61


The Return, starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus, owes a debt to the oral storytelling tradition of the Greeks


first audiences. In an ideal world, the listener’s mind would expand – in spite of the perva- siveness of social media ‘brain rot’. Although the two Homeric blockbusters on the silver screen last year and next are inherently visual as well as aural, they might give renewed vig- our to the eloquence of Odysseus, thousands of years aſter Homer first gave it life.


to call ‘late capitalism’ – are temperamental- ly in sympathy with environmentalists. That fine writer Robert Macfarlane – whose shtick is to forge deep into forests, up mountains, down ancient pathways and such accompa- nied by his fine literary sensibility and rap- turous feeling for the transcendent unities of the natural world – might not, then, seem an obvious subject. Macfarlane, you might think, is just the


LITERARY NOTES


THE MEANING OF LIFE


Sam Leith


IT STRIKES ME that not all that many read- ers of Spear’s – full-throated supporters as I dare say you all will be of what students like


sort of person who would object to the place- ment of a mining concession or a chemical factory on the grounds that it interrupted the migration route of a rare, thumbnail-sized brown frog and care not a whit for the dent that such an objection could make to share- holder value. And yet, as I was reading his new book, Is a River Alive?, ahead of our con- versation for a podcast, I found myself think- ing that this is something the readers of this magazine might be interested to have a look at – and not just for the author’s way with a simile and his immaculately cadenced prose. The titular question, you might harrumph,


sounds a bit hippyish. Indeed, Macfarlane told me that when the title of the book was announced he had been clobbered from both sides of the ideological divide. Some of his interlocutors took the line: ‘Well, duh, obviously! Why do you even need to ask the question, you idiot?’ Others took the line: ‘Well, duh, obviously not! A river is H2


O +


gravity. Why do you even need to ask the question, you idiot?’ (I paraphrase, though only very slightly.) And it’s true that in this book – which as


well as being a philosophical investigation is an adventure story that takes its author through the cloud forests of Ecuador, down the polluted waterways of Chennai and by kayak through a terrifying river in the Cana- dian wilderness – Macfarlane is above all in- terested in philosophical and spiritual ques- tions. He’s a bit of a natural animist. He wants to think about what it would mean to undo the Enlightenment (or even, before that, Biblical) division between humanity and the rest of nature, between the masters


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