I picked up
The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane's account of walking (and sailing) across old paths, because the folks at Failbetter Games listed it as one of their inspirations for their upcoming game, Mandrake. Specifically, they said, "He's an exceptional writer, and meanders through history, science, folklore and nature in a fascinating and charming way," which sounded way too much like John McPhee for me to resist.
I mostly agree: He does meander through those things, and it's frequently charming and sometimes fascinating, and I think we've lowered the bar on exceptional a bit----
Old Ways is split into four sections, each of which follows Macfarlane across various landscapes: England, Scotland, Abroad, and England again. Of these, my favorites were the first three sections, which follow Macfarlane out of his house, down deer trails, and across the chalk downs via the Icknield Way, and the three sections dedicated to walking Scotland (particularly, the Isles of Lewis and Harris and the Cairngorms). In both, I found that the lasting commitment to a particular landscape made me want, very badly, to walk them,
and it filled my TBR lists with scads of writers and artists I'd never heard of before. I am particularly looking forward to Nan Shepherd's
The Living Mountain, about walking the Cairngorms, and I fell in love with the sculpture of
Steve Dilworth. (
Wow, I'd think, repeatedly, as Macfarlane described Dilworth's process of collecting materials,
We have very different rules about what you can do with animal remains!)
These moments of discovery-outside-the-book were one of the book's greatest pleasures. Stopping to look up a name or a title, to gawk at an image or a life, felt electric, much like finding an unexpectedly beautiful stone on a walk and taking it home to learn about it. That said, I do think it's telling that one of my highest pleasures came from taking the book outside the book...
It's unkind to anyone to compare them to John McPhee (including John McPhee!). But I couldn't help it. McPhee is a master delver; he is able to follow veins of thought to their origins (not only where did this rock come from, but where did the study of this rock come from, and where did the people studying it come from, and why did they all what they asked), so that this context, when he returns to the present day, illuminates not only what is considered a given, but what is being questioned. Macfarlane is a surface man, for all he can tell you the names and breeding habits of different insects or the names of five other writers who've walked these paths before. He's interested in the paradoxes of the facts as they stand, but rarely scrapes at
why.
This interest in the glittering surface--which is! beautiful! I cannot fault him for loving beautiful things!--is the root of my two greatest frustrations with the book, I think, that might otherwise seem unrelated. The first is, as always, linguistic. He has a habit of using fragments and out-of-place similies, and by the time I was four chapters in, I was like,
Get another trick, PLEASE. ( Examples )Later in the book, I realized that Macfarlane's most electric interest in the experience of walking is the moment where the paradox of self-and-landscape explodes; that he is drawn to, more than anything, the feeling of the old-and-continuing colliding with the particular present. In that light, his tendency to interrupt images with contemporary analogy at least made
sense to me, even if I didn't love it as a reading experience.
However, I found his attention to surface increasingly uncomfortable as the book went on, specifically as it revealed a mild, but present, Orientalist-like excitement about The Other. (This might not surprise anyone reflecting on his willingness to call the red loris of a grouse a "drag-queen slur." Please! Think! Okay this was published in 2012 but man!)
Surprisingly to me, this was not so bad in the section, "Limestone," where he visits and walks with a Palestinian friend of his, Raja Shehadeh, in the West Bank. Although that section is marked by his clear discomfort with his fear and anger, he is honest about it, and although he is not particularly good at writing about walking when guided--he doesn't push himself to research the flora, fauna, or previous writer-walkers--he is honest about Shehadeh's expertise and experience under occupation.
It's much worse in "Ice," his accounting of walking around Minya Konka with his friend and Tibetologist, Jon Miceler. This section features none of the narrative discomfort at not-knowing-or-understanding evident in "Limestone," despite that Macfarlane still knows just as little. I find myself assuming it's at least in part because his guide is also white, here. Macfarlane spends little time talking to or learning about the Tibetans they work with or encounter, and plenty of time making statements like, "The pilgrim on the kora contents himself always with looking up and inwards to mystery, where the mountaineer longs to look down and outwards onto knowledge," and, on the first American attempt to climb the mountain in the 30s, "He gazed out of the window and blinked happily, imagining a time when such adventure was still possible." And even:
‘There’s a Sanskrit word, darshan,’ Jon said as we gazed up at Konka. ‘It suggests a face-to-face encounter with the sacred on earth; with a physical manifestation of the holy.’ I hadn’t known the word, but I was glad to have learnt it. Darshan seemed a good alternative to the wow! that I usually emitted on seeing a striking mountain.
There's a part in this section where Macfarlane describes his "hunger for high mountains" as "unseemly," and my note was, "Not a surprise." There's something in wanting to walk landscapes that is about dissolution, and there's something about it that is about ownership. I think about this often when I think about my habit of birding, although, I admit that, like Macfarlane, my joy at seeing a piece of beauty alive
in the moment usually eclipses my curiosity about the drive to count and name and know. That said, a book is not written in the moment, and I do hold against him his choice to not interrogate himself or the history of mountaineering. (He does
recount the history of Western mountaineering in Tibet. He does not
ask much.)
This made the second-to-last section of the book, Ghost, an imagined reconstruction of the last days of Edward Thomas, English poet of the chalk downs, inveterate walker, depressive, and WW1 soldier, nearly unbearable. Yes, Thomas's poetry and walking across the downs was a constant presence in earlier parts of the book, but all this imaginative time spent.... I was annoyed. Guy who wants research getting treated to imaginary stories: :< face.
However! While I can't say I'll be searching out other Macfarlane any time soon, I know much of my frustration with the book comes from it being so nearly something I'd love.
The Old Ways fully eclipses many science books I've read (or gave up on). His interests and delights are real; sometimes his language
is terrific; his love of art and the breadth of his reading--and the notes section!!!--fully enriched my life and will continue to; someday I'll visit the chalk downs and the Cairngorms and the Hebrides, and what I read here will be with me then.
Last note, because I feel it would be unfair not to share it: Macfarlane travels to Spain to walk part of the Camino, but also, first, to visit his friend and material artist, Miguel Angel Blanco. Blanco's life work is
La biblioteca del bosque, a collection of false books that contain materials from each of his daily walks for decades. I love nothing quite Huge Installations, and I want to visit this so badly.
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