Season on the Plain

by Franklin Russell

SEASON ON THE PLAIN This exciting book re-creates the dynamics of animal and plant life on an African plain. The setting, an island of vegetation in an equatorial wasteland, is a composite of several actual locales - a fictionalization that engobes grasses, trees, insects, birds, reptiles, microscopic organisms, and grazing and carnivorous animals as well as breeding and migration cycles, rain and drought, disease and age, all in a teeming network of complex interrelations. There are four main a leopard forced out of his own territory, a baboon chased away from his troop, an aging lion, and a hyena with cubs to feed. "In such a world," writes the author, "nothing is what it seems...There are many clues, but the final secret always eludes the watcher in the audience. He may be certain of only one thing; triumphant life is distilled from death, and a new sense of Africa is lodged in his memory."

320 pages, Paperback

Published May 30, 1975

Reviews

[Neil Funsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘The life of a wild animal always has a tragic end.’ This quote by Ernest Thompson Seaton, who wrote Wild Animals I Have Known, has always stuck with me. This book is a 313-page testament to that notion. The central character of the book is nature, complex and terrible, indifferent to our attempts to understand despite mountains of scientific facts.
The author provides plenty of facts from the lives of microbes, plants and animals to the physical landscape of soil, rock and water, scorched or drenched by capricious weather cycles. All are characters in the drama that unfolds on the plains of Africa during one seasonal cycle.
As rich as the book is in detail and invention (no human characters, rather using 4 individual animals as protagonists) I found it a little flat. The note of nature being red in tooth and claw is described in clinical, sometimes gruesome detail throughout. No sympathy is allowed for the characters. For example, just when you might feel compassion for an aging male lion on his last legs it’s revealed that in the past he has dispassionately eaten lion cubs when hungry.
On the plus side I learned a lot about what goes on in the Serengeti. As I’ve mentioned it is rich in detail. The writing occasionally rises to the poetic but sometimes feels self consciously so.
I started the book with high expectations but 3 out of 5 on my scale is ok.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Franklin Russell is my favorite natural history (NH) writer. Only a quarter way through this one but I can recognize another classic by him. Is there any other NH writer who regularly purges his writings of humans and their personal and geographical names? The only capital letters that appear in his books are at the beginning of sentences. Even when the reader is not consciously aware of this, he feels something different about what he's reading. It could repel or attract. Russell uses fictional techniques, he has individual animal characters, a lion, leopard, hyena, and baboon, all unnamed, yet he gives their personal histories,and enters their minds--or heads, if you don't think animals have minds.

Correct me if I'm wrong that this is a unique approach to NH writing, I would love to read other authors like this.