How to love your father – and Britain’s butterflies
The Flitting is a beautiful story about the end of Ben Masters’s father’s life, and the struggle of being his son. At its heart is an intricate enquiry into the nature of the self – the “structure of feeling”, as Masters identifies it, following the theorist and writer Raymond Williams.
Masters is a writer and academic. He’s sensitive and self-doubting, father to young children of his own. Richly engaged with literature and music, from the work and lives of Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf to the essays of Zadie Smith and the songs of Prince, Masters addresses sections of the book to his father, as if gently and insightfully teaching “Dad” about his passions.
Dad is a loving parent but a different kind of man: dominant and traditional, one whose own upbringing, at the hands of Masters’s grandfather, was sometimes harsh. A fan of Luther Vandross and the writer “BB” (Denys Watkins-Pitchford), as well as a shooter and a keen amateur lepidopterist, he has often clashed with his son. Masters, in turn, regards BB – not having read him yet – as a sort of professional nostalgic. A revealing moment comes when Dad asks Masters to take care of his collection of sporting guns. Masters refuses: “I don’t want them in the house.”
This is also the story of a millennial sensibility wrestling with the baby boomers’ ways of seeing, and assumptions about what a man is or should be. The battleground, the book’s setting, is the English countryside, and its butterflies. Butterflies are Dad’s great passion, as they were Nabokov’s: as Masters tries to get closer to his father in the months before his death, he takes up their pursuit and study, looking for Lulworth Skippers, White-letter Hairstreaks and the like, to photograph and send to his constrained and bedridden father. Man hands on butterflies to man: Masters’s grandfather was pugnacious and, after war trauma, happy only in nature.
The terrains of the family and The Flitting – Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire – are among English nature’s actual and literary heartlands. While Dad remembers his father fighting gamekeepers, “poaching” in Masters’s time means ignoring “keep out” signs. John Clare, BB, ghosts of wars and generations gone criss-cross the rides and brakes of the book, beset by the butterflies of metaphor, and the actual insects Masters encounters.
Mercifully, Masters does read BB, who was one of the most gifted writers about nature in British history. Both BB and Masters père bred and released butterflies, the writer introducing Purple Emperors to the Fermyn Woods reserve. “I only had it under observation for a couple of seconds but there was no mistaking it, or the bold gliding flight which was almost like that of a partridge,” BB writes, of his first Emperor.
To Masters, butterfly hunting becomes a way of understanding the structure of his father’s feelings, an archetypal quest which often finds him bothered, worried about being away from his own son Kit, and short a butterfly. The family have quick tempers, and Masters is endearingly honest in his occasionally eye-rolling self portrayal: “As enthralling as these butterflies are, they are not Purple Emperors, which I am doubtful of seeing for sure. What I need is know-how and hunch, a talent for nature like BB and Nabokov. I need Dad. He would talk me through it all if he was here.”
Masters inadvertently sums up the whole continent of a lost parent in that last line. Truly, this is a desperately loving and missing country, where jewelled insects keep us in touch with one another across the borders of time and death. “For BB the natural world was a kind of intuition, a metaphysical connection beyond logic or explanation, whereas all I feel is a great unknowing.” The Flitting finds a wonderful language for all our structures of feelings about our fathers. I hadn’t read Masters’s previous work, mentioned deprecatingly here, but I hope to read much more of his non-fiction writing. He has unmistakeable talent, as bright and thrilling as a ‘Red Admirable’ – as they were once called.
Horatio Clare’s latest book is Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing. The Flitting is published by Granta at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books