James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life is written in opposition to a number of things. It’s written against the modern workforce, the nature of cubicle computer labour in urban environments. It’s written against our disconnect from our food, from the land, from the practices of our ancestors. You could almost say that it’s in the tradition of Wordsworth and the Romantics, reacting against the Industrial Revolution and extolling the virtues of nature and the wilderness, except it’s written against Wordsworth too. The Shepherd’s Life is an autobiography set in the sheep farming communities in the UK’s Lake District. In some regards it adheres to the standard formula of biography, tracing the life of the author from childhood through to the present day. It’s also pretty firmly set against biography, constantly warring with different aspects of the form. In the introduction to his book, James writes about the divergence between life in school and life on the farm. He notices that his teachers are scornful towards agricultural work: “After a few minutes of listening, I realised this bloody stupid teacher woman thought we were too stupid and unimaginative to ‘do anything with our lives’. She was taunting us to rise above ourselves. We were too dumb to want to leave this area with its dirty dead-end jobs and its narrow-minded provincial ways.” Although he didn’t have the language to articulate this idea at the time (“I just made a farting noise on my hand”), he started to recognise a split between the modern industrial world, “obsessed with the importance of ‘going somewhere’ and ‘doing something with your life’,” and his farming community, where “we were firmly set, like our fathers and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers before us, on being what we were, and had always been.” That recognition is the basis for the book. It’s founded on a diverging set of claims as to what’s important, and it uses those divergences to take biography in a different direction. World leaders and household names are the common coin of atomised nuclear families, of suburban households and city folk: James offers instead his own biography as a farmer in the Lake District, framing himself as someone who isn’t going to make it into the history books – not because he thinks he’s legitimately unimportant, but because he thinks the way society measures importance is probably wrong. The Shepherd’s Tale thus functions as both correction and rebuke, borrowing the form of biography to tell a different story about who we are and what we should value.

The book is split into four seasons, summer through spring; each corresponds to a different phase in James’s life, from childhood through to his present day. That seasonal framing pulls against the typical arc of a biography: it’s normal to have a chronology of a person’s life, but James frames that life within the turn of the seasons. The finite individual, with fixed start and end, is countered by the cyclical, the renewed, the eternal change and return. “There is no beginning and there is no end. The sun rises, and falls, each day, and the seasons come and go … the farms and the flocks endure, bigger than the life of a single person.” The individual is repositioned as one aspect of the seasons, inside of the turn of time. “We are born, live our working lives and die, passing like the oak leaves that blow across our land in the winter.” It’s a different way of looking at what a life means. James knows he’s just one guy in a long line of farmers, here for a season, and best understood as part of an intergenerational chain. Where the typical biography starts and ends with the life of the individual, James sees his life as only a moment in the broader historical calendar.

That alternate framing is reinforced by the book’s focus on breeding sheep. Much of the book is taken up with concern for the genetic health of James’s herd. Each breeding season layers in new genes from newly purchased tups, introducing (in theory) strong new blood to breed healthy lambs and help the herd survive the winter. Each new year’s flock is the cumulative product of every preceding generation. Every decision, good or bad, is present in the herd’s current shape. The Herdwicks in the flock “have been selectively bred for more than a thousand years to suit this landscape.” In that sense, James’s birth isn’t the start of his story. It starts in prehistory, with the lost, unwritten generations whose decisions as shepherds set the template for the flock he inherits as he comes of age. And in turn his story won’t end with his death: those who come after, whether they’re his kids or somebody else’s, will inherit a flock most recently shaped by his decisions. Sheep breeding gives the lie to a biography that starts and ends with birth and death. That’s ahistorical, James suggests, symptomatic of a society that’s lost touch with its place in history. Our decisions are shaped by the past and give rise to the future. We can’t possibly by bookended by the span of our mere lives.

