The Company of Swans

by Jim Crumley, Harry Brockway (Illustrator)

With The Company of Swans, Jim Crumley has ensured that there will be a more enduring monument to the life of this swan, and of all swans, than the pile of white feathers. Crumley watches, year in and year out, as a pair of mute swans struggle, against the odds, to raise their young on a wild patch of loch. But the pen starts to lose her eggs to predators and the cob begins to disappear for longer and longer periods. One day a third swan, younger and stronger than the first pen, appears at the other end of the loch.

This beautiful record, on fine paper, is Crumley's homage to these noble creatures, but it is also an elegy, a love song to one swan whose silent tragedy he watched from one season to the next.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction, Scotland, Birds, Natural History

48 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 1997

About the author

Jim Crumley is a Scottish nature writer with almost 20 books to his name, mostly on the landscape and wildlife of Scotland. He is renowned for his style - passionate, inspiring, visionary, sensitive, majestic - no work of his should be missed. He is also a columnist and presenter of radio programmes.

He has also received the accolade of '...the best nature writer now working in Great Britain...' from David Craig in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Reviews

[Fiona]

A gem. A hymn and a love song to mute swans, beautifully illustrated by Harry Brockway. A very slim book but a joy to read. Jim Crumley is among the very best of nature writers.

For 20,000 years that we can be sure of, people have revered swans. Siberians and Red Indians, Celts and Norsemen, Zulus and Australian Aborigines have conferred sanctity on swans and woven them into their own rituals and legends. So I am not alone, but perhaps a little out of my time.

[Rebecca]

Crumley is an underappreciated Scottish nature writer. Here he tells the tale of a pair of mute swans on a loch in Highland Perthshire. He followed their relationship with great interest over a matter of years. First he noticed that their nest had been robbed, twice within a few weeks, and realized otters must be to blame. Then, although it’s a truism that swans mate for life, he observed the cob (male) leaving the pen (female) for another! Crumley was overtaken with sympathy for the abandoned swan and got to feed her by hand and watch her fall asleep. “To suggest there was true communication between us would be outrageous, but I believe she regarded me as benevolent, which was all I ever asked of her,” he writes. Two years later he learns the end of her story. A pleasant ode to fleeting moments of communion with nature.

Favorite passages:

“Swans this wild let you into only a certain portion of their lives. They give you intimate glimpses. But you can never have any part in the business of being a swan. You can offer them no more than the flung tribute of your admiring gaze.”

“I think there is nothing in all nature that outshines that lustrous lacing of curves [of swan necks], nothing in all theatre that outperforms its pivotal tension.”

[Callum McLaughlin]

Reading this lovely little offering was proof that it’s worth browsing displays in bookshops every now and then, and taking a punt on something that catches your eye. Nature writer, Jim Crumley, observed the same pair of mute swans in rural Scotland for more than two decades, growing a particular attachment to the gentle female (or pen). In this slim book, he offers us a snapshot of the creatures’ ethereal beauty, as well as the many hardships they face in an effort to fend off predators, survive the changing seasons, and raise their young. More so, he has crafted a surprisingly moving tribute to the pen, who is presented as both emblematic of her species and its place within the cycle of life, and yet, singular in her tragic determination to defy the odds.

With his prose, Crumley paints vivid pictures of the landscape he so obviously admires. His lyrical approach brings an air of quiet magic that suits the majesty of his subject matter perfectly. My middling rating is reflective of the book’s brevity, rather than its quality, and I will certainly be checking out more of Crumley’s work.

[Michael]

In this slim book, Crumley reflects upon the beauties and harsh realities of nature. His façade of pragmatism and objective detachment for the subjects of his interest is belied by his efforts to aid a pair of mute swans successfully hatch a clutch of eggs.

He accepts his and their failures as unsentimentally as Nature itself, but his feeling of loyalty to the old pen, more sustained and faithful than that of her mate, his realisation of his love for her as a fellow-being, and, ultimately, his sense of loss at her death, tempered as it is by his acknowledgement that in death her body sustains the life of other creatures, are testiments to the deep, personal connection he experiences to this wild creature, which occupies a privileged place in the heart of the not-so-dispassionate swan-watcher.

Brockway's engravings of the swans, including a couple featuring Crumley himself, are a fitting complement to the text.

[Helen McClory]

Last book of the year, and more a pamphlet, but it counts. A story of a swan-watcher and the Highland swans he spies on, year after year, as the forces of nature enact loss and renewal, renewal, loss.

[Amina at Book Nomad Podcast]

A beautiful short read for anyone who finds contentment in nature.

[Georgie Fay]

This short book documents the challenges of nature in Scotland and the lives of two swans and their relationship with their swan-watcher. It is both moving and inspiring, it is close and personal and yet wider and more universal and really worth a read.

[Sarah]

A book doesn't have to be the size of a dictionary to be significant. This is a wonderful little story about a man who watches the swans on his property in Scotland. Year after year they come back to the loch for the near impossible task of raising young cygnets. The writing is sparse as he observes nature being impassionately cruel. Despite this, the book conveys raw emotion. The illustrations are perfect for the story.

[Mick Canning]

A little gem of a book. Life and death amongst the hills and lochs of a Central Scottish landscape. Beautifully observed and written.

[Julie]

The Scottish naturalist Jim Crumley wrote this "journal of a swan-watcher" after observing a pair near his home in Highland Perthshire in autumn. When the male swan abandons his partner for another mate, the reader learns much about the cruelty of life in the natural world: "Any rational assessment must conclude that that is fair enough; nature sustaining nature, fate fit enough for any wild creature" (25). I particularly liked Crumley's descriptions of the cultures and legends that revere swans, many of which assume that "the human soul flies on in the swan after death" (26). The illustrations - engravings by stonemason and wood engraver Harry Brockway - are exquisite.

The epigraph:
"A small mound of white feathers
lies on a tussock of grass
made grey by a Highland winter.
It is all the monument there will
ever be to the life of a swan."

[Christian]

A very short but very brilliant gem of a book documenting Crumley’s visitations to two, that becomes three, swans over the course of a year, with fascinating insight and gripping writing for such a slight book.

[Robert Hinds]

This is a stunningly beautifully written book about the stunningly beautiful story of two swans that Jim would see regularly.

You can borrow and read it for free on the internet archive on your lunch break if you don't believe me. You should also do that if you do believe me too.

[Tracey Foston]

Short piece in watching swans on his local loch. Interesting

[Wendy Johnson]

Evocative beautiful and haunting

[Elizabeth Jane]

He felt love for the pen swan, and then it got mauled

[Nix Pikov]

Beautiful and SAD.
It’s very interesting how humans intertwine their lives with animals like this, and how one animal can seem so distinct it stands out and sticks in one’s memory.

[Barb Bailey]

A lovely little novella that can be read in one sitting.This books is about the cycle of life in nature. Well Illustrated.