THE FLITTING

Literary son seeks to connect with his outdoorsman father by exploring the latter’s lifelong fascination with butterflies.

Masters, who teaches English literature and writing at the University of Nottingham, is a devotee of American popular culture, while Dad, “steeped in natural history,” spent his life in the fields and woods of rural Northamptonshire. In this moving memoir, Masters cares for his terminally ill father while taking a crash course in lepidoptery. His “butterflying journey” goes beyond “trophy butterflies up in the canopies” to encompass poetic descriptions of their various forms of beauty, such as the “tiny white bit of punctuation on each hindwing of the Commas, short breaths for dead clauses.” Masters alternates passages of his lessons in natural life with stories from the lives of famous literary lepidopterists such as Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf. Nabokov advanced methods for classifying butterflies and identified a new species; Woolf portrayed her fellow novelist E.M. Forster as a pale blue butterfly. But for all of the entomological references Masters finds in great books, nature poetry, and pop culture, his memoir really resonates when he gets personal and describes the deepening of the father-son relationship in the face of imminent death. Along the way of his transformation “from butterfly-ignorer to butterfly-obsessive,” Masters brings his writerly skills to bear, such as when he describes the silver-washed fritillary as “an ingenious piece of orange origami powering above and disappearing into the hedgerow.” There are paeans to great insects like the purple emperor with its “owlish eyespot” and the white admiral with its “leopardish underside.” His recollections of his naturalist father and their late-in-life connection is replete with butterfly themes and imagery, but ultimately it is the humanity of their story that compels.

A heartfelt remembrance.