An Anthem of a Quiet, Beautiful Life
A Feature Review of
The Place of Tides
James Rebanks
Hardcover: Mariner Books, 2025
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Reviewed by Drew Brown
My favorite quote from my favorite novel is this: “How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?” The main character says this towards the end of Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, a book about friendship, love, and loss that is conspicuously absent of depravity or vice. It is simply a book about decent people trying to lead decent lives in the face of an all-too-unforgiving world. I am drawn to it because I am drawn to that in my life. I want to lead a quiet life, one of integrity and fidelity to the people around me and the place beneath me.
James Rebanks has successfully written a quiet book in praise of a quiet life, and the quiet life at its center is Anna’s– a “duck woman” spending her last season on her tiny island off of Norway watching over ducks and collecting their down. We read as she enters the season and the island too feeble and too weak to do the work of building nests and preparing the island for the arrival of ducks but, over time, becomes the strong, tender, and capable duck woman she is, continuing the work her family—and families like her’s—has been doing for thousands of years, even though the economy around her work is dying. The island has an almost medicinal quality for her, imbibing her with strength through its solitude and rhythms.
Despite the downfall of her industry, she refuses to give up. The Place of Tides, from my reading, spreads out like the Oklahoma prairies I was raised on from this quote about Anna at the beginning of the book: “Anna had lived a rebellion against modernity. Her belief that it all still mattered was absolute, unshakeable—a gift from God” (14). For Rebanks, “modernity” is all that the industrial revolution has wrought on the world, with its obsessiveness on efficiency and its ability to turn a human into “a machine-like man with iron in his soul” (148).
He sought Anna out because he found himself becoming this machine, despite living a pastoral life as a farmer in England. He felt he had been hustling too hard and had turned away from the ways of his grandfather, who “spent many hours walking his farm and learning about the wild things upon it, like it was the most important work a human could do” (148). However, the striving got the best of Rebanks, and his wife gave him permission to leave home and spend a season with Anna with the encouragement to “take some time on the island to figure things out” (183). Rebanks writes immediately after, “There is a point where hard work and striving flips from something noble, making the lives of the people around you better, to something too intense, making their lives worse, and for a year or two I’d been on the wrong side of that line” (183).
The Place of Tides, despite being a work of nonfiction, will sit on my bookshelf next to books like Crossing to Safety and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series because—and I promise this is not a back-handed compliment—it is so anti-climactic yet so readable. There are no affairs in Crossing to Safety and the preacher John Ames does not die in Gilead, nor is there any trouble with the birth of his son in Lila. In The Place of Tides, very little that would traditionally keep pages turning happens. Rebanks almost shoots a winged predator but doesn’t because it flies away at the last minute. That is the most sensational the book gets. But that is also its beauty. That is the point of the book: a beckoning towards a life of enchantment and intentionality, towards—as Rebanks writes at the end—a life of forgiveness.
Anna has much she can be disappointed and jaded by. She grew up ostracized on the mainland for being an “island” child. She experienced the dissolution of two marriages. And she was forced off her ancestors’ duck island and onto another island that is not hers and will never be hers. But she did not hold onto bitterness, calling everything that had gone on in the drama of island life “tittle-tattle.” Rebanks writes, “I had been drawn to Anna because she seemed heroically tough—and she was tough, but her real superpower was forgiveness.” He continues, in perhaps my favorite section,
“She was showing me that a good life was about forgiveness—accepting other’s flaws as we hope they might in turn forgive ours. Anna showed me how much we all need each other, and how empty it is to be alone. I had been driven to the island by anger, I realized. I had been most angry at those closest to me—bitter that no one seemed to recognize the trouble I was in, that no one was helping me in quite the way I needed. But Anna had wired out that letting go of anger was not just an act of kindness to the other person, it was a kindness to yourself. Holding on to hurt eventually burns a hole in you. Forgiveness gives everyone a chance to do better next time” (276).
After finishing the book, I thought of the concept of the “Anonymous Christian,” originally coined by the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner. It articulates the sanctity achieved by certain people who, from all accounts, are not or were not explicitly Christian. James Rebanks seems to be this type of person, continually writing books that point towards the true, the good, and the beautiful. He writes at the end, “I hadn’t known it at the time, but a certain version of me died on that island—a person who had been quite effective and ruthless, a machine-like me that got things done in a machine age. I was returning different, like I had been reassembled, or born again, to use that strange Christian phrase” (284).
Rebanks once wrote how surprised he was to receive so much fan mail from Christians. But I don’t think he should be surprised; his book is an antidote to the atomizing and commodifying ways of this dying world, pointing each of us towards the wonder we were created with. May we each live quiet lives like Anna, faithfully doing the tedious work of building something sustainable.
Drew Brown
Drew Brown is a writer living in Michigan and dreaming of Oklahoma. He writes about living a sustainable life on his Substack, Slow Faith.
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