‘A Year in Green Tea and Tuk-Tuks’ by Rory Spowers

I hate writing really critically about books that I read and always try to find something good to say about them. Normally, in a case like this, I would simply not have persevered. But this little book, originally published in 2007, was chosen by one of my reading groups, so I did read on and completed it. I really did not enjoy the experience, but I that was in part because I was reading this alongside ‘Daniel Deronda’ and Julian Jackson’s amazing biography of Charles De Gaulle. They were both such fantastic reading experiences that pretty well anything would have been a disappointment to pick up of an evening alongside.

Rory Spowers had previously written some interesting travel books about cycling in Africa and walking in India which received some acclaim. I find it difficult to believe that this one did. I note that the fulsome endorsement on the back cover comes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who is a personal friend.

The bulk of the book concerns the period between 2004 and 2006, during which Rory and his young family moved from Wales to Sri Lanka, where they acquired the lease on a tea plantation north of Galle with a view to running it on impeccably organic and sustainable principles.

My brother used to live in Sri Lanka and I have been there twice, so I am reasonably familiar with the geography and the people. I was therefore looking forward to reading the book. My disappointment was really due to three things.

First, it is very poorly edited. Much of it consists of diary entries that Rory Spowers presumably wrote at the time, but insufficient explanation is provided as to exactly how everything fits together. Aside from one plan of the plantation, there are no maps or photographs, and you rather have to piece the story together for yourself. I was not even sure whether the family actually lived on the tea plantation full-time, because so many of the diary entries are headed ‘Galle’, where they rented a place on first arriving in the country. I understand from reading elsewhere that they remained in Sri Lanka until around 2012, but the book rather gives the impression that they left earlier. It is simply not clear, particularly as the civil war begins to erupt again in 2006 after a period of relative peace. Moreover, the title promises ‘a year’, but the 'action' actually spreads across two.

It is, to put it mildly, all a bit thrown together and lacks coherence. More disappointingly, you never get much sense of what it was actually like to live in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the tsunami – or, indeed, simply to live there. There is surprisingly little about the food, culture, sights, sounds and texture of everyday life.

My second objection is to what I found to be rather clumsy attempts at humour and a somewhat Pooterish tendency to give equal significance to minor and major incidents. There is an absurdly long passage about a container lorry getting stuck in Rory’s father’s driveway while they are packing to leave which is so long-winded and unfunny as eventually to become funny, although not in the intended way. Some running jokes, such as the way a farm manager pronounces the word ‘yes’ as ‘yeees’, are repeated ad infinitum until you feel like throwing the book across the room.

But my main objection is to what struck me as Rory Spowers’s extraordinary lack of political self-awareness. He preaches green and sustainable living while flying here, there and everywhere to promote his causes, and seems somewhat baffled when accused of hypocrisy. There is also an uncomfortable irony in a privileged Englishman acquiring a lease on land in Sri Lanka and then deciding to tell the local people how they should farm it. They needed ‘educating’, apparently. To me, this sometimes reads less like enlightened environmentalism than a peculiarly modern form of liberal cultural imperialism - self-regarding, bossy and ethically smug.

Rory Spowers certainly comes from a privileged background. I could not find out much about his early life as online profiles start from when he left Edinburgh University. He may or may not be an Etonian. His older brother Hugo certainly was, and the fact that Rory keeps so quiet in public about his own schooling inevitably made me a tad suspicious. His father, Major William Spowers, was a successful director of Books and Manuscripts at Christie’s and created a substantial arboretum on the family's property at Windlesham in Surrey. None of this invalidates anything Rory Spowers has to say about environmentalism, of course. But given the extent to which the book tells other people how they ought to live, I found myself wishing for rather more self-reflection on the privileges and opportunities that made his own unusual way of eco-living possible.

At the end of the book he includes a series of short essays on different aspects of sustainable living – transport, water, energy, food supply, health, economics and so forth. These, unlike the earlier hodge-podge, are well written, suggesting strongly that this is a man who can write very eloquently when he chooses to. The problem for me is the insufferable preachiness and the absence of much evidence of serious expertise behind some of the sweeping claims. He appears to be counter-cultural, anti-growth and suspicious of all things Western, corporate and industrial more by inclination than by sustained argument. There are few references to serious work and a great many overly simplistic assertions.

As always with this sort of writing, that matters less when you happen to agree with the author, and on some matters I did. But his treatment of economics struck me as particularly limited. He offers platitudes about our economic system being predicated upon exploiting a planet with finite resources – simplistic baloney in my view – alongside some claims about alternative medicine that I found very unpersuasive. And all of this is delivered with remarkably little personal humility or acknowledgement that these are enormously complicated and contested questions.

I went along to my reading-group meeting expecting – as happened when we read Raynor Winn’s ‘The Salt Path’, another book I disliked intensely – to be the lone voice of negativity. Far from it. Nobody in the group had enjoyed the book, and nobody emerged from reading it with an enhanced opinion of Rory Spowers.

It is quite an achievement to write a personal memoir and have such a diverse group of readers all thinking less of you at the end than they did at the beginning.

So, sadly, this is not one I would recommend.