Holloway
Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards
Faber & Faber, £14.99, 48pp
Sometimes, as I trail around Ikea in Edmonton, I think it would be rather nice to run away from modern life. I could build myself a little bothy on top of a mountain. I would spend my days foraging and, at night, instead of sitting in my flat listening to joyriders screeching down the road on stolen pizzadelivery mopeds, I could watch the stars.
Then I think . . . come on. It would be ever so damp. For idle dreamers like me, nature writing is the answer. Without having to leave my sofa, I have experienced the windy peak of Binn Chuanna and the Black Wood of Rannoch and revelled in words such as “moschatel” and “foot-querned” without needing to know what they mean.
The granddaddy of contemporary nature writing was the late Roger Deakin, a founder member of Friends of the Earth and author of Waterlog (1999), a witty and wonderful account of a year spent wild-swimming in Britain’s rivers, tarns and lochs. Robert Macfarlane was his friend and protégé and he has picked up where Deakin left off with a trilogy of books – Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways – that have been garlanded with prizes and critical praise.
In the wake of these two big fish swim many minnows; it is now even possible to take an MA in “wild writing” at the University of Essex. So popular has the genre become that, having been a fan, I am beginning to feel weary. Where does all this rhapsodising over badgers and briar get us? Along with Mumford & Sons, The Great British Bake Off and real-ale microbreweries in Shoreditch, it feels like a symptom of our collective nostalgia for a more wholesome age.
This general sense of disillusionment may have affected my response to Holloway, the latest book by Macfarlane, with the writer Dan Richards and the artist Stanley Donwood. In September 2011, the three men spent the night in a “holloway” or sunken path in Dorset. Macfarlane had discovered the place with Deakin in 2005 (this journey is documented in The Wild Places). They took with them “a hip flask, two penknives, matches & candles”, “a bottle of damson gin” and a book called Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, in which the fugitive hero hides out in a holloway.
The book was first published by Quive-Smith, an imprint founded by the three authors, with a print run of 277. It is now being reissued by Faber. Donwood’s black and white drawings are lovingly reproduced in the Faber version but while Holloway might have worked as an art object (the original was painstakingly printed using an old-fashioned letter press), it now feels insubstantial. A cover price of £14.99 buys you less than 25 pages of text, several of which are simply abbreviated chunks of The Wild Places. It reads like a notebook of poetic and rather pretentious jottings: “No moon above the whispering fields, low service in the crosshatched apse and every outside sound an ambush. Amphidromic points of faith.”
Its greatest failing is its lack of humour. Deakin, in contrast, was a funny writer; he had a keen sense of the absurd and, as well as telling us about the wildlife he encountered, he was interested and amused by the other people he met. There is nothing wrong with escapism: it is lovely to read about beautiful places and wild adventures, especially when you are stuck in a slightly too small flat trying to assemble flat-pack furniture. But there is a danger in it, too, because no matter how long we hide in a hedge, the rubbishstrewn world will be waiting for us when we dare to peer out.
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