The Wild Places - Robert MacFarlane

Robert MacFarlane's The Wild Places (2008) is the second entry in a loose series of travel writing books which began with his Mountains of the Mind. Robert travels to the remote areas of the British Isles on a quest to find wildness and discover how much of our country remains untouched by mankind. His locations include Ynys Enlii, the Coruisk Basin, Rannoch Moor,  Ben Hope, the Lake District, Chideok Holloway, Orford Ness and Dengie Peninsula among others. These locales range from the inhospitable to the serene, with Robert sleeping rough on their varying terrains and providing historical and philosophical commentary. Written in a buoyant yet reflective style, I couldn't help but notice just how middle class and polite the whole thing was. From the opening, we see that our guide is a very privileged, one might say entitled, young Cambridge man and his forays into the rugged wilderness are always done so with a pampered reassurance that all will go smoothly.

Robert's main critic is the angry journalist Kathleen Jamie. In a scathing review called 'A Lone Enraptured Male' (London Review of Books. Vol. 30, 2008) she writes: 'The Wild Places will be much loved because, for all its wildness, it's a deeply conservative book, and very English... It is sensitive, courteous and above all comforting.' I think this is the main problem I had with it, I don't want to feel like my hand is being held as I'm 'courteously' guided through these wild reaches. Robert frequently makes rather winsome mewlings on the loss of nature to the advance of civilisation which read like priggish sermons. His nights in the wild, with the exception perhaps of Ben Hope, all appear a little too comfortable as he munches on bars of chocolate and bathes in clear mountain springs. There is never any mention of where or how he deals with more unpleasant bodily functions, the pages are simply not to be soiled with such. Despite his desire not to glamourise or aestheticise nature too much, Robert ends up doing exactly that.

Another interesting point made by Kathleen Jamie in the same article is on the lack of human influence: 'There are no voices, no Welsh or Irish or differently accented English. It has to be thus, of course, because if we start blethering to the locals the conceit of empty 'wild' will be lost. So there has to be silence, an avoidance of voices other than the author's, just wind in the trees, or waves, the cry of the curlew.' Too many writers on the subject attempt to remove humans from the landscape, either ignoring or failing to recognise their relevance. Despite her astute observations, Jamie is a bit too unfair on MacFarlane, and my own criticisms stem primarily from envy. For all its flaws, The Wild Places is a relatively enjoyable read and not to be dismissed entirely. The journey is thought provoking and informative, and some scenes are written with a supreme clarity of vision.

Rating: 2/5