2015 read #14: The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane.

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
330 pages
Published 2007
Read from March 16 to March 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

It was Roger Deakin who inspired my interest in books of eccentric (and, seemingly, ineluctably British) adventures in the proverbial backyard. His Waterlog documented his project to swim throughout the British Isles, "dipping into ponds and estuaries, lochs and ocean littoral, trout streams, fens, abandoned moats, canals, flooded quarries, harbors, industrial rivers, hidden becks, a cave, even heated swimming pools," as I put it in that review, while his Wildwood lingered in coppices and took delight in nuts and berries and sunbeams. Knowing nothing of Robert Macfarlane when Amazon recommended this book to me, I seized upon The Wild Places to fill a hunger for domestic exploration that had been maturing ever since I finished Waterlog, a craving Three Men on a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel had failed to assuage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Macfarlane and Deakin had become good friends in the last years of Deakin's life, and much of The Wild Places is imbued with Deakin's presence, his actions directly on the page or his example and inspiration like a warm light through eyelids. I only "know" Deakin through his own two books, and now through Macfarlane's depiction, but the chapters dealing with Deakin's death and Macfarlane's mourning have left me glum and heavy all day today.

Less eccentric, perhaps, than Deakin's quest in Waterlog, Macfarlane's project here is to discover any remnants of wildness left on the long-inhabited, recently-monocultured British archipelago. Beginning with the obvious wildernesses of the remote north, Macfarlane works his way toward more populated areas and a more intimate conception of what wildness might mean, finding (with Deakin) the wild in the limestone gryke microenvironments of the Burren and the forgotten holloways of the chalklands. Macfarlane's narration is also more conventional than what I recall of Deakin's sumptuous digressions, sticking close to his theme with beautiful but efficient prose, making for a faster but, perhaps, less beguiling and lingering read. Macfarlane's text also carries an undercurrent of melancholy, never approaching the gentle delight of Deakin's abbreviated career.

If his other books are like this one (and I've already ordered one more from ILL and one from Amazon), though, I can already tell Macfarlane will quickly become one of my favorite authors.