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Literary Review
Those crazy climbers
SPEAKING of authors young and attractive, Robert Macfarlane is both, but he is also that something more: a dazzling writer. To write on landscape and the mind is to boldly go where many have gone before, including dauntingly gifted historians like Simon Schama. But Macfarlane's own journey through man's discovery of the mountains is a triumph of passion, erudition, and insight.
How, in the Western imagination, did mountains evolve from being regarded as "boils" on the face of the earth to objects of veneration? Macfarlane writes a magpie history stealing authoritatively from geology, painting, anecdotes, literature, diaries and letters, for his riveting story of the West's 300-year long changing relationship with altitude.
Beginning with how the early geologists exploded popular conceptions of landscape, Macfarlane writes of "deep time", and shifting continents. Geology has never sounded as luminous. Many aspects of man's dangerous fascination with altitude and ice are explored: early visitors to Alpine glaciers, deliberate Romantic encounters with danger in pursuit of the Sublime, Victorians in thrall of the Ice Age, mountaineers inexplicably courting death, year after year. The many and unexpected strands of the story unite in an analysis of George Mallory's fatal obsession with Everest.
Himself a climber, Macfarlane nimbly steps from history to personal narrative, probing, through his own experiences, how the mountain mania of his ancestors has moulded him. His rich, metaphoric prose powerfully evokes his own experiences, as well as distant epochs of history. He untangles the mechanisms of language as he analyses how writers have described mountains. He unearths aspects of writers we know in more conventional avatars: we meet Coleridge in a trance stuck on narrow ledge with a sheer 12-foot drop beneath, Dr. Johnson lithely steering his bulk across rock formations, and Mark Twain satirising contemporary hysteria over moving bodies of ice: he boarded a glacier with his luggage to get transported to the next town and waited patiently for it to begin moving, until he found out from the Baedekar that it only moved an inch a day. "As a means of passenger transport," he complained, "I consider the glacier a failure."
Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane, Granta, £15.
ANURADHA ROY
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