Opportunities for development are lost throughout the book.

Too often he skates over what must be fascinating territory for a reader. Admittedly, there were times when I found his distance frustrating. That is not what readers get in Deer Man, with its hallucinogenic brevity. Yet, in most books, the hook must always be human biography. Many, like Foster, who try to do this acknowledge that we need a disruption of power relations across the living world.

Writing against recent trends in publishing, Mabey challenges us to “have more respect for nature’s own narratives”. The celebrated naturalist Richard Mabey has long railed against the impulse to use other animals as “some kind of mirror”. And yet we always somehow loop back to the human. Charles Foster’s Being a Beast saw him live like a range of creatures, from otters and swifts, in a tragicomical rejoinder to the challenge thrown out by philosophers: “What is it like to be …” Such books are encounters, more than anything else, with sentience. In Sooyong Park’s The Great Soul of Siberia, scientific scrutiny gives way to revelation in the face of his study subject, the Siberian tiger. More recently, we have Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk. The Peregrine by JA Baker remains one of the finest and strangest. There’s a long tradition of accounts by people who have tried to enter the domain of wild animals. Yet that is the power and charm of his book. Delorme never dwells on himself, stubbornly training the lens on the animals alongside him. We are only glancingly told that he survived hypothermia on several occasions, that he learned to sit with one leg tucked under him to keep the water from impregnating his clothes, that he wore three woollen jumpers. But we are spared the true privations he must have endured: Delorme is both stoical and tight-lipped. In his time there, he must survive the damp and cold and feed himself from the forest plants, differentiating the textures of leaves to forage in the dark. Yet the strength of this book is its singular focus on the deer.Īs readers, we yearn to know the nitty-gritty of how he made it in the wild. The lack of information about his life – the ruthless absence of autobiography – can seem odd to a modern reader. It’s fairytale stuff, both in its transformational force and its unspoken darkness. Yet a fleeting encounter with a young buck draws him into the woods around Louviers, France, and off he goes. And there’s something amiss in his relationship with his family. Exclusively home-schooled, the young man was clearly lonely. We discover very little about the events that preceded this decision. Deer Man follows the story of someone who turns his back on society and spends seven years living in a forest among roe deer.

Deer man of the dark woods deck