Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks is a simple wonder

There is a paradox at the heart of Robert Macfarlane’s latest project. Doesn’t language get between us and the world?

Supplied Editorial English writer Robert Macfarlane

The first thing Robert Macfarlane wants to show me is a tree: a dawn redwood, to be exact. The coniferous green giant is one of more than 100 rare, lovely or eccentric examples planted in the gardens of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where Macfarlane has been a fellow since 2001.

As we tramp along stone paths and climb the worn back stairs to his rooms, the Nottinghamshire-born writer tells the story of the redwood’s discovery. Until a keen-eyed Chinese forester happened on a single example of the tree in the 1940s, it was known only from Mesozoic-era fossils. It is a living example of the genus Metasequoia, thought to be extinct for five million years.

As Macfarlane attempts to clear a space among his donnish mess of books and papers for us to sit, it occurs to me that this story is a fragment in which his larger method is contained: simple wonder, bolstered by empirical knowledge, delivered in vivid narrative form.

Such attentiveness to the world is catching. Anyone who has read one of Macfarlane’s works of place-based literature will know the feeling of heightened awareness they engender. Go outside after closing one of them and bland reality resolves itself into a series of small miracles. You perceive what medieval theologians called haecceity, this-ness all around you — whether “this” is a tree, a rock, a bird.

For now, Macfarlane is in the more prosaic situation of submitting to interviews about his new work, Landmarks, in which he turns his attention to the relationship between language and place. For many years he has been collecting place-related terms, and the book’s chapters are interspersed with glossaries: words referring to rivers and mines, bogs and coastlines, mountains and woodlands from all corners, linguistically and geographically, of the British Isles. They can be mellifluous and onomatopoeic, gruff and utile, but they are all markers of specificity. They refer back to a time in which people’s relation to the land was more intimate, more tactile, more demanding of fine-grained discrimination. A ghost dictionary for a lost world, then?

Not quite, Macfarlane explains, and finely balances his new project’s aim as divided between “Avant-garde antiquarianism” — an attempt to “salvage a shadow language as it slips from us” — and a celebration of the possibility of fresh creation.

“The book is always teetering on a sense of its own futility in that these glossaries might be no more than reliquaries or cabinets of curiosity,” he says. “But on the other hand, speaking more hopefully, there is a sense in which these words possess afterlives, or new lives, or new forms of vigour — hopefully they set imaginations tingling as well as giving glimpses back into these lost life-words.”

He continues: “I try to resist an instrumentalist account of what releasing these words back into circulation might do, but I feel hopeful that some of them will go on and live unexpected lives.”

There is every chance they will, since Macfarlane, since publication of Mountains of the Mind in 2003 and three subsequent place-based narratives — The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012) and Holloway (2013) — has built a substantial following, both for his books and for the ideas that animate them. In the dozen years since he began, Macfarlane has worked at the vanguard of a cross-cultural movement that has tried to reanimate our wonder in and respect for the natural world.

Yet there is a paradox at the heart of this latest project. Doesn’t language get between us and the world? How do you inspire direct contact with nature via such a noisy intermediary? Macfarlane agrees the book is “a first technology, a first mediation”, but he has a more nuanced take.

“It’s a fascinating conundrum, whether we can find an art that reacts to nature without intervention — that stands as a form of pure transcription,” he says, and speaks of contemporary experiments in what he calls “un-meditation” such as field recording, sound art, in which ‘‘the cassette recorder is the technology but it’s spectral to the point of invisibility’’.

“Writing doesn’t do that. As I write in Landmarks, ‘Light doesn’t have a grammar.’ As soon as you work in language you’re acknowledging the basic paradox of the impossibility of a pure representation.

“The more interesting question is how do we twist and torque and splinter language in ways that make it better at its strange job of evoking the world.”

The question of human interpolation is at the heart of several essays in the book, appreciations of nature writers (a term, coincidentally, that Macfarlane dislikes — “it makes my gills shiver”) such as JA Baker and Nan Shepherd who have sought to erase the lyric “I” of the romantics and replace it with something more elusive.

Macfarlane says of all his works Landmarks “has the least of me in it. I flit in and out of its pages, occasionally there as a pair of eyes or as a companion or as a compass wielder. I’ve tried to make myself less present and more ghostly.”

Whatever the case, Macfarlane’s love of Scotland, home of his grandparents, remains palpable on the page. His long chapter on Shepherd, a poet, novelist and schoolteacher who spent years roaming the Cairngorms, writing her way into the mountains and their moods is a standout section of the book. He’s only just returned from one of his many treks through the area.

