Come rain or shine

‘Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing,’ pleads Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.’ Weatherland would make Gwendolen very nervous indeed. Our observations of the sky, Alexandra Harris reveals in this extended outlook, have always meant something else.

Weatherland is a literary biography of the climate. Beginning with the Fall (in the Biblical rather than the autumnal sense) and ending with Alice Oswald, Harris condenses 2,000 years of weather ‘as it is recreated in the human imagination’. It is the weather-consciousness of writers, for the most part, that propels the narrative; art takes a back seat until the 17th century, at which point the sky appears in English painting and the purpose of a cloud, as Ruskin said, is no longer to put an angel on it.

Harris presents us with a vast canvas, filled to the edges. No Norman weathercock goes unobserved; we follow the sun as it evolves from a Renaissance symbol of majesty to the chilly light of Claude Lorrain; meteorological discoveries are included throughout. The result is variable: a dry start for some is followed by mainly bright and sunny spells, thickening at times, and culminating with a patch of low-level turbulence. What holds the material together is Harris’s fluent and unfaltering prose; she could be read for style alone.

We can blame Eve for our English summers. Eden’s ambient air made clothes unnecessary but one bite of the apple, according to Paradise Lost, and God unleashed the ‘alterations in the heavens and elements’. Milton, Samuel Johnson drily noted, was super-sensitive to temperature and only wrote at certain times of the year.