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Wild
Griffiths gave up her job and sold everything she had to go and spend seven years of her life travelling in the world's wildest and loneliest places, and living with the rugged, capable and wonderful peoples who still know how to survive in the wild. In the Amazon, she asks what is the worst thing that could happen to her. La muerte, claro (Death, of course) is the blunt reply. It does not put her off. The parts of Wild are Earth, Ice, Fire, Air, and Mind. Each one takes fifty or eighty pages in the telling - and represents a year or more of Griffiths' life. It is an astonishing undertaking, indeed truly "elemental". Griffiths was a journalist, but in Wild she consciously chooses to abandon "the bounds of my tribe (physical bounds and intellectual bounds)", preferring "the real outside". Her descriptions are accurate, but intensely coloured by her experiences - alone on the ice or in the rain forest; in the company of the Inuit, the Aborigine, the Amazon tribes. She is not afraid of 'purple prose' here and there, nor of admitting anger with white man's racism - the despoliation of Australia, the scorn for "the idea of there being a famously large number of words for snow in Inuktitut". For there really are many:
It really shouldn't be a surprise - skiers know half-a-dozen words (powder, crust, firn or neve, ice, junk, sugar, slush, piste, drift, mogul ...) and that is based on far less experience than the Inuit's.
This is precise knowledge, both on the part of the vanishing Inuit hunters - nowadays they live in heated houses in towns, with freezers and televisions - and on Griffiths': her journalist's eye for attributable facts serves her well. Wild is a unique book: passionate, informed, deeply-researched, intellectual, scorched by the earth's wildest places. It's not easy to put down.
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Wildwood
Deakin died just after finishing Wildwood, so this book is automatically poignant: not just a celebration of life and wildness, but also an epitaph for this wonderful, crazy, brilliant, down-to-earth craftsman of wood and words. Deakin was very comfortable with wood, and in woods. Indeed there was a timber merchant named Wood in his family, and one of his father's Christian names was Greenwood, so he tells us. It is at once personal, uncompromising, and captivatingly narrated. There is no academic or intellectual lamentation about how we have lost touch with nature, no vague generalisation: but the truth emerges, clearly and naturally. He rebuilt his ancient moated house, from a mossed-over, wooded-up ruin, into a lovely, light, airy place: in the process getting to know every one of the 300 beams ("300 trees: a small wood") that made up the ancient oak frame of the house. He describes the carpenter's marks on the beams - cut ready to fit together, then transported and assembled on site. His wanderings about Britain may seem random, but are highly directed: to the places where the Green Man may be found in a dozen churches; to the home of that most English of plants, the Cricket Bat Willow; to the places where those old badgers, Cobbett and Ruskin, protested the injustices meted out to the common man. There is nothing "quaint", no "folklore" here: just a constant delight in nature, a steady slow-burning fuse of evidence, of hard-won knowledge lightly worn. Or he shares his visit to the Pilliga forest in New South Wales, describing in careful but lightly-told detail how the forest of today is not what it seems; how Charles Darwin saw an open park-like woodland, not the dense and lovely tangles that people imagine is the ancient wooded landscape of Australia. He tells from intimate knowledge of the species of trees that used to dominate; of the skill of the Aborigines in managing the land with fire; of the extinction of the local Kamilaroi language, ironically just as the first and last dictionary of that lost tongue was published. Deakin is not afraid of seeming tame: he is as much at ease telling us about a Bluebell picnic - on a lawn with a woodland view, accompanied by a posse of Cambridge botanists - as roaming the Outback. His knowledge is deep, even encyclopaedic: he collected facts as he collected interesting pieces of wood, stones, feathers - kaleidoscopically. It's just a pity that there's no index in the current paperback edition - let's hope the publisher rectifies this soon. Wildwood is, quite simply, a delight. You will want to visit the places described; you will look afresh at the wild places you know; and you will be glad that you met Deakin, in the only way that is now possible, through his graceful and supple writing. |
The Wild Places
Macfarlane knew Deakin, and was inspired by meeting him and visiting his extraordinary house. As a young, tree-climbing academic in the distinctly tame countryside of Cambridge, just sitting in the top of his favourite tree outside the city simply wasn't enough to satisfy his craving for wildness. So, Macfarlane sets out to the farthest shores of the British Isles, trying both to redraw his map of these islands - not with roads and cities, but coasts and mountains and woods and bogs, linked by ancient footpaths and holloways (roads worn down into the land by centuries of feet and cartwheels), and to define for himself what wildness really means. In the space of fifteen carefully-crafted chapters, with titles like Beechwood, Moor, Grave, Holloway and Saltmarsh, Macfarlane introduces us to some of his favourite places, views, treasures - in the form of found stones and shells and bits of wood, in a Deakinesque manner. Where Griffiths is passionate, even overheated, and Deakin is calm but subtly warm, fiercely rooted in wood, Macfarlane can seem at first rather cold and intellectual: skilful with words, but oddly bloodless. It takes some chapters to start to realize the quality of The Wild Places; a desire to immerse oneself in wildness (both Deakin and Macfarlane favour swimming the wild way, Deakin notably traversing many of our wilder rivers in Waterlog). There is a plan to the book: around the British Isles, upside down; around the different kinds of wild place - high, low, wet, dry, hard, soft, empty, populated. The last is plainly a surprise to Macfarlane, who travels from an initial rather romantic conception of the places unaffected by man (as if), to places with strong energies of their own, and the people who naturally go with them. There is a bit of dialectic about all this - a thousand student essays on Man vs Nature, perhaps - but it becomes clear that Macfarlane is coming down to earth, and warmth creeps into his writing. Macfarlane is at his best describing the wonderful diversity of life in the Burren: a rainforest in miniature, in the deep narrow grykes between the clints, the hard, dry exposed slabs of limestone pavement: an endangered habitat if ever there was one. And his love for Coruisk, beyond The Bad Step in the Cuillin Hills of the Isle of Skye, shines out despite any clever word-schemes or devices.
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