Wild: An Elemental Journey
Saturday, 21 July 2007
Review by Harry Eyres
If you imagine a cross between Thoreau's Walden and the later travel writings and novels of D.H. Lawrence, you might come close to the prophetic and personal intensity of Jay Griffiths' ecological odyssey. But then you would need to add a dash of Jeanette Winterson to convey the flavour of Wild's sassy, sexy eco-feminism. Like Thoreau, Griffiths feels disgusted by "the lives of quiet desperation" lived by most of her contemporaries, and impelled towards a closer, deeper relationship with nature - which she calls the wild. Like Lawrence, she cannot stay in one spot, but hurtles restlessly around the globe, from the ice fields of Ellesmere Island to the rainforests of Peruvian Amazonia, from the high peaks of Papua to the immensities of the Australian desert.
What she finds is both desolating and inspiring. Despoilation on the one hand - the logging of the forests, the destruction not just of environments but also of minds and cultures (aboriginals confined and rotting in reservations, freedom-fighting Papuans hunted down by the Indonesian military). But, on the other, in her remarkably close and vulnerable contacts with indigenous people she discovers ways of relating to the earth which respect not only the planet's remarkable interlocking diversity but also the deep requirement of the untamed human mind for freedom (already celebrated in her previous book on time, Pip-Pip).
Griffiths is as adventurous linguistically as she is geographically. Her style, replete with puns, wordplay and neologisms, embodies the poetic creativity that is the human mind's answer to the wild fertility of nature. You might sometimes wish she would quieten down a bit, or try less hard, but - like Lawrence, again - she is capable of startling, revivifying evocations of birds, beasts and vegetation.
An evangelical Christian herself for a spell in her teens, Griffiths is implacably hostile to Christianity and most of western culture, which she holds responsible for the devastation of the planet. The Bible is fit only to be thrown on a compost heap, tragedy is a denial of life, nearly all philosophers are misogysnists; only Mozart and Shakespeare (in parts) are worth salvaging. Her ranting is never less than passionate, but curiously echoes the judgmental blinkeredness she finds so offensive in certain forms of Christianity - especially missionary varieties.
Quite early in the book Griffiths launches a ferocious attack on golf as the epitome of tamed suburbanism (a bad thing). She has obviously never played the back nine at Dornoch with a stiff wind roughing up the Firth and the curlews and oystercatchers calling. In other words, there may be more resources within western culture for rediscovering the call of the wild than Jay Griffths acknowledges in this brave, timely, provocative book.
If you imagine a cross between Thoreau's Walden and the later travel writings and novels of D.H. Lawrence, you might come close to the prophetic and personal intensity of Jay Griffiths' ecological odyssey. But then you would need to add a dash of Jeanette Winterson to convey the flavour of Wild's sassy, sexy eco-feminism. Like Thoreau, Griffiths feels disgusted by "the lives of quiet desperation" lived by most of her contemporaries, and impelled towards a closer, deeper relationship with nature - which she calls the wild. Like Lawrence, she cannot stay in one spot, but hurtles restlessly around the globe, from the ice fields of Ellesmere Island to the rainforests of Peruvian Amazonia, from the high peaks of Papua to the immensities of the Australian desert.
What she finds is both desolating and inspiring. Despoilation on the one hand - the logging of the forests, the destruction not just of environments but also of minds and cultures (aboriginals confined and rotting in reservations, freedom-fighting Papuans hunted down by the Indonesian military). But, on the other, in her remarkably close and vulnerable contacts with indigenous people she discovers ways of relating to the earth which respect not only the planet's remarkable interlocking diversity but also the deep requirement of the untamed human mind for freedom (already celebrated in her previous book on time, Pip-Pip).
Griffiths is as adventurous linguistically as she is geographically. Her style, replete with puns, wordplay and neologisms, embodies the poetic creativity that is the human mind's answer to the wild fertility of nature. You might sometimes wish she would quieten down a bit, or try less hard, but - like Lawrence, again - she is capable of startling, revivifying evocations of birds, beasts and vegetation.
An evangelical Christian herself for a spell in her teens, Griffiths is implacably hostile to Christianity and most of western culture, which she holds responsible for the devastation of the planet. The Bible is fit only to be thrown on a compost heap, tragedy is a denial of life, nearly all philosophers are misogysnists; only Mozart and Shakespeare (in parts) are worth salvaging. Her ranting is never less than passionate, but curiously echoes the judgmental blinkeredness she finds so offensive in certain forms of Christianity - especially missionary varieties.
Quite early in the book Griffiths launches a ferocious attack on golf as the epitome of tamed suburbanism (a bad thing). She has obviously never played the back nine at Dornoch with a stiff wind roughing up the Firth and the curlews and oystercatchers calling. In other words, there may be more resources within western culture for rediscovering the call of the wild than Jay Griffths acknowledges in this brave, timely, provocative book.