Herons at the Helm – 17 October 2025

Inclement winds, gathering clouds, flood waters, rain and snow: few of those of late in Clifton but I have been buffeted and shivering in the domains of Sarah Hall, Philip Pullman and Sverker Sörlin where winds and snow are noisy with personality.

Helm by Sarah Hall is named for the north-easterly wind which besets Cross Fell in the Pennines. Pictures of the bank of clouds which sweeps in with the wind across the Eden Valley are well worth gazing at, as the voice of Helm acknowledges: ‘The valley – after some Chistian-Pagan bunfighting – is [named] Eden. Seriously? OK, it is quite pretty.’

The helm wind is chilling and fierce, strong enough to knock people over. Hall’s Helm is also mischievous, curious and something of a kleptomaniac: there are sections documenting trinkets which Helm has snatched, including a tobacco pipe, a Howdah pistol and an iPhone 11.

The story of Helm is the story of the landscape over which it is born. The wind observes huge continental arguments, watches mountains form and gets ready to blow.

Things get fun when humans arrive: ‘These humans are very entertaining. They ferment drinks that make them silly and aggressive and lusty; they biff and boff and booze. Fantastic theatre.’ As is the book itself, its cast comprising a neolithic woman with mushroom-grey hair exiled from her tribe, an astrologer-cum-priest-cum-wizard with a helmet horribly welded into his head, crag-hopper Bodger come to the valley to capture the wind and an academic researching microplastics – a cloud pollution analyst adding her share of toxins to the atmosphere each time she gives in and lights a cigarette.

Helm is a novel with the encapsulating force of a tornado. The scenes come at you in gusts. There are moments with the intimacy of a summer breeze. Can all of these be true? I would have paid more attention in Geography had Sarah Hall been there to give voice to longshore drift.

Other winds are available:

The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey is something of a favourite, a palindromic novel beginning four days after the death of a man in medieval Somerset. In the first half, each chapter moves back a day to the start of the story. In the second, it moves forwards again to the end. Or the beginning. Depending on how you look at it. Either way it is exquisite.

Sing to the Western Wind by Tariq Mehmood tells the story of a man whose life has taken him from rural Pakistan to working in a mill in Bradford, to Afghanistan, and then to Manchester, where he is preparing to detonate a bomb. What has led him here makes for uncomfortable and confronting reading.

The Crying of the Wind by Ithell Colquhoun is a series of essays by the surrealist artist about her travels across Ireland. They are delightfully dippable, a book to take to a cosy pub for reading a few pages by the fire while Colquhoun describes a misty drive, a picnic of barm brack and cider next to some ducks, a brave swim (adjective mine – no fuss from her) and the sun sinking over the loughs.

From northern winds to the Northern Lights, I have been indulging in a return to the world of Lyra’s Oxford, of dæmons, of warrior bears, witch clans, balloonists and mysterious Dust. Northern Lights, I am happy to report, is still just as good (possibly better now that one has a little more political understanding) as it was when I read it many years ago.

La Belle Sauvage too, the first in The Book of Dust trilogy, is superb: in this prequel to Northern Lights, Lyra is a baby removed from her parents and entrusted to nuns in Oxford. When floods hit the convent, it falls to Malcolm, a young boy at the helm of his beloved boat, La Belle Sauvage, to rescue her from the rising waters and from the many people interested in this child and what she may become. It’s a proper adventure story, mature and fantastical, with an increasingly dark edge. Not to mention a terrifying hyena and a seriously disturbing fairy.

All of which is to say, as if you didn’t know, that next week is perhaps the biggest event in publishing this year. The long-awaited final instalment in the trilogy is out on Thursday. The Rose Field follows Lyra and Malcolm twenty years later, far from home in a world on fire. I can’t wait to own it, hold it, sniff it, open it to the first page. But I refuse to read it immediately. Thirty years since Northern Lights was published and yet I am not ready for the culmination of Lyra’s story.

Instead, I think I’ll read about the history of snow. Seriously. Snö by Sverker Sörlin looks glorious and fascinating as a cultural and environmental history, a scientific examination of changes in the climate and a paean to something I long for every winter before remembering that I don’t do well with the cold and am already very accomplished at falling over.

As Helm sweeps the clouds overhead, I must mention Cloudland by the great John Burningham. Albert and his parents are enjoying a mountain walk, so high up that they are above the clouds. Then Albert falls off a cliff. Fortunately the children who live in the clouds rescue him. Unfortunately he gets left behind in a cloud race and nearly knocked to Earth by a plane. No one wrote or illustrated picture books quite like Burningham.*

Winds and clouds combine in Kit Fan’s poetry collection The Ink Cloud Reader. Reading Fan’s political and environmental poems alongside Helm and Snö, it feels as though they are all in conversation with one another. I shan’t sully it with précis but encourage you to read ‘The Shape of the Wind.’

Tomorrow, we welcome Esme Allman, and hopefully many of you, for a reading from Sweet Bone Girl. Do come and join us to weather any storms together over a drink and some poetry.

May your weekend be breezy, in the cheerful sense,
Lizzie  

*If further evidence is required one need surely look no further than Come Away From the Water, Shirley.