The automotive journalist, here writing about farming, creates a cycle of delightful prose, one with an agreeable absence of linearity.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE J eremy Clarkson has done a remarkable thing with his farm tales titled Diddly Squat. In the throes of the U.K.’s Covid lockdowns and unable to review cars, the world’s most beloved and profane automotive journalist turned his wit, fortunes, and affected dunderheadedness to the challenges of farming.

The book, which bears the name of Clarkson’s farm — a property composed of a baker’s dozen fields scattered by God and generations of farmers across the English countryside — features a collection of columns originally published in the Sunday Times, now banded together. As a result, the central narrative is tenuous beyond “farming is bloody hard work, and the government and the thrice-damned ‘enviro-mentalists’ aren’t making it any easier.” The lack of clarity is fine, considering the book’s other merits.

For example, it is obvious that much effort has gone into making the book worth owning; it’s a high-quality object with literary intent. The jacket art and internal cartoons are adorable and homey — fitting for a farm dubbed “Diddly Squat.” My two-year-old nephew, smart as he is, cannot read. However, he was happy to inform me, with the authority of a tenured professor, what sounds each of the depicted animals makes; he then extolled the horsepower of the tractor Clarkson leans against by providing a toy Allis-Chalmers as an example and making vroom noises. Not many texts can inspire such brilliant discursions by sight alone. Whether the presentation is worth £17 is up to you, but for me, it’s one of the few new book purchases not tinged with regret.

When assembling the book, Clarkson confronted a real danger of inviting accusations that the collection is no more than a half-hearted money grab, effectively ripping a series of columns out of the dailies and cobbling them together with some twine and a spine. And indeed, there are some points in the book where chapters are disconnected to such a degree that to read consecutive passages is momentarily off-putting.

For instance, essays lurch from a blistering indictment of state farm policy to a light-hearted systems check, wherein Clarkson reports how many of his body parts aren’t working in a quest for firewood. While both chapters are delicious, there is an element of whiplash. One moment, readers encounter a writer in high dudgeon about the U.K.’s climate activists and farm subsidies:

This is what neither of the people who read lefty newspapers understands: that some farmers have Range Rovers and spend half the year spraying their subsidy cheques into Val d’Isère”s cheese fondues, but the vast majority have to hold their trousers up with baler twine and burn their children at night to keep warm.

The next, he’s dreaming of chainsaws and his knees working as they should:

In my head a chainsaw is a tool of the gods. No one picks a fight with someone who’s revving a Stihl. Brandish one and you’re the most powerful person in the room, unless someone has an AK47 — and even then it’s by no means a foregone conclusion.

It’s scattershot, but this tonal archipelago may be appreciated by those who appreciate variety or are sufficed reading one chapter at a time.

But for all of Clarkson’s prickliness, the sentences read sublimely — even smoother than the fifth pull of boozy eggnog that they are best accompanied by. In fact, it is in the atomization of his subjects that Clarkson creates a cycle of delightful prose, one with an agreeable absence of the linearity that more traditional novels tend to offer. Rather than rush from scene to scene, Clarkson meanders in his fields, delighting in the evening sky from within the cab of his Lamborghini tractor as he listens to “a constant dribble of socialism coming from Radio 4.” It’s a line that demanded theft, so I did.

Insofar as the book is political, Clarkson comes across as an accidental conservative. Perhaps the most telling excerpt is when he’s discussing how the wealthy are the best hope for conservation efforts, as they have the coin and requisite social interest to take perfectly good farmland and turn it into financially hopeless but environmentally necessary meadowland.

Clarkson writes:

There is a sound argument for handing all Britain’s countryside and farmland to rock stars and bankers. And then giving them massive tax breaks to help them to run it properly. I’m being serious, because who else would you trust with such a big job? Not the government obviously. The government can’t be trusted to do anything properly. I mean, all it had to do when it saw the pandemic coming was buy some aprons and some gloves, but somehow it managed to make a mess of it . . . . There was talk by the Labour Party, when Corbyn was in charge, that land should be confiscated from the rich and given to the poor. But that wouldn’t work either, because what poor people do when they have a bit of land is use it to store their rusting old cookers and vans.

He doesn’t even spare the book’s heroes — farmers:

I’m not sure the farmers are the answer either, because they need the land to be profitable. So when they look at an agreeable view full of dry-stone walls and bustling hedgerows and ancient woodland, they don’t think, ‘Wow, this is pretty.’ They think, ‘Hmmm. I must fire up the bulldozer.’

This is the essence of Clarkson’s politics; he’s a modern realist. The man is a gargantuan scrum of competing interests, and he accepts these tradeoffs in life just as he does on the farm. An internationalist, he adores French wine and Italian cars, South American vistas and American excess. Yet he’s fiercely British, and simultaneously expresses sympathy for Brexit impulses while also acknowledging that major shifts in trade relationships make life near impossible for businesses on his drizzly isle. At the end of the day, billions adore Clarkson because he doesn’t feed his viewer or reader bull; he only steps in it. He may not be quite the intellectual equal of Russell Kirk, but I’ll bet the two rural writers would share a scintillating excursus about lambing.