Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s novel of human violence and natural wonder

When a good nature poet decides to write fiction, as Elizabeth-Jane Burnett has done with her debut novel, Splendour, then not only do mundane events become magical; setting is liberated from its unfair status as a secondary backdrop. Splendour is a moving tale about two girls, Leah and Kenjo, navigating life during and after the Mau Mau uprising against the British colonial regime in 1950s Kenya. But from the giddy opening, which features the girls guzzling rain (Kenjo shows Leah how “to slide the sky in, down her throat, like a shaft of light through the canopy”), to the ancient forest where a fittingly nostalgic ending unfolds, nature is at its core.

Born in Devon to a Kenyan mother and an English father from a farming family, Burnett has been called a “new school nature writer”. She roots her novel in a sense of ecological consciousness, reflecting on the trophy hunting of hornbill birds, the overlooked struggles of moss, and the “sacrilegious” felling of mũgumo fig trees. “When even one tree died, its loss cascaded on,” Burnett writes. “Leaving only the memory of water where it used to run.”

Despite the novel’s poetic shimmer, Burnett honours the power of plot and is unafraid to dwell in its darkest twists and turns. Mothers shriek, men shout, girls are held at knifepoint, and villages are torched to the ground. Gunfire rains and the military strikes. The violence of an aerial bombing is articulated in unnerving, sublime prose: “The huge bird lays dark eggs in the sky that hatch instantly into fire.”

Splendour uses a roaming third-person perspective, shifting between different characters to show the story through each of their eyes. One of the most visceral scenes records Kenjo’s horrific experience of being captured by a rebel fighter and held in a forest cave. “When he stopped to light a cigarette, it seemed like the stars had aligned,” Burnett writes. Kenjo douses her abuser in paraffin and escapes while the man burns alive.

The story is lightened by the love between Leah and Peter, a British settler’s son; the couple marry and move to England. As they experience struggles with infertility, “he told her that it didn’t matter, this child that didn’t come. If it did, it was a blessing. If it didn’t, they had each other.” This blessing arrives in the form of a daughter named Hannah, though her eventual career as an academic proves to be less than ideal. Hannah navigates institutional prejudice and is hospitalised after burnout: “Evaluations, committees and forms had buried her more than once in their rotting leaves.”

A beautiful scene unfolds after Hannah resigns and retreats to her mother’s countryside home where, living out a fantasy of technological emancipation, she buries her laptop and phone in the earth. The narrative jolts between timelines, these twists and turns honouring the tangled nature of life itself, especially the “wood-wide-web [...] trees communicating through roots and fungi”. The motif of moss is as invasive here as in Burnett’s Wainwright prize-shortlisted nonfiction work Twelve Words for Moss (2023); both Burnett and Leah are guided through grief for a dead father by what the author has described as this ancient plant’s “tiny beacons of light”. Despite atrocious violence, Burnett ensures that nature’s splendour shapes each line. Even when history stains, this debut novel shines.

Splendour is published by Particular Books (£20). Order a copy at The Observer Shop for £18 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply.

Photograph by Graham Shackleton