The Farmer’s Son: Calving Season on a Family Farm
By: John Connell / Narrated By: Alan Smyth
Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
When living and working on a farm makes you more loving and NOT callous!
What I really, really loved about The Farmer’s Son was that it turned John Connell, already a grand respecter of life, into a wonderful advocate of animals. I know, I know. Life on a farm is a different reality, fraught with death, and when the farm animals are slated for farm-to-fork lives, there’s not much room for compassion or for seeing creatures as individuals in their own right (Think: Jon Katz and his woeful Going Home where we’re SUPPOSED to find peace when our loved animal companions pass, but it is instead a treatise on how urban folks just don’t get that not all animals are worthy of life. Yes, yes, yes, I’ve whined about Katz before, and I STILL want to listen to his other audiobooks I have in my Library, but really? On the day my precious Wootie died?!? I did NOT need that book!!!).
Instead, what we have in THIS wonderful audiobook is a completely and unutterably devoted man doing his best to care for his family’s cows, calves, sheep, lambs, and even the family’s young and easily distracted dog, Vinny. It opens, not unlike All Creatures Great and Small, with Connell doing his best during a very difficult birthing situation and goes on to him treating animals as they live and die.
And it’s about his precarious peace with his unyielding and undemonstrative father. As a matter of fact, his father is demonstrative only when he’s picking at everything Connell’s attempted or when he’s flat-out yelling and blasting Connell to Kingdom Come. The son runs (literally); the son hides. And at the end, he must come to terms with some really hurtful, really honest comments his father makes that wound him to the core.
This is a wonderfully written book, and John Connell has that wonderfully Irish way with words and with description. It kinda makes me wanna check into his other books, but maybe that’s just cuz I just heard his dad TRASH ‘em. I dunno. Still, I’d like to think my interest was based more on interest inspired by nifty language, NOT on Dad’s demeaning words.
Alyn Smyth does a fine job with narration, made it sound so natural that I had to double-check a couple of times to see that The Farmer’s Son wasn’t a Written and Narrated By deal. He has warm tones, and naturally: Who DOESN’T like an Irish accent?!?
Lovely writing with a fantastic love of animals. Connell is a good-hearted man who wants to do the best by everyone. Scattered throughout, too, are references to mythology, different cultures. And unfortunately to the world’s history of mistreatment of animals, many many of which occur here in the States. Still, he’s not harsh or thumbing his nose up at the U.S.; he’s just more concerned with being the best farmer he can be, with getting his animals to market, yes, but giving them good and healthy lives while they’re on the farm in the meantime.
QUITE a loving and refreshing look at life on a farm!
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