A Single Swallow
By Horatio Clare
Chatto and Windus £17.99, 317 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14.39

As harbingers of spring or summer, swallows have always been symbols to human beings as well as real, graceful birds. The first thing to make clear is that, despite its title, this is not a book about swallows; it is a book about a man trying to be a swallow, or behaving like a swallow.

Horatio Clare decides to follow the migration route of the swallow (that is, our familiar European hirundo rustica, sometimes called the barn swallow) from the Cape of South Africa – his father’s homeland – to the valleys of south Wales, where his mother raised him. He will do so in a single journey, or series of journeys, more or less keeping time with the agile insectivore. It is to be a personal and romantic quest, a rite of passage into a delayed adulthood than a scientific expedition.

A Single Swallow is more of a studenty African travel adventure than a work of ornithology. Clare’s timetable is partly determined by the migratory route of the swallow, which spends European winters in southern Africa before migrating 6,000 miles to arrive in Europe in spring to breed. But it’s also determined by the fiendishly complicated visa requirements for certain African countries.

There is an obviously ironic contrast here: swallows don’t require visas; they can fly blithely over the frontiers with which human beings, in pursuit of loot and empire, have criss-crossed the African continent. Clare does fly sometimes, when land routes become impracticable. But he generally travels by road, in hired cars or on buses. The life of a human being, especially in Africa, is far more complicated than that of a swallow.

The route traversed by the swallows goes through Namibia, Zambia, Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger, Algeria and Morocco. Clare is a gifted and lyrical travel writer, excellent at conveying atmospheres and good at making contact with all sorts of people. There are memorable encounters with a Congolese policeman and a Cameroonian rugby player, desperate to get a chance to play in Europe (despite Clare’s best efforts, he fails).

He also seems generous to a fault, showering people with gifts including his best pair of shoes, money, and eventually even his binoculars, which one might regard as essential equipment for a bird-watcher.

Then on the rock of Gibraltar, in a moment of madness, he casts his rucksack, which contains his notes, into the sea.

But for all the engaging charm of Clare’s personality and many passages of fine travel writing, you wonder what has been achieved by this Quixotic pursuit, or what the reader has gained by accompanying Clare on his migration. Certainly he or she will have gained no deep or original insights into the life of the swallow.

This is not a book to compare with the nature writings, based on long and patient study, of authors such as Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, or, further back, Charles Darwin or Gilbert White. Clare’s contacts with swallows, as they dart past him at various points of the journey, are too tangential for that. Strangely, he chooses not to seek out ecologists or ornithologists – people who might know something about the local habits of swallows – in the countries he visits.

To really understand something, you need to get close to it, and true closeness eludes Clare both with the bird of the title and with the African countries he flits through too swiftly. Rumours of war and the destruction of forests by logging companies abound. Clare is a sensitive and intelligent observer but he does not hang around long enough to get near the bottom of anything.

There is one further crucial contrast between the swallows and their romantic devotee: swallows migrate because their life depends on it – as do certain human migrants who take appalling risks to cross from Africa to Europe. Clare’s migration ultimately seems too whimsical to reveal anything profound about what he calls “the workings of the world”.

Harry Eyres writes the FT’s Slow Lane column
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