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.