“The Cairngorms are a wild, strong place,” he says. “It has left its marks on me in ways that I’m just recovering from.”

This makes sense when we view the arc of his writing: from a celebration of mountains in the western imagination to a fascination with “edgelands”, the interzone between urban and rural. It is as though the author has set himself the challenge of finding beauty in ever more ordinary landscapes: recompense, in a way, for his early indifference towards the undramatic Midlands farmlands in which he grew up. “I lacked the wit to comprehend North Nottinghamshire as a child,” he says. “I saw it as a pastoral Xerox.”

And a love of the Gaelic-speaking Outer Hebrides remains at the heart of the book. Macfarlane’s initial inspiration came from a desire to hoard those words from the islands that were threatened by disuse. As the traditional task of peat-cutting fell into desuetude, for example, so did those many words that graded and defined the landscape. That bleaching of significance may have broader ramifications. The author relates how extensive peat-bogs on the Isle of Lewis, now considered an empty wilderness, recently became the potential site of Britain’s largest wind farm.

When Macfarlane speaks of Gaelic as a “dazzlingly site-specific language which is withering on the tongue” (not just in terms of primary-language speakers — “its own subtleties and specificities are also coarsening out”), I can’t help but think of our local situation, where 110 of the 145 Aboriginal languages still spoken are considered critically endangered. Can there be remediation of language as well as landscape? Are the fates of the two intertwined? Macfarlane responds by speaking of the resilience of the literary traditions of his home culture.

“Here we have a tradition of place-based writing that goes back to Beowulf and Celtic Christian nature poetry of the 8th century. And it is deep, and it is long, and it is strong.

“That tradition occasionally appears to be broken but it always never has been — even in the 20th century. Even during this supposedly dark period, when you look carefully there are astonishing works everywhere: blinding beacons like Nan Shepherd and JA Baker.”

Still, if climate scientists are correct we are in for challenges that far exceed those facing us today. I put it to Macfarlane that, while his five works of creative nonfiction are ostensibly apolitical, they are nonetheless impelled by a desire to change us — our minds, our attitudes and our practices — and so have something to with globalised social and political environmental movements of the moment.

His response is eloquent: “You could describe the politics of my writing as ‘progressive parochialism’. It seeks to reinstate older forms of intimacy, place knowledge, grace and wonder that arise from good relations with the land.

“I become very anxious when I am asked to conceive of [ecological] consequence at a global level. It seems so impossible and so preposterous.”

If there is a sensible modesty of scale in this response, there is also modesty in Macfarlane’s ambivalently optimistic conclusion: “There is unintended consequence of writing: writing is an act of hope. And hope is an act of not-knowing, of uncertainty.”

Oddly enough, this optimism emerges from those forces that most threaten our unmediated engagement with the natural world. When I ask him about his position in relation to technology, and in particular to what Walter Benjamin called the “tyrannical perpendicular” of the screen, his response is surprising.

“Cyberspatial experience has come to rival and in many ways exceed that of the natural. It’s tightening its grip in countless ways.

“But it does a have a counter-consequence: a drive back to contact, to responsibility, to touch and the body and we see that in a hundred ways as well. The surge in place-based or landscape culture is one very visible version but there are many others. As the grip tightens, so do the means of evading it develop too.”

Landmarks ends on a similar note of paradoxical confidence. In a chapter that deals with the ecological imagination in childhood, Macfarlane notes a dramatic shrinkage in the amount of time spent by young people in natural spaces in Britain. He quotes a study that reveals that nine out of 10 children can identify a Dalek; three out of 10 a magpie. However he lingers more on an experiment run near his home in Cambridge: in an effort at rewilding, four and five-year-olds from a local school were taken by teachers to a large park on the edge of town. There they were encouraged to play, climb, build and loaf about.

The experiment was an astonishing success. It turns out that children exposed to nature become natural map-makers, as well as storytellers who weave language and place together in much the same way they build dens from pieces of scavenged wood. The bodily confidence they developed was accompanied by expanded imaginative powers.

Macfarlane, typically, does not draw any forced conclusion from these children’s newly ignited love of nature, but he bathes in the atmosphere of their glee and adventurousness just long enough to remind us that we, too, once lived in some purer relation with the world.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Landmarks, by Robert Macfarlane, is published by Hamish Hamilton ($45 HB). Delia Falconer will review the book next week.