Robert Macfarlane

Several years ago I was visiting our daughter in Bath, Somerset where she then lived. It was inevitable in my roamings that I would find myself in a book shop, preferably one that served coffee and cake. But, I had said to myself, before I left Vancouver, there was no way I was going to buy a book 

So, Alison was at work and I was left to my own devices. Bath is both a Roman and a Georgian city. It is a beautiful place that rises up from the River Avon which forms its natural heart and is quaintly accompanied by the railway station which, for years, has been its unnatural centre.  The city encroaches its way up the seven or so hills which surround it. Bath University where Alison worked at the time sat atop one of those hills, not quite in the bucolic patchwork quilt situation of Bath Spa University where she had worked previously.  This Davidson can wander for hours around such places, wondering at the Roman Baths, wondering at the Georgian Crescents. The city reeks of history, smells and sights and sites which blend the past and the present.  

I found my way to the Recreation Ground where Bath Rugby play their games. Like many cities which do not possess a Premier League football team,  they have a pretty good rugby team. The west of England remains an hotbed of first class rugby teams.  I strolled into their rugby shop just up the old stairs by the river. I took deep breaths of relaxed air as the whole ambience of the old buildings, the old world feel of the place added to the people going about their business, the tourist busses of Spanish students, the local art gallery’s Toulouse Lautrec exhibition.  My whole being calmed through a blissful sense of continuity, I was uplifted. Time for a bookshop and a coffee. But first a newspaper to read.

The city has turned once traffic filled streets into pedestrian walk areas so I strolled with little urgency, found a newsagent, bought a copy of “The Times’ and continued my saunter. Eventually a bookshop appeared. The windows were full of Robert Macfarlane’s latest publication, “Underland”.  Its orange hard-backed cover was alone in the window display, large cut-outs of its cover, life-size of its author. Possibly I tried not to look, probably I smiled ruefully, certainly I knew that my resolution not to buy was for nought.  I walked through the doors, bought his book and was upstairs in the café breaking its spine, and reading his introduction before the steam from my flat white had dissipated. As I reflect on this moment I am almost back there.

There are some authors, Dear Friends, whose prose flows, whose descriptions dream, whose words move across the page like honey across toast.  So engrossed was I in his writing that I was ensconced in that café for far too long, time joined me in stillness.  Remembering what he wrote about is hard for me now, I would have to reach for it again and remind myself.  Being interested in the writing process I have read that ‘nobody writes about the view for 5 minutes” a denigration of long descriptions by RL Stevenson. I completely understand this except that if Robert Macfarlane or Sarah Bakewell or Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo writes about the view for much more than 5 minutes, I love it.  I cannot explain why and often a week after I have read it I cannot remember the content or context but I am carried along by the words at the time. I have never experienced yoga or a massage but, Friends, I have been calmed by long walks in beautiful areas, as I know many of you have. In outstanding writing the sentences trickle by like a stream through a wood, a breeze amongst the trees. The English language lies on its back on the grass on a sunny day, watches fair weather clouds scudding across a blue sky, sucks in nature’s breath and exhales its calm.

June 7ths ‘Globe and Mail’ featured an article on Macfarlane’s new book “Is a River Alive?” The next day, I drove up to Edgemont Village and the quaint book store mysteriously named “32 Books”.   I will only buy a book which will likely be a ‘keeper’. All Macfarlane’s books are such. I was not concerned that it might take a couple of weeks before the order came through so was immediately surprised when the cashier buzzed away from the counter and came back with the book seconds later.

Robert Macfarlane is 48 years old. He is a professor of English at Cambridge University. He is a rock climber, an explorer and a writer. I have read all of his books some of them twice. I would never have read any of them but for my brother, George, whose reputation remains unsullied as never havingrecommended a bad book.  Macfarlane could write a book on the qualities and varieties of  pancake mixes and I would read it and enjoy it. He wrote an introduction to “Living Mountain’ by Nan Shepherd, a  short book written in the first half of the 20^th Century .I  recommend it for anybody who wants to walk in the Cairngorm National Park in the north of Scotland.  It too is a beautiful wee book but, Friends, Macfarlane’s longish introduction is better.

What can I say about “Is a River Alive?” other than you should read it. Macfarlane goes to Ecuador and spends time in the Cloud Forest which has recently been saved by the government from the ravages of mining companies. I have yet to explore what he says about Indian and Canadian rivers. I am reviewing a book and its author as a fraud as I am only a couple of chapters into it. Like many of you, Dear Friends, I prefer the icing to the cake. This book to me is all icing. To savour it, I have to limit myself. I need to discipline myself not to read it during the day because then I will finish it and completion will leave a hole.  I will feel that I have cheated myself. This is a book which I only read in bed at night. I try to read no more than 10 pages per session.  And, most importantly, I slow my reading so that each phrase is savoured, each masterful paragraph allows me to join Macfarlane’s group as they wend their way up the muddy paths to the birthplace of the river of the Cedars in Ecuador. The best is yet to come, I feel.

Robert Macfarlane has long talked about ‘finding the boundless in the bounded” and has realised that ‘wandering and wondering have long gone together’.  He could of course preach this pithiness from his high pulpit but he doesn’t. He lives it. He loves John Muir’s* maxim that ‘going out was really going in” for as such we learn so much about our inner selves. But in this book he refers to rivers as ‘who’, he recognises that they have rights. To those who see this as some ecowarrior cloud cuckoo land, a latter day back to the land hippy, let me inform that the Ecuadorian government has done the same saving the Cloud Forest, a home to such a colossal variety of biology and botany, and given all rivers personal pronouns, no ‘which’ only ‘who’. Macfarlane is in at the beginning of something unusual. But, Dear Friends, it really shouldn’t be unusual that people need their water to be fresh and unpolluted, drinkable and disease free. Robert Macfarlane shows that the reversal in water pollution very possible and very quick given the will and the power.  Please read this book.

Let me, Dear Reader, leave you with William Shakespeare:-

“And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything.”

Thanks for reading.

*John Muir— Scots born writer, explorer, adventurer, founder of the Sierra Club.