‘B
ooks like rivers have water- sheds. They don’t begin in one place but in countless places, and then they declare them- selves visible.” As we sit in his
book-lined room at Emmanuel College, Cambridge where he is professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities, Robert Macfarlane is coining a fluid metaphor for the genesis of his captivating new non-fiction work: Is a River Alive? Boldly and persuasively recasting rivers as
living beings, this three-part exploration of their multitudinous lives courses from mountain-top to sea. It takes us from the source of the Río Los Cedros (River of the Cedars) in the Amazonian Cloud Forest in Ecuador, down to the river estuaries of Chennai in India, and to the Mutehekau Shipu, a river of Nitassinan in Eastern Canada, which flows into the Gulf of St Lawrence. In each location, Macfarlane encounters remarkable river creatures and heroic human river defenders. And, between his intrepid global dispatches from these diverse places, the narrative loops back to the clear- watered stream who (note that “who”) flows unnamed from a spring that rises in a wood, a mile from Macfarlane’s Cambridge home. Hamish Hamilton describes Is a River Alive?
as Macfarlane’s most personal and poetic book yet, and I ask if this description chimes with him. “My most poetic yes, in terms of what happens to language over the course of the book, which becomes increasingly liquid. And yes, my most personal. Because compared to the partial immer- sions of earlier books, this one has absolutely immersed me in ways that have been total.”
Not a single river in England and Wales is in good ecological health. Our water has become undrinkable, unswimmable and untouchable. I saw a Southern Water company sign lashed to railings by a river, saying: ‘Please do not come into contact with this water. If you or your dog do, be sure to wash your hands very thoroughly afterwards.’” And, thousands of miles from the ravages of
Southern Water, Macfarlane’s three far-flung rivers are starkly representative of others globally which are perishing or under terrible threat: the Río Los Cedros from mining, the waters of Chennai from pollution, and the Mutehekau Shipu from damming. This is a book which floats not only the title question, but one that follows from it: “Does a river have rights?” Macfarlane explains: “That idea might seem
alien and problematic for some. But non-human entities like business corporations have legal standing and a suite of rights from the moment they are registered. Whereas a river that has flowed since the retreat of the glaciers, continu- ously nourishing and shaping life around itself, has no rights at all.”
H
Compared to the partial immersions of earlier books, this one has absolutely and totally immersed me
Macfarlane asserts that he has always been a
river person: “Because I’ve always been a moun- tain person, and rivers and mountains make each other. I grew up in Nottinghamshire, but my grandparents lived in the Cairngorms and the Strathspey River Avon ran past the bottom of their field. I have such clear memories, aged about 10, of floating face-down in that river with a mask on, and seeing the dark shadows of salmon swimming upstream to spawn. And having a sense of this extraordinary river life moving beneath me. Now the salmon are mostly gone, and although Scotland is faring better than England & Wales, its rivers have in many cases been grievously wounded.” After the poetic and the personal, this brings
us to the third adjectival “P” that hallmarks Is a River Alive?: political. Says Macfarlane: “I began work on the book in 2020, but will be publishing it into a completely changed landscape, in which rivers have become a subject of huge concern.
appily, that state of affairs is beginning to change. Earlier this year, Lewes District Council paved the way by recognising the rights of the
River Ouse in Sussex, the first river in England to have its legal rights recognised by a local authority. And in 2021, a declaration by the indigenous Innu people of Nitassinan made the Mutehekau Shipu the first river in Canada to be granted legal personhood and rights. Set to visit the US for the book’s North American publication in late May, Macfarlane tells me he intends to speak out against President Trump’s environmentally damaging policies, including the recent order to dramatically expand logging across millions of hectares of public forests. “I feel very fired up to add my voice to the push against this drive for absolute subordination of the living world.” While he is most often characterised as a nature
writer, Is a River Alive?, like so much of Macfarlane’s work, lies at the confluence of many tributaries: memoir, myth, poetry, geography, deep-dive natural history, as well as a pounding sense of urgency about environmental crisis. And it’s also a book alive with people: “I love writing about people,” Macfarlane tells me. Among those we meet are musician Cosmo Sheldrake (brother of Merlin) and renowned mycologist Giuliana Furci, Macfarlane’s travel- ling companions in Ecuador, and the heroic and delightful Yuvan Aves, river angel of Chennai. And in Canada there is Innu nation activist
and poet Rita Mestokosho. Before Macfarlane embarks on the perilous 100-mile trip by kayak and foot down the Mutehekau Shipu described in the third section of the book, Mestokosho, who is also a healer, knots a red band of cloth around his wrist, telling him: “Only time or the river, which are the same things, can remove it.”
Key backlist
Robert Macfarlane Mountains of the Mind Granta, £10.99, 9781862075610 Macfarlane’s debut non- fiction – winner of the Guardian First Book Award – explores the strange impulses that have for centuries led us to scale the world’s highest places. “It simply fizzes with insights into the sublime madness of mountaineering,” said Roger Deakin.
129,487 TCM copies sold
Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (illus) The Lost Words Hamish Hamilton, £20, 9780241253588
This gloriously illustrated book takes a stand against the disappearance of wild childhood in a joyful celebration of nearby nature and its wonders. “Macfarlane and Morris have made a thing of astonishing beauty,” said the Observer.
203,614 TCM copies sold
Robert Macfarlane Underland Hamish Hamilton, £12.99, 9780141030579
An epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory and the land itself. Winner of the Wainwright Prize and the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award.
105,151 TCM copies sold
(Two years later he still wears it.) She also instructs him to put his notebooks away and not to think too much with his head: “On the river, be a river.” And indeed, his progress down the river turns into a kind of unworldly transit, by which Macfarlane feels himself becoming one with its waters. “Over the eight consecutive days we were continuously in it, and on it, and by it, I experienced a sort of erosion of the normal boundaries of self and perception,” he marvels. This perhaps is what impresses most about
Is a River Alive? – its meld of real-world urgency and an enchanting sort of magical realism. When I mention this, Macfarlane is pleased. “I wanted to hold all of that together in a sort of vibrating matrix. The book took on an animate power that just kept surprising me. In the end I simply wanted to find a way to reactivate the question of the title. One that is incredibly ancient but that it has taken us the last 200 years to forget the answer to.”
07
MARK WORMALD
Books Author Profile
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