Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton review – woman meets leveret

A brief survey of my one-year-old’s bookshelf reveals a plethora of books about animals: crocodiles, cows, sheep and rabbits (so many rabbits). In truth these creatures are humans in disguise, or at least they embody qualities that are distinctly human; it is purely in their surface – their fur or scales or hair – that they resemble animals. As John Berger wrote back in 1980, they are but “human puppets”, creatures whom we ventriloquise. Like animals in zoos, or large mice inhabited by underpaid and hot theme-park workers, they represent not our proximity, but our estrangement from what Berger calls “the first circle of what surrounded man”, that is animals. Talk about ruining a bedtime story, John.

The cover and endpapers of Chloe Dalton’s debut, Raising Hare (beautifully illustrated by Denise Nestor) at first seem to resemble these children’s books: there are no rabbits, but hares, doing what hares do: inspecting berries, leaping, boxing, feeding young and gazing outward, apparently, towards the reader. The story of this excellent book is in one sense familiar: a narrator, experiencing a rupture or crisis, is transformed through a magical encounter with a “wild” creature, a hare. But there is much more going on here. As hare and narrator enter into conversation, their strange dialogue begins to shed light on our relationship with our non-human neighbours, bringing into question assumptions about control, consent, boundaries and autonomy. Unlike my daughter’s books, this is a sustained and patient attempt to cross the species abyss, and to see the world through the hare’s eyes.

The setting is Dalton’s home, a restored stone barn situated somewhere in the English countryside (as with so much in this book, there is a deliberate elision of personal detail and we do not know exactly where). During the pandemic she retreated here from London, distancing herself from her work in the city as a well-connected political adviser (the book’s acknowledgments feature William Hague and Angelina Jolie). For all that the she lionises her work (she writes, with little irony, that she would risk death for her political masters), she is conscious of its costs: severed relationships, deracination and hyper-vigilance. Dalton relishes the high-status tightrope, but is not too sure where the exit points are.

Enter the leveret, a baby hare, magical interloper and harbinger of transformation. She finds the creature lying on a country track outside her home, seemingly abandoned. “Its forepaws were pressed tightly together, fringed in fur the colour of bone and overlapping as if for comfort.” From the outset, Dalton is conflicted about whether to rescue the hare and take her into her home. She relents, though she places certain restrictions on their relationship: she does not name the animal, tries not to touch it, and does not, except briefly, confine it (it can leave the house through a specially constructed flap). Over the course of the book they develop a remarkable relationship with its own language; not, of course, a human language, but one of gestures, movements and exhalations (hares, we learn, emit soft, puff-like sounds). Dalton has a zoologist’s eye for detail and a poet’s sensitivity to language; she conjures the beauty, the allure and variation of the hare’s sounds, mouth, eyes and fur, which changes with the seasons and marks the passage of time. Her language is shot with such intense tenderness and emotion that sometimes I paused, put down my pencil and asked myself: what are we actually talking about here? Are we talking about a hare? Yet the challenge of this book, or rather its invitation, is to temper parental assumptions and take Dalton’s language as it comes; to imagine and appreciate both that a leveret is not a child, and its care can be as intense and meaningful as care for a child.

It was the author Michael Pollan who asked, of our relationship with plants: who is domesticating whom? It’s a question that’s relevant here. The hare is clearly altered: she takes powdered milk, munches coriander and enters and leaves a human domus, deriving both protection and companionship. So too Dalton, this busy professional who hare-proofs her home, sacrifices her garden plants, discovers a sense of connection to the local landscape and reevaluates her past. Theirs is a mutual dance, one without a leader, and indeed it’s hard not to draw contrasts with the working culture of the place in which Dalton forged her career, Westminster. There is very little irony in this book; it possesses a dream-like quality, and often reads as a fable of metamorphosis. It is full of binaries: city v country; tame v wild; frenetic v still; before v after hare; binaries that are seductive and alluring but which perhaps reflect our own desires more than the messy realities of the Anthropocene (or indeed the painful and drawn-out process of personal change). “[Affection for an animal] has an innocence and purity of its own,” Dalton writes in a finely crafted section of the book that betrays her training as a speechwriter. But is this true? All relationships, whether human or non-human, contain darkness. Even relationships of care have their own shadow, yet in this tale darkness is an external, almost archetypal, force; the machine, the city, work, the past.

Each year there appear new books which fuse stories of personal transformation and non-human encounters whether with whales, octopuses, birds and such like. What would Berger have made of these stories – and our appetite for them? I think he might have critiqued the ease with which they flourish within those market systems which he excoriated for marginalising animals in the first place. But maybe he would have appreciated this book’s urge to restore a sense of the sacred, to meet animals on their own terms, and rewild the human imagination.

• Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.