I was attracted to this novel because I had loved The Evening Chorus, Helen Humphreys's 2015 novel about a prisoner of war who maintains his sanity by observing a family of redstarts, a bird species he discovers in the trees around the camp. Published in 2024, Followed by the Lark is also about a man who becomes a watcher. But far from being a prisoner of war, he is our much-heralded naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, the man famous for writing about his sojourn at Walden Pond.

The novel concerns itself with Thoreau's life in the years after Walden when he became a surveyor, a job that allowed him to continue his observations of the natural world. It is not a biography because Humphreys, though steeped in her subject's writings, wanted the freedom to create and imagine as she filled in the gaps. The result is a compulsively readable catalogue of moments in the life of a curiously solitary and driven adult male. The narrative neither builds nor stays flat, and I think that's because time itself supplies the momentum. The dated chapters take us through forty years, from 1822 to 1862, ending with Thoreau's death.

It's clear that Thoreau seeks the companionship of men rather than women, but Humphreys chooses not to develop that preference and instead focuses on his observations of the natural world, which become fertile enough ground for a novel in the hands of this wise and gifted author. If anyone is following anyone here, it's not the lark so much as Humphreys who is following the Thoreau she discovers in his journals and books. Perhaps it takes a Canadian to see with fresh eyes an American literary icon whose book has been such dry required reading for school children, that for most of us, the memory of Walden is foggy and unpleasant. Humphreys' Thoreau bristles with liveliness and the added edge is that the reader comes to him with a twenty first century mindset, ready to notice the loss of the very habitat and species that Thoreau celebrates.

Here he is observing hunters after a flock of the now long-extinct passenger pigeons:

"As the train slowed on its approach to the station in Concord, Henry saw a group of men with a large net walking towards a dead tree on which there was a flock of passenger pigeons.

You can get a hundred at a time using that method, said Horace approvingly. They aren't expecting the net.

The birds looked stately, with their long tails and rose-coloured breasts. They sat calmly on the branches of the dead tree, patiently awaiting their fate" (210).

The passage above is typical of Humphreys' choice to undercut, rather than emphasize. By this point, late in the novel, the reader knows that Henry is against all forms of sport hunting, and here, merely with the image of a dead tree populated with these stately and beautiful birds, she suggests his anguish and helplessness.

Never religious in the traditional sense, Thoreau nevertheless had assumed a divine origin for the basic designs of the natural world, but when Darwin's Origin of the Species was published, he read it out loud with three of his friends because "[i]t felt too important a book to read alone...What he had always felt—that everything in nature was undeniably connected—had now become scientific theory" (182). Another historic milestone that Thoreau mourned was the US supreme court ruling on the Dred Scott case which set back the abolitionist fight by stating that people of African descent could never be citizens of any state, free or otherwise.

But more than the recognition of historic events, what kept me turning pages were the ordinary, everyday perceptions of a man who had devoted his life to the process of shedding all unnecessary apparatus that kept him separate from nature and existing as simply as possible. Here he is sojourning beside another pond with his friend Charles:

"Life became only sensation. They closed their eyes of an afternoon and felt the sun on their eyelids, which became, suddenly, the most powerful, exquisite feeling. For hours they were silent, and then at supper, while cooking a fish in a skillet, they had a passionate discussion about the moths that flitted about the woods and how the tapping they made on the undersides of the leaves when they flew into them sounded exactly like rain—how one sound could belong to two completely different things" (10-11).

How close this novel hews to the actual man was never my concern as a reader because this Thoreau, a fictional one that Humphreys created after a close study of his writings, is abundantly alive on the page. He possesses such odd, humble, and solitary majesty I fully trusted that as a portrait of a well-known literary figure it was honest.

But why? How did Humphreys establish my trust? I believe it was the lack of a traditional narrative design (rising action, climax, falling action) that would have laid an artificial structure on the randomness of his journals. That, as well as the beguiling contradiction in a "novel" that keeps the character's very recognizable name. More than anything else, that signaled that liberties had been taken but the essence of the personage is true.

Followed by the Lark, by Helen Humphreys. FSG: New York, 2024.

Filed under: Fictionalizing an historic figure