The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence

"I picked it up and read it because I am passionate about the West coast of Scotland. It is a strange read. Its architecture is simple and rather artless. Not artfully artless, in the way that some books are. In many ways the architecture seems rather old-fashioned: Ansell just goes to places and describes them, as travel writers did a generation or two ago. There are occasional episodes in which he reminisces about previous travels and previous relationships when something in Scotland makes him think of those things. Those episodes often don’t seem to relate very obviously to the Scotland that he’s viewing. The language used for the narration is very simple, sometimes to the point of near banality. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . And yet the book works. I’m not quite sure how. I don’t know if it works because of or despite those characteristics. Certainly its naiveté is disarming, and it made me suspend my normal critical instincts. When I did that, something rather wonderful came in. It’s a mournful, wistful, elegiac book, but that elegiac quality isn’t generated by any obvious device. Again, I can’t say how he does it. It’s tremendously hard to give a general answer to that question. But thinking about it in the context of Ansell’s book, since he doesn’t discuss anything with an actual or metaphorical companion as he walks through Scotland, there’s no dilution of the power of the language with which the land is described. His eyes tell us, very simply, what they see. That generates a sort of intensity which is very unusual. It means that we see ferns and birds and deer and mountain summits more accurately than we normally do, because they’re uncontaminated by opinions. Most nature books are narcissistic and discursive. The writer goes into a wood and describes his (yes, male writers are far away the worst) feelings about the wood. Those feelings almost never have anything to do with the wood itself. So: what does solitude do? It can still the distracting voices. It can turn the senses of the writer and the reader away from the usual mental toys with which we fiddle, and on to rocks and waves and leaves. It can also produce such terrible psychological pain that you can’t see the trees through the red fog, or hear the birdsong through the hiss of panic. That’s what it tends to do to me. But Ansell is a better integrated human than I am. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here at all. Ansell doesn’t seem interested in himself in the slightest. That’s what gives the book its power. Ansell allows himself to be a lens through which the world is seen, rather than wanting himself to be the object upon which our eyes rest. That denotes and expounds a haunting love of the landscape. This is not a book about Neil Ansell. I can’t think of any other book in which the writer is so invisible. Invisibility is the mark of a very good writer. When Ansell does introduce himself, he does so reticently and almost formally, so that nothing of what we know about him bleeds out to contaminate the landscape. The West Highlands aren’t filtered through his personal hinterland. But we do learn about his failing hearing and his failing heart. That makes the book unforgettably poignant, and his voice, when he’s describing the land, unforgettably plangent. Often the simplest songs are the most moving aren’t they? We feel Ansell’s own loss and potential loss. He is undemonstrative and wholly un-self-pitying, but we sense the parallel between his personal losses and the wider loss of the natural world. The natural world is being progressively lost to him. He can’t hear birds anymore. Because his heart’s weak, he’s teetering, he knows, on the edge of eternity. He knows that soon he’ll lose the whole world. Being mortal, we feel solidarity with him. We begin to know how desolate it would be to lose the natural world – whether by our personal death or blindness or deafness, or by a multi-storey car park being built on it. So we’ve come full circle. Acute nature writing necessarily makes political points, and it makes them more impressively if it doesn’t ram them down our throats."