The chthonic nub of things

Don’t imagine this book by a 42-year-old Englishwoman who has been in her time an English undergraduate at Oxford, a digging-in anti-roads campaigner and a lonely depressive in her London flat, is anything resembling your average expedition into the wild. The usual elegant reflections on wilderness and its transcendent emptiness are absent here. Instead, there is an encyclopaedic, energetic, plunging, anarchic, intensely sexualised, often wildly written and over-written journey, filled with a mayhem of influences and references, from anthropology to English religious history, the European classics and the big OED (her favourite book), through five of the earth’s biomes-cum-elements: Amazonia for earth itself, Greenland for ice (seen as a fifth element), Indonesia for water, the Australian desert for fire and the mountains of West Papua for air. If, as I imagine they are bound to, books are soon going to carry a sticker showing the carbon emitted in their creation, this one would be miles into the purple end of red.

The ambition is vast: an attempt to rewrite our understanding of what wilderness means. Wilderness is not what we have always taken it for. It is not where meaning runs out. It is not even where there are no people. It is not even particularly hostile. In Griffiths’s understanding, wilderness is where people have been and still are most intimately connected with the earth. Unlike tilled ground, she maintains, which has been told what to do, wilderness retains its will, and it is in that sense ‘willed earth’, earth which is allowed its part in a conversation with people. ‘Today the Amazon is full of mute inglorious Clares,’ she says, referring to the Northamptonshire poet, ‘whose silenced words would sing the songlines of a stolen world, if they could. For them their lands have been lit with meaning, glowing with signs and messages, imbued with symbolic thought.