Review: Sarah Chayes on Robert Macfarlane, “Is a River Alive?”

A river is a tissue of dynamic and intimate relationships between arrowing, seeping, even air-wafted water and the land around, and the creatures within and upon them

What is a river, anyway? The question is not one that Robert Macfarlane’s paradigm-shifting book, Is a River Alive? expressly asks. But it cries out from every luminously-written page.

A river is more than water between banks—the water and its sinuous vessel ceaselessly sculpting each other. A river, it emerges through Macfarlane’s exploration of three landscapes on three continents, is a tissue of dynamic and intimate relationships between arrowing, seeping, even air-wafted water and the land around, and the creatures within and upon them.

These relationships play out in the realm of geology, in the realm of hydrology—with water enveloping a cloud-forest in the form of mist, for example, to collect into drops and streams and rivers, or water circulating and conveying solids between ocean, wetlands, and river. They play out in the realm of biology, as plants and animals, including humans, enjoy and absorb and release water as well as elements of each other in a mutual co-creation. And they play out in the minds, the psyches, and the souls of the participants.

Where there is relationship, there is communication—that is, language. And language is the air Macfarlane breathes. Author of the exuberantly viral volume The Lost Words: A Book of Spells, he is a conjurer of relationship between humans and nature by way of the magic of words. Only he could have written this work—one that took even him “right to the limits of my language and my beliefs”— and then beyond.

“To go unheard is not the same as to be speechless,” Macfarlane opens. Confessing initial skepticism, he sets out to test whether rivers do possess voice, and therefore must be regarded as animate subjects, that is, alive. He journeys to three places whose human inhabitants seek to give rivers a hearing—in the juridical sense of the word.