Review by New York Times Review
IN 1977, Bruce Chatwin's "In Patagonia" and Patrick Leigh Fermor's "Time of Gifts" prompted a renaissance in British travel writing, which for 20 years would remain as pre-eminent in the United Kingdom as the memoir was in the United States. Jonathan Raban, Redmond O'Hanlon, Pico Iyer, Sara Wheeler and the Norfolk-based Iowan, Bill Bryson, all advanced that revival. Since the millennium, however, travel writing has become a dwindling force as digital access has eroded the exotic - while British natural history writing has soared, bringing commercial and critical success to writers like Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, Richard Mabey and Roger Deakin. The youngest of these figures, Macfarlane is the author of four works of nonfiction, most recently and triumphantly, "The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot," an iconoclastic blend of natural history, travel writing and much more. "The Old Ways" takes us to some far-flung places - Buddhist trails in the eastern Himalayas, Spain's Camino de Santiago, the occupied Palestinian territories - but mostly Macfarlane stays closer to home. Topographically and emotionally, his loosely assembled collection of walks is centered on two heartlands: southern England's soft chalk downs and the unyielding Scottish north. To describe Macfarlane as a philosopher of walking is to undersell the achievement of "The Old Ways": his prose feels so firmly grounded, resistant to abstraction. He wears his polymath intelligence lightly as his mind roams across geology, archaeology, fauna, flora, architecture, art, literature and urban design, retrieving small surprises everywhere he walks. In one such passage, he notes the power of what urban planners call "desire lines," in which one person's impulsive shortcut encourages others to follow, creating informal, unmapped channels through a city. Macfarlane is likewise fascinated by what geologists have termed "preferential pathways," grooves carved by the solvent action of water on limestone. Those pathways in turn pull in pedestrians, "all of whom etch the track of their passage with their feet as they go. In this way the path of a raindrop hundreds of thousands of years ago may determine the route of a modern-day walker." Macfarlane upends the stereotype of the environmental writer as a surly, solitary misanthrope railing against human desecrations of the wild. His book positively teems with people. On most of his journeys he travels with a friend, but his wanderings are also informed by a deeper, historical sense of accompaniment. "The Old Ways" is a book of ghosts, a homage to those who have walked these routes before: "Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It's hard to create a footpath on your own. . . . Like sea channels that require regular dredging to stay open, paths need walking." Two ghosts stand out from the rest. Macfarlane's grandfather, a diplomat and mountaineer, instilled in him a love of roaming. An especially tender chapter recounts a ritual walk Macfarlane took across Scotland's Cairngorm massif to attend his grandfather's funeral. Here he recalls how that peak-obsessed man was forced in his 80s to yield to age: first driven down from the summits to the passes, then from the passes to the valleys, he in turn forsakes the valleys "for the limestone land around the house." "Stride shortened to shuffle, shuffle to dodder, dodder to step. . . . During the same years that my grandfather was losing the ability to walk, my children - his two first greatgrandchildren - were gaining it. Step lengthened to dodder, dodder to shuffle, shuffle to stride." The other great haunting figure in this book is the Edwardian poet-naturalist Edward Thomas. "To Thomas," Macfarlane writes, "paths connected real places but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self." Like many compulsive walkers, Thomas was dogged by depressions that he tried to slough off through punishing hill climbs, administered "to macerate and to forget himself." But his sadness, in sending him out onto the road, also gave him the chance to become an astute observer of natural detail. Macfarlane is inspired by this poet for whom "the mind was a landscape of a kind and walking a means of crossing it." Macfarlane's method recalls W. G. Sebald's literary meander down England's southeast coast in "The Rings of Saturn." Like Sebald, Macfarlane loves side stories, chance encounters that become vital portals into historical feeling. But despite this shared passion, Macfarlane adds a singular physical awareness. He exudes curiosity about the physiology of motion, about the way moving legs move the brain. Recuperating on a ridge after an arduous day, he observes that "my legs preserved a ghost sense of stride, a muscle memory of repeated action, and twitched forwards even as I rested." If there's a limitation to this lively, luminous book, it's Macfarlane's fundamental assumption about why people walk - and who gets to do so. In two brief pages, he offers us a shadow history of the wayfaring dispossessed, the "brigades of broken men" who, during the Great Depression, were exposed to the asperity of the open road. This treatment feels too glancing. On our embattled planet, most people walk not for romance or recreation or enlightenment; they walk because they're too poor to do otherwise. Moreover, the freedom to sleep rough (as Macfarlane does, on cliff ledges and beneath hedgerows) is unevenly distributed. This is surely an observation worthy of reflection. The black British photographer Ingrid Pollard once traveled to the Lake District on a Wordsworth pilgrimage. In her self-portraits, she is seen wielding a baseball bat as she wanders, not lonely as a cloud but lonely as a black woman in a white rural area, Wordsworthian or not. That said, Macfarlane has given us a gorgeous book about physical movement and the movement of memory, one that resounds with stories told to "the beat of the placed and lifted foot." "The Old Ways" celebrates the civility of paths, thin lines of tenacious community threaded through an "aggressively privatized world." There is something sustaining about that tenacity, and something humbling too. Thomas understood as much when he wrote of this "brief multitude." We are, after all, just passers-by. Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His most recent book is "Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
