone, enraptured male”. With presences, and with danger: for the enfeebled environment that dooms so many species will inevitably doom us too; there is, in the end, no escape.

There is a sharp, glittering edge in Malay’s vision and philosophy — for in melding animal and human stories, he creates a single continuum into which many futures can be folded. For where is the essential difference between human lives ground down by economic austerity and homelessness, and animal lives marginalised into extinction by disappearing habitats and poisoned water? In underscoring the concept of basic dignity as being the right of all species, and illuminating the idea of an expansive, planetary politics, Malay offers a bright, fierce hope for the future.