Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from July 22 to July 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Much of the critical coverage I've seen relating to this book emphasized its role as a "word-hoard." At least one review gently chided Macfarlane for producing what at times amounts to a topographic dictionary; I put off reading Landmarks for months, in fact, persuaded that it sounded more apt as a reference volume than an edifying read. The word-hoards, however, make up only half of the raison d'être of this volume. Landmarks is equally if not more so a wayfinding exercise through Macfarlane's influences as a writer, a protracted argument by example in support of a particular school of nature writing. Many of the chapters began life as introductions to the foundational texts (and authors) Macfarlane visits. The visits range from moving epitaphs (the chapter on Roger Deakin) to cursory overviews that quickly veer away to different authors altogether (the "North-Minded" chapter begins as an ostensible examination of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams but spends far more words introducing Peter Davidson). Macfarlane produces some of his most precise and elegant prose in pursuit of these authors, but its beauty is often pulled up short by his subject matter -- a guided tour of a writer's favorite books, no matter how elegantly worded, is always going to carry the stigma of a listicle.
The word-hoard, in its turn, is fascinating, but so loaded with Gaelic words and regional synonyms for general terms that its usefulness to an outside writer is limited, except in its role as a prompt to imagination and specificity. Which, after all, is Macfarlane's central argument throughout Landmarks. Great nature writing demands precision of meaning; the culture-wide drain of that precise awareness of the natural world is what Macfarlane, in his own way, hopes to avert, or at least delay.
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