Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane review: 'fiercely intelligent'

Like Robert Macfarlane’s earlier books, Is A River Alive? is luminously written, but it’s also much more polemical, writes Stuart Kelly

The provocative title of Robert Macfarlane’s new book brought to mind a favourite couplet by the ingenious, wry Scottish poet Frank Kuppner: “God is real, but not as we use the word ‘real’. / Or, for that matter, as we use the word ‘God’.” The semantic hair-splitting evaporates if we invoke the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s concept of “Als Ob” or “as if”. Macfarlane is less concerned with the metaphysics of rivers than with the ethics. Setting aside concepts of consciousness, volition and identity, what would change – in and for us and them – if we treated rivers as if they were alive?

I should declare an interest: I was on the panel judging the Booker Prize in 2013 when Macfarlane was a judge; and I had previously reviewed his work. I have even read his work outside of his acclaimed “nature writing” (Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature, which sits with China Miéville’s Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law and Invasion of the Space Invaders – terrible pleonasm – by Martin Amis in my “books not in ‘by the same author’” collection).

The Adyar river in Chennai, India | AFP via Getty Images

As I would have expected, Is A River Alive? is fiercely intelligent, slightly self-deprecating and luminously written. I should caution, however, that readers expecting either a re-run of the joyful linguistic foraging of The Lost Words or Landmarks or the numinous, elegiac questing of The Old Ways or Underland might be someone taken aback and even discomfited by the new work. It is a more polemical book, and sometimes even seems to chastise itself for seeking epiphanies rather than action. It is acutely observed and at the same time sceptical of the distance and separation observation implies. The frames of reference have shifted: instead of lodestars like Edward Thomas, Eric Ravilious and George Borrow, in the first third we are in the company of Stanisław Lem, Chirrut Îmwe from Star Wars: Rogue One, the Na’vi of Avatar and Ursula Le Guin.

The book is divided into three journeys. The first follows the Río los Cedros in the Cloud Forest of Ecuador (one can see why the lexicon might pivot to the science-fictional), the second is principally concerned with the Adyar in Chennai, India, and finally Macfarlane embarks on the Mutehekau (Innu) or Magpie (English) on the border of Quebec and Labrador. Whatever reservations one might have about the loaded question of the title, it becomes clear that rivers can be poisoned, asphyxiated, throttled, drowned and immured. In all this, Macfarlane is not a solitary traveller. His companions are eclectic and include a mycologist and a musicologist, several lawyers, a autodidact who has “suffered terribly” and whose mind leaps from lepidoptery and ornithology to the heresy of mixing DC and Marvel superheroes on a T-shirt, a haunted “human-geographer land-artist” who though “capable of joy… is almost all grief” and a Czech-Canadian fisherman nicknamed The Bear who can cut out 1.6 billion-year-old bedrock. They are significantly individual, pitted against loggers, miners, big pharma and petrochemical companies that are bodiless and corporate.

For all that Macfarlane is concerned with political, economic and judicial questions, and has a clear admiration for activists and agitators, there is an undercurrent of the atavistic. Although he takes copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh on his travels to present as gifts, it is more telling that towards the end there is a discussion about the “triple rhymes that connect the Odyssey, the Aeneid and Dante’s Divine Comedy”. Although the ostensible reason is their shared scenes of descents to the underworld – the katabasis – this book is especially Dantean in having an anxious, slightly naïve protagonist encountering different individuals with curious, possibly parable-like biographies. He is too subtle a writer to map the Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise onto his travels, but there are continual references to Hieronymus Bosch-style flora, fauna and fungi, weird oases in polluted, Stygian wastes, baptismal cataracts, sacrifice zones, fraud maps and uneasy dreams.

The three pilgrimages are framed with home vignettes, and his son’s question “Has the water died?” in the heatwave of 2022. There is an apocalyptic, eschatological feel to the frame; fish poached in their streams, uncovered ancient skulls, Saharan dust on England’s not-green, unpleasant land. Macfarlane slips in a Hamlet misquotation: “the time falls out of joint”. There are also fantasias on his own birth and death, which might seem like straining for epiphanies, but are just about pulled off. There is a danger, perpetually, summarised by the late Angus Calder’s scepticism about Kenneth White’s geopoetics: if the ineffable is everywhere why does he never get a revelation in a Cowdenbeath carpark?

The linguistics here are more complex. One poet he meets, Rita Mestokosho, writes of “millions of books / scattered upon the land / encyclopaedias of rivers”, and there are notings of specific words and the alternative hydrologies they propose. But the neologisms have the upper hand: technozoic, kindom (as opposed to kingdom), geologian, inscendence, ecto-network. The end of the book channels James Joyce, and the great river-hymn of Anna Livia Plurabelle at the end of Finnegans Wake. It is a bold, even reckless move but it truly compels. Macfarlane’s question is simple and the answer is don’t ask simple questions. There is always “fuzz in the matrix”, and the water’s meaning will always slip through your mind’s grasping fingers.

Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane, Hamish Hamilton, £25