25. Marshworld by A. R. Lloyd

look at these evil mofos!

This one has been on my list almost as long as the elusive Colin Dann but I finally found it somewhere last year.  As many of you may know from years of following this blog, I am a fan and student of the sub-subgenre of intelligent farmland animal adventure fiction.  I am very pleased to find that Marshland is an excellent addition, possibly one of my favourites so far.  It's the story of Kine, the bold (and perhaps arrogant) weasel in the pastoral river valley (in the afterword we learn this is between Kent and Essex).  The only other humans are the farmer and his daughter and Poacher, the lone neighbour who knows everything about the land.  Weasel's dominance and indeed his very existence is soon threatened by a gang of nasty mink, led by their truly evil leader and den mom, Gru.

Mink are nasty!  Though (again the afterword) Lloyd explains that mink aren't actually as voracious and destructive as portrayed in the story.  They were imported from North America for their pelts and those that escaped survived and even dominated in the english landscape.  But they tend to live fairly solitary lives and hunt and protect their territory in a reasonably balanced way.  In Marshland, they are like true human colonists, slaughtering simply for the slaughter.  They massacre frogs, birds, fish and in the most brutal part, Kine's awesome mate Kia and his loving new brood of weasel kittens!  It's rough.  This book is almost like a weasel Death Wish. There is also a secondary plot about Poacher with hints of his past in the Second World War and the farmer's daughter who helps take care of him as he gets sick and old (he showed her the ways of the woods when she was young).

My one challenge with these books is that the author's are almost always english flora and fauna nerds.  They tend to go overboard with the descriptive writing and the specific species of plants, birds, insects and animals.  The latter I can generally picture but so many of the plants I have no image of at all, that it just goes right over my head.  This is the kind of book that would do well with some cool ebook where you could just put your finger on the word and it would show an image of that kind of plant. Actually, this holds true for the powered pump drainage system that I guess takes excess water from the marsh and puts it into the river. It was a crucial plot point, but I couldn't figure out how it was supposed to work so had trouble visualizing its dangers.

Despite those minor concerns, it's an absorbing and exciting book.  I am happy to learn that it is the first in a trilogy, so A. R. Lloyd stays on the list!