Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane; W. W. Norton, 374 pp., $31.99
When nature needs an attorney, rivers make star plaintiffs. In 2017, New Zealand’s third-longest watercourse, the Whanganui, received the rights of a legal person, thanks to pressure from Maori leaders. This spring, the district council for Sussex’s hardworking Ouse affirmed its right to flow free and untainted to the sea—welcome news for all Britain’s rivers, since 100 percent of them are now polluted beyond legal limits. In his 10th book—Is a River Alive?— British travel writer Robert Macfarlane chronicles the murder-for-profit of rivers worldwide; a watercourse can be strangled, poisoned, entombed, stolen, erased.
His young son has no doubts about river selfhood—“Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then, Dad, because the answer is yes!”—but both are alarmed by visits to the springs near their home, including a depleted chalk stream, threatened by climate change, that feeds the lovely River Cam, or tries to. Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where his day job is professing literature and the environmental humanities. His other vocation is risking his neck for literature. Is a River Alive? features the writer savoring the mountain precipice and the battered kayak, never asking why he is not on the trail of Henry James.
Macfarlane’s literary geographies have yielded opera lyrics, film scripts, audio dramas, and a clutch of philosophical travel narratives. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012) traces lost routes to the numinous; The Lost Words (2017) explores our shrinking word-hoard of natural description; his magnum opus, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019), is a master class in darkness and loss. (The physical record of our species, he warns, will be “plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.”)
Are rivers like us? Not in the least, but our urge to personify them is old and strong. Do they want our help? Macfarlane must first learn their language. “Muscular, wilful, worshipped and mistreated, rivers have long existed in the threshold space between geology and theology,” he writes, and on social media, he rejoices in “a river’s wilful, cursive, animate presence in the land: an alive, enlivening force—a silver god.”
The global Rights of Nature movement is young and ad hoc, with more failures than wins, but Macfarlane thrills to its potential and offers three examples of river advocacy. Gold mining threatens Rio Los Cedros and its Ecuadorian cloud forest, despite a high-court ruling that the river and its creatures have the right to exist. In Chennai, on the Indian Ocean, preservationists and jurists fight for damaged creeks and wetlands even though, nearly 30 years ago, the Tamil Nadu government erased a crucial waterway from official maps to let development rage. In far-northern Quebec, the wild Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, declared a living being in 2021, may yet be forced into captivity by Canada’s hydroelectric industry.
Yet the more he tries to merge with these great waters, the more words fail him—an enduring hazard in nature writing, from Barry Lopez, silently bowing before the Arctic snows, to Annie Dillard’s mountains that slam. Macfarlane once wrote that Dillard is not an epiphany hound; here, he is one, but in slow motion: “Why should a god make choices we would recognize as choices? … is after all and of course the question of life, which is not a question at all but a world—find the current, follow the flow … and in it, I am rivered.”
This is a hinge book in the Macfarlane canon, a riverine Seven Storey Mountain. The waterways are his coauthors, he insists, and he peppers their human protectors with questions, as dons do. A very few, very colorful characters are his guides and gurus. Ask the river what it wants, they urge, but answers are hazy. In Ecuador, Macfarlane pleads for revelation in the glitter of a forest pool and learns to read the river of fungi under his feet, the mycelial streams. On a South Indian beach, he encounters bioluminescence, hatchling sea turtles, and maybe ecstatic connection. Mesmerized—and nearly killed—by the Magpie’s roaring rapids, he still strains to translate its “immense and frightening will … speech tumbling out of its mouth … since the old ice left.”
Is a River Alive? draws on two marvelous currents in British letters, the hyperliterate adventurer (Tutira, The Road to Oxiana, The Living Mountain) and the place magics of Susan Cooper’s Thames Valley, L. M. Boston’s Green Knowe, and Algernon Blackwood’s chiller The Willows. Its language is bedazzled: “An animist grammar of this place would need a syntax of hypotaxis, not parataxis: one of maximum correlation, proliferating connections quaquaversally; a branching, foliate, fractal, super-furcating language structure.” And its sources are somber: the hymn, the dirge, and the academic conference. Macfarlane offers a few thigh slappers. “Strong forces,” he writes, “will be required to release older, more complex river-meanings from their impoundment—and to reanimate our relationship with these vast, mysterious presences whose landscapes we share. But as the economist Erich Zimmermann’s enduring one-liner has it, ‘Resources are not, they become.’ Which is to say—they can unbecome too.” But soon Macfarlane takes off downriver with Gerard Manley Hopkins at stroke:
Its grammar of animacy is one of ands and throughs and tos and nows, of commas not full stops, of thens not buts, aura not edge, of compounds and hyphens and fusings, silver-blues and grey-greens and mist-drifts and undersongs, process not substance, this joined to that, always onrushing, always seeking the sea and here and there turning back upon itself, intervolving, eddying in counterflow to cause spirals and gyres that draw breath into water, life into the mind, leave the whole world whirled, whorled.
Disasters, not rescues, run this show, even though for every Chennai, there is a Kham River restoration; for every Cedros, a Machángara, or a Marañón, given rights and headed for decontamination. Most river stakeholders—farmers, industrialists, mainstream scientists, politicians—are kept firmly offstage. So is any solid look at the economics of destruction, or the role of each flowage as cultural imaginary.
To convey what it is like to be a river, Macfarlane went looking for gods, monsters, and angels. He settles, in the end, for the cloud of unknowing. When he and the Magpie finally reach the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and wild freshwater joins salt sea, he is wetter, but not much wiser.