With that reframing of the biography, James often drops continuity in favour of anecdotes or incidental events. The basic thread of his chronology is traceable throughout, but he’s comfortable leaving it very loose. For instance, he sets out an archetypal relationship between him, his father, and his grandfather. When James was a child, his grandfather owned the farm, and his dad helped work it. James idolised his grandfather, and, as he grew, became increasingly combative towards his father. When the grandfather died and James’s dad inherited the farm, the relationship got even worse. “My father was assigned possibly the worst role in the play, that of suffering the father as boss and the son as usurper. He was doing the lion’s share of the work, and never quite getting the control of the farm that his efforts deserved.” There’s a deep consciousness in the book that this type of relationship is typical. James recounts how his dad and grandad fought in the same way, at the same life stage. “My father had left briefly when he was young, and had worked in a local quarry after some bust-up with his father.” James knows his experience is not new or unique. It’s part of his biography, part of the strict sequence of events that makes up his life, but it’s also something his father went through, and probably his grandfather before that. It’s an archetype. It comes around like the seasons. He shares it because it’s anti-biographical, not specific to him as an individual but common to all sorts of people, and therefore indicative mostly of our ties to history and to each other. This happened to me like it happens to most anybody. It’s my story, but it’s also a common story, and maybe we shouldn’t try so hard to separate those things.

The broader chronology of the book works through the same ideas in a different way. Each season roughly corresponds to a stage of James’s life, but he’ll also happily drop the chronology to tell you some random anecdote, something relevant to the season or the current train of thought. After talking about fighting with his father in his late teens, he jumps back to a memory from when he was four. It’s not strictly unusual for biographies to jump around a little, but here it feels connected to the book’s broader thesis. There is no linear progression from start to finish, birth to death. There is no straight line of continuity. Our own histories jump forward and back: each winter contains every winter. What’s happening now only makes sense in terms of what comes before, and ultimately in terms of what comes after. Towards that end, the book moves fluidly between present and past tense. Sometimes a memory will be framed explicitly as happening in the past (“Last year I had to go and see this old shepherd”), but in other areas, the framing moves from present to past tense within the same scene:

“I’m working as a sub-editor, despite having zero experience. After a term or two in Oxford, I realised that to get the kind of well-paid job I neded, I had to get some ‘work experience’. I secretly fancied myself as the next Ernest Hemingway, so I thought maybe I could be a journalist.”

The first sentence is in the present tense, but everything else – the rest of the passage – is in the past. This fluctuation happens constantly throughout the book. When James returns from studying at Oxford, one passage begins “My mother is sitting on a wooden chair in our barn”, and stays entirely in the present tense. Shortly after, another passage opens “The fields are silver-wet with late autumn dew,” and then shifts into the past tense (“I was back from Oxford”). There’s no pattern or logic: the two styles merge together. It’s a deliberate creative choice. “The past and present live alongside each other in our working lives, overlapping and intertwining, until it is sometimes hard to know where one ends and the other starts.” Each season in the book is further punctuated with timeless, rootless events that could have happened just about anywhere in James’s life. “I am looking in through the glass at a carving from a reindeer antler from at least 13,000 years ago”. There’s no temporal context – it could be from when James was a child, or it could have happened this year just passed. It’s just – now.

All of these decisions cumulatively make up James’s private war against biography. Against a genre that focuses on notables, he writes about the unwritten, the everyday people living their lives. He’s interested in place and history, our connectedness to the world around us, how we grow out of the past and shape the future. You could argue he’s being a little unfair to biography as a discipline – any good biographer would be equally sensitive to questions of history and social context – but I think James is more writing against the way biography says something about our modern condition, with its pressure to ‘be someone’. He’s writing against that individualistic culture of attainment where having a biography, being a person of note, is a marker of success. You don’t have to be someone special, he suggests – that’s going about it all wrong. You think you’re your own person, but you’re the choices that came before, part of a continual, seasonal cycle of life and death that precedes you and that will continue after you.