374 pages
Published 2012
Read from March 30 to April 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
There was an unconformity (in the geological sense) between this book and me, or between what the author intended to write and what I hoped and expected to read. I was beguiled by Macfarlane's The Wild Places, so easily and thoroughly charmed by his style and perspective that I prematurely forecast that Macfarlane would "quickly become one of my favorite authors." The mismatch may well be on my end -- circumstances have forced me to read this book in snatches of stolen time, rarely more than fifteen or twenty pages in a go, and with prose this consciously elliptical (there's even a glossary elucidating the more niche terminology Macfarlane employs), and a thematic through-line this all-encompassing and attenuated, it's likely my attention was too scattershot and flighty to appreciate what Macfarlane was going for here.
The blame is not wholly mine, however: some rests with the publishers, or whomever composed the jacket flap copy: "In this exquisitely written book, an immediate bestseller in England, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes that crisscross the British landscape and its waters, connecting them to the continents beyond." I tend to avoid jacket flap copy, and that first sentence is admittedly all I read. But I could be excused for expecting a book about, well, Robert Macfarlane setting off on ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths crisscrossing Britain, a text exactly in line with my recent interest (inspired by The Wild Places as well as the books of Roger Deakin) in British rights of way and tramping culture. Macfarlane does set off on one such tramp early in the book, along the Icknield Way, but the actual thematic through-line is a quasi-biography of a certain poet, Edward Thomas, as well as a thesis on how memory, personality, and identity relate to environments and the experience of walking -- in his paraphrase of Thomas' lines of thought,
...self -- not as something rooted in place and growing steadily over time, but as a shifting set of properties variously supplemented and depleted by our passage through the world. Landscape and nature are not simply there to be gazed at; no, they press hard upon and into our bodies and minds, complexly affect our moods, our sensibilities. They riddle us in two ways -- both perplexing and perforating us.It's all interesting enough when Macfarlane warms to these themes, but I don't think I forgave him for deviating from the path I'd expected to follow, and even his most evocative nature-writing felt lost on me.
Whether it was my own sense of disconnect, or whether this was indeed a lesser effort than The Wild Places, I didn't feel Macfarlane's prose was at the same level he produced for his debut work. His similes, while still bracingly original, often felt more strained than natural, and at times I couldn't quite suss out his meaning, especially when he left the ground for displays of philosophical scintillation. And this is a minor point, but I felt there's something disingenuous about a writer going off to Sichuan because he "couldn't think of anything I'd rather do" in one chapter, then in the next sneering about "trust funds." I'm sure it's great to be able to globe-trot on a whim while writing your next book, but having access to that kind of lucre should, as a rule, make it harder for you to offer "Trust fund kids, am I right?" comments.
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