The Country Diaries, edited by Alan Taylor

 

Alan Taylor’s earlier anthology (with Irene Taylor) The Assassin’s Cloak was a wide ranging anthology of great diary writing, with the entries arranged from January to December but the years intermingled. This was a great and very original idea that produced a great book. It was followed by the similarly great Those Who Marched Away, which focused on war diaries. The format is very clever, and will no doubt produce many great books – but The Country Diaries doesn’t quite achieve greatness. The problem is that the premise itself doesn’t seem as strong – where war diaries are almost a tradition that the diarists are aware of, diaries written in the countryside don’t appear to form a genre. Nonetheless, Taylor’s selections are (as usual) excellent. The Scottish poet William Soutar’s entries particularly impress (a favourite is on p177), and this shows one of the strengths of this type of anthology – it allows for comparison. Another strength is twofold: as time passes, the reader is gradually aware of the seasons changing, but looking at the dates of the entries, the change in the countryside itself is also apparent. Not quite as good as the previous books, but fascinating nonetheless. [Nat Smith]