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Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood review – forces of nature

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/14/ness-robert-macfarlane-stanley-donwood-review

This freewheeling prose poem from a master of modern nature writing is an apocalyptic vision set in one of Suffolk’s most curious corners, Orford Ness

Robert Macfarlane’s most recent book, Underland, came out only months ago, took him several years to write, and must rank as one of the most personally taxing books of its kind (it’s filled with accounts of dangerous descents beneath the surface of the earth). So it’s no surprise that a new book should be as short, and comparatively unadventurous in terms of its destination, as Ness. Decorated with Stanley Donwood’s pen and ink illustrations, it also suggests a different kind of release for Macfarlane. While his previous books have laid their evocations of the natural world on a foundation of scholarship and reportage, Ness is a freewheeling prose-poem. As far as its poetry is concerned, it doesn’t offer much more than passages of irregular rhyming, broken-up lines, and the encouragement to read with an especially sharp eye for metaphorical rather than merely literal interest. But never mind: the book is a chance for Macfarlane both to take a breather, and to continue his conversation about the beauty, fragility and sheer strangeness of the world we inhabit.

The ness in question is an extremely strange place indeed: a 10-mile-long shingle spit running parallel to the shoreline at Orford on the Suffolk coast, which for much of the last century was a top-secret site for military research. Machine guns were tested there during the first world war, and during the cold war it was the site of important work on the mechanisms of nuclear bombs. When the site was abandoned by the military and taken on by the National Trust, the trust decided it couldn’t defend it indefinitely from the ravages of erosion. It thus became a place of several overlapping interests: the ness itself, with its rich flora and fauna; the buildings, and what they tell us about old threats and secrets; and the effects of climate change in our time of encroaching disaster. It is, as Macfarlane has said elsewhere, “a landscape produced by a collision of the human death drive and natural life”.

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