If a shrewder Muggle had been casting HBO’s coming series on Harry Potter, the person chosen to act as a wizard might well have been Robert Macfarlane. He is, officially, a professor of literature at Cambridge, but, happily, no writer sounds less professorial. Macfarlane climbs mountains, plunges into the underworld, collaborates with artists on books about lost words, lost spells. He makes films, writes songs and operas, has published a book-length prose poem. Not yet 47, he has already brought out 11 substantial works, delivered in prose as dense as a forest but flooded with sunlight.
“Mules are the shopping-trolleys of the ungulate world,” he delivers at a somewhat typical moment in his latest work, only a few pages before daring to proclaim, in a very different vein, “The light of the rising sun sets the world singing like a ringing bowl.” For 300 long pages he sustains one such line after another, mostly in short, vivid brushstrokes, and then, when riding a series of rapids in a kayak, he expands to a sentence that stretches across 26 lines, then one that lasts 36 lines, and, finally, to one that extends over 42 lines, till at last we collapse, just as he does, in an ecstatic heap.
