Surfacing

"It’s a collection of essays about apparently very, very different things – from ancient seal meat to Chinese politics – and very different times – from the Neolithic to the distant future. As a writer, and as a publisher, you need quite a lot of chutzpah to put things so disparate together in one book, and you need a real, rather than a theoretical belief, that everything is connected. But Kathleen Jamie has a good track record of having that nerve and displaying that belief. It seems to me that everything Jamie has written has been about the natural world. It also seems to me that everything that has ever been written by anybody has only ever been about the natural world. Even a guide to the Manhattan subway has been written by a wild creature about another wild place. As David Abram says, “there are only relatively un-wild places.” A Manhattan subway station is just a relatively un-wild place. “It seems to me that everything that has ever been written by anybody has been about the natural world” But books that explicitly acknowledge their wild authorship and their wild subject matter are better than books that don’t, and Kathleen Jamie has always expressly acknowledged that she’s a wild thing writing about wild places. The main characteristic of a really wild creature is that it pays attention, and Kathleen Jamie is one of the great attention-payers – but not in the narrow, minute, overbearing, obsessive way that’s become fashionable in modern nature writing, where pages are spent in a breathless, pathologically adjectival and downright boring appraisal of a twig. This fashion does injustice to the non-twigs in the wood. It distorts the picture of the wood. A wood is not just a twig. But as Jamie walks through her world, everything is seen in its right relationship to everything else: she pays attention to context: to juxtaposition. And to do that for the human world of Chinese politics as well as to the expressly non-human world of a wood is a proper, useful job for a writer. It’s a quieter, less agonised, less angry book than those. But because it’s a quieter book, the wind and the waves are more audible than Kathleen Jamie’s words, and that is a great thing to say about any writer. I’m not suggesting that Jamie characteristically gets in the way of her subject: far from it. She’s a great writer – more interested in her subjects than in her words about those subjects. But I’ve already expressed my suspicion of language as a medium for conveying reality. Language is particularly hopeless and destructive if it is used colonially in a direct approach to reality. Reality doesn’t seem to like that: it retreats. Jamie shows that sometimes (though unpredictably), if words are used softly and obliquely, reality isn’t alarmed, and it comes slowly out of its burrow to be seen."