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| South Downs, South England, snow; some sheep. (via my.opera.com) |
Robert
Facfarlane doesn't live in the same world as the rest of us. His
world is better, probably. He's the kind of guy whose life consists
of looking out the window after a few hours of writing, noticing that
it's just snowed, and pulling on his boots to walk across the crisp
virgin whiteness with a dram of whiskey and a few owls
for company. This isn't me being poetic; this is the first chapter of
the book. Last time it
snowed I checked the bus schedule to see whether I would be late. The
people he meets are all folklorists or poets as well as fishermen or
sailors or farmers or just walkers. The people I meet mostly work 9-5
and don't like it very much. The places he goes are imbued with
mystery and magic and soul; the places I go are now mostly dingy backroads near Kings Cross.
The
delight of The Old Ways
is that Macfarlane shares this world view with you, for a few hours
at least. He is primarily a walker, of course, and not all of us have
a lot of time for walks in the country or holidays with our academic
friends in Gaza or our mountaineering friends in Tibet or our
fisherman friends in Orkney. But we can enjoy them vicariously.
Macfarlane, in places, writes a weird sort of travel writing.
Unlike
most travel writers, however, Macfarlane is not really interested in
describing locations or places per se. He is far more interested in
analysing the journey itself, in the effect of a new place on the
mind, in the palimpsests of history that leave their vague tracks
across the land. This is travel writing located somewhere between
love poetry and academia, closer to Nabokov's 'travel writing' of
America in Lolita
than Bill Bryson (disclaimer: I have never read a single word by Bill
Bryson). In Macfarlane's eyes, the world is permanent but also
weirdly inconstant. The walker has access to a whole range of levels
of experience at once: aesthetic bliss in nature, the crunch of fresh
snow beneath boots; the simple pleasures of greasy campstove bacon
after a thirty mile day, a night spent with ghosts in a neolithic
barrow; the slight resistance of the rudder as you learn how to steer
a boat, tacking across the wind; company, the fact that hiking is
about the only place where strangers acknowledge one another's
presence rather than icily gliding past one another, eyes fixed
ahead, like icebergs or ex-lovers; connection with the past,
connection with a friend; profound alienation; and, perhaps most of
all, the easy rhythm of an experienced walker's paces, free,
unencumbered, tramp tramp tramp towards the horizon.
The amazing thing is that a Cambridge academic can write a
non-polemic book about walking and folklore and Romantic poets and
that it can be so rhetorically effective and convincing. Macfarlane
gives the world a little bit of a glimmer, even as you tire of his
almost precious interests and pursuit of obscure, long dead poets.
There are other ghosts for us to follow.
As I sit here writing this, I am in the back of my parents' car, on
the M4, just west of Swindon. Arguably the least romantic or exciting
place in the world. But, post Macfarlane, or, with Macfarlane, I am
starting to see a little bit of joy. It's a dark, cold November
night, one of the first frosts of the winter, and we pass men in high-vis jackets spreading grit, slightly illuminated by our headlights,
and pass into a world where vague fog gives a dreamy quality to the
pricks of light that pass us by, and to the red dots than hang a half
mile in front of us, leading the way, and to the cat's eyes that mark
the road and keep us from going astray.