A literature professor and prodigious perambulator, Macfarlane has walked in England, Scotland's Isle of Lewis, and elsewhere and describes his experiences here. While descriptive observations of trails and vistas inform his presentation, Macfarlane's animating idea is the construction of a meditative sensibility that involves imagining history, exulting in nature, and interpreting literature. Macfarlane confides that his inspiration for walking-writing is Edward Thomas, author of The Icknield Way (1913), a foot travelogue that Macfarlane's loosely replicates, routewise; England's southern hills, the chalk downs, are where Thomas ambled. Macfarlane's contemporary peregrinations partake of a fine-grained feeling for the pathway, encounters with fellow itinerants, and the occasional ghost-haunted campsite. With a penchant for neologism and literary allusion, Macfarlane seeks out ancient footpaths across an Essex mudflat, on a section of the pilgrim's way to Spain's Santiago de Compostela, within a circumambulation of a Chinese mountain sacred to Buddhism, and sea routes around Lewis. Concluding with Thomas' biography--he was killed in WWI--Macfarlane renders his feelings toward landscapes in ruminative, mysterious hues.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This scintillating travelogue is a celebration of well-worn footpaths and ancient sea routes. Naturalist MacFarlane (The Wild Places) traipses across Britain via Stone-Age trails, sand flats that briefly emerge between daily tides, and sea lanes to the Hebridean Isles. He ventures abroad into the bullet-strewn hills of the West Bank and follows a pilgrimage route in Spain. Along the way, the author meets artists, poets, farmers, sea-bird hunters, and adventurers, each with stories to tell and idiosyncratic attitudes toward the terrain ahead. MacFarlane writes with a discerning eye and an immediacy that immerses us in his surroundings-whether a delicately misty shore, a seemingly chaotic field of rocks that reveals hidden patterns, or a holy Himalayan mountain that makes him "[gaze] up, neck cricked and mouth bashed open at the beauty of it all." MacFarlane strikes a fine balance between lyrical nature writing and engrossing scholarship that makes him the ideal walking companion. (Oct. 15) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Walking is an intimate way to experience a landscape because it proceeds at a pace that lets travelers contemplate nature, history, and self. In his travels around Great Britain and other countries, Macfarlane (English, Univ. of Cambridge; The Wild Places) follows a variety of old paths (called "ways") on both land and sea, some that date back thousands of years. This highly readable narrative weaves together landscape, local history and myth, art, literature, natural history, ritual, and the internal dialog familiar to any who have spent time alone in nature. The people he meets and the places he visits are luminous and extraordinary in the retelling as Macfarlane explores the idea of place and of self as well as the close relationship between the two. The book closes with a brief biography of fellow path walker and author Edward Thomas (1878-1917), from whom Macfarlane draws inspiration throughout the work. VERDICT The author's love of the land and his elegant use of metaphor make for a moving book that anyone who loves being part of nature will treasure.-Sheila Kasperek, North Hall Lib., Mansfield Univ. of PA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Macfarlane (English/Cambridge Univ.; The Wild Places, 2008, etc.) returns with another masterful, poetic travel narrative. The author's latest, focusing broadly on the concept of walking, forms what he calls "a loose trilogy," with his two earlier books, Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places, "about landscape and the human heart." As in his previous books, it seems nearly impossible that a writer could combine so many disparate elements into one sensible narrative. It's ostensibly a first-person travelogue (of England, Spain, Palestine, Tibet and other locales), combined with biographical sketches (such as that of poet Edward Thomas, who died on a battlefield in France in 1917) and historical anecdotes about a wide variety of subjects (e.g., a set of 5,000-year-old footprints made by a family along the coastline just north of Liverpool). In the hands of a lesser writer, these divergent ideas would almost certainly result in unreadable chaos, but Macfarlane effortlessly weaves them together under the overarching theme of "walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move." While this notion may seem abstract, the author's resonant prose brings it to life--whether he is writing about the mountains of Tibet, where a half-frozen stream is "halted mid-leap in elaborate forms of yearning," or the mountains of Scotland to which he returned for his grandfather's funeral, where he found "moonlight shimmering off the pine needles and pooling in the tears of resin wept by the pines." A breathtaking study of "walking as enabling sight and thought rather than encouraging retreat and escape."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
