Currently listening to:

“Have you heard of James Herriot?”

Every time anything relating to England, farm life, World War II or, especially, work with animals comes into a conversation with me, it is almost always accompanied by that question.

To me, the name James Herriot is synonymous with some of the few happy memories I have of middle childhood. I won’t dig too deep into family life back then, but to say we had a lot of…rough…moments will be sufficient. But despite everything that happened back then, one prevailing memory is of my mom popping a cassette audiobook of James Herriot’s writing into the car radio, an experience we bonded over while she drove me, my brother, and often other kids from our rural hometown to the private school we all attended in the city beyond. I think in the early years it was a 45-minute trip, but by the end, 2 hours slogging through traffic was not out of the question.

As a kid, any amount of time stuck in a car is a long time. Double that during the days when it was rare for a working adult to own a cellphone, much less a kid. The James Herriot audiobooks, though, were something adults and kids alike could bond over, sharing moments of laughter or horror at the antics which were the life of a country vet before World War II. Perhaps it was made all the more amusing by the fact that everyone seated in that car was a farm kid. We only attended a school in the city because our parents made the sacrifices they believed were necessary to give us the sort of education we deserved.

But still, I hold firmly to the belief that James Herriot’s books possess a certain charm that transcends all life experiences and age gaps, and it is for this reason that I regularly find myself asking, “Have you heard of James Herriot?”

Book Overview

Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32085.All_Creatures_Great_and_Small

My Rating: 5/5 stars

All Creatures Great and Small is the first of four books following the early life and work of James Herriot, a young vet fresh out of school who lands a job working as the assistant to a man named Siegfried Farnon out in the Yorkshire Dales. Operating out of a charming old town property called Skeldale House alongside other colorful characters such as Siegfried’s charming rogue of a brother, Tristan, the stony-faced but ever-present housekeeper, Mrs. Hall, and militant secretary Miss Harbottle, Herriot sets out on his first two years of life as a country vet in pre-war England. The book follows through his ups and downs, the hilarious and heartbreaking moments, and culminates with his marriage to the spunky Daleswoman he fell in love with.

Herriot’s writing is largely viewed as semiautobiographical; his real name was James Alfred Wight, and many of the characters and stories in the book are only based on real events or people. Still, this book and those that follow remain quite real as they examine the joys and heartaches of country life and the love of animals.

If you were to look up a description of All Creatures Great and Small and its successors, you will likely see them described as “animal stories.” Which isn’t wrong, but perhaps a better way to describe them is “stories of the ways that animals influence our lives and bring people together.” After all, with the number of animal videos and pictures floating about on social media and online forums today, one thing quickly becomes abundantly clear. The love of animals is a universal language.

What I Liked

I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that this is my first official read-through of the books themselves, and I haven’t listened to the audiobooks since those long car rides between home and school. Still, I am happy to say that after over a decade since I last popped those old cassettes into a player, I still find that I love the stories every bit as much as I did when I was a child, and perhaps more so now, because as an adult I have a profound appreciation for an outside look at a life that was inherently hard and fraught with its fair share of mistakes.

Autobiography or not, the stories in All Creatures Great and Small do anything but overexaggerate Herriot’s success both in his professional and personal life. There are tales of some of the jobs he wasn’t able to successfully complete and the animals he failed to save. He even talks about his few quite disastrous attempts at courting and interacting with the woman who would eventually become his wife, including a flat tire and a flooded floorboard on their very first date. In a book where it would have been easy only to regale the audience with his tales of success, Herriot takes a refreshingly humble and humorous approach to experiences that were, at the time, likely quite humiliating.

Humor is the overtone for this book, and despite the hardships and harsh realities sprinkled through the work, the more amusing tales make up the difference. My favorite has to be the story of Herriot catching a ride with Siegfried in a car with no brakes, but that is only one of many.

Another thing I greatly appreciate about the writing in this book is the personable way in which the characters are described. The description is superb, and I felt like I was getting to know the characters as real people, not just caricatures on a page. My heart broke at the description of a widower reminiscing about the wife he loved and badly missed and soared with affection at the description of the girl who rode her bike all the way into town to get her hard-working father a bottle of his favorite drink with the few coins she had managed to scrape together.

The book centers around work with animals, and I do love animals, but it’s the people that I remember most. I’ve never been to England, and I doubt I would ever have the grit to be a vet in the modern day, much less almost 100 years ago, but the dales of Darrowby feel like home when I read these stories and the hardy Dalespeople feel like family.

What I Did Not Like

I can’t say there’s anything that I truly don’t like about this book, but for those who are more accustomed to a modern read, perhaps it’s fair to drop a word of caution.

For starters, there are moments where understanding what is going on in the dialogue is a challenge. Much of the dialogue in the book is in the local vernacular, and that way of speaking is quite foreign to someone like me. So if you aren’t the kind of reader who is interested in putting forth the effort to decode what is being said, the read can be a bit slow in spots.

Also, while the book isn’t gory, Harriot doesn’t exactly mince words when it comes to the biological processes dealt with in veterinary practice. This could be offputting to some who are looking for a less…gritty…read.

My Take-Away

Well, if my introduction doesn’t sum it up, I suppose I’ll ask again, “Have you heard of James Herriot?”

If you’re at all interested in slice-of-life stories centering around the common love of animals, this is the book for you. The characters—human and animal alike—are loveable and memorable, and I feel like the simple, down-to-earth tales are capable of reaching across the generations in a way few stories can.

In the right setting, at least, the stories can also be a bonding experience between the generations. This one isn’t just a book review to me. My hope is that others will discover and fall in love with the James Herriot stories, and that maybe, just maybe, they will be able to provide a bright spot even in the hardest of circumstances the way they did for me all those years ago.