Orford Ness is a bizarre, eerie, ever-changing shingle spit off the Suffolk Coast. It once housed the British contribution to the nuclear weapons project and, before that, other highly sensitive adventures in military R&D. It is now managed by the National Trust, and its bleak horizontals are broken just occasionally by the weird, squat buildings that used to house all this top-secret activity and which now are subject to a policy gloriously named “controlled ruination’. The Ness is also designated a National Nature Reserve and thrives as such: an unusual habitat in between the rust-busted reinforced concrete and the crumbling pagodas. On one side the Ness shelters the sleepy River Ore, on the other it faces the oncoming wrath of the North Sea.
This is the setting for Robert Macfarlane’s latest book. A thin volume, it commands the level of respect that all thin volumes do: the unspoken claim that though it may have fewer words, they must therefore be chosen better and have fuller effect than most. It is a book of prose-poetry, with some prose, and some poetry.
Macfarlane has been the undisputed King of the new nature writing since his late twenties when he burst into the public consciousness with his incandescent book Mountains of the Mind, not a history of mountaineering, but a history of mountains in the human imagination. Since then he has done more than almost anyone else to bring about a revival of the literature of landscape and nature. His writing is characterised by an astonishing breadth of reading, a lyrical skill for narrative and for the fact that he has, more than most, walked the walk: and, in his case, climbed the mountain, swum the lake or slept the night on the haunted Iron Age fort.
The new nature writing has been developing for the last twenty years. It has largely sat within the equally modern genre of narrative non-fiction. From the beginning it has intersected with climate and ecological campaigning, with autobiography (particularly around mental health), with the revival of interest in 70s ‘folk horror’, and with the resurgence of interest in ‘folklore’. It has walked a tremulous line between the premises of scientific materialism and an emerging form of animism that it hasn’t quite yet articulated. Macfarlane might be the furthest along this path within the mainstream. Recently there has been a shift in his work from books easily placed into the narrative non-fiction genre, to works which are neither fiction nor non-fiction, they are simply story.
Ness is the latest of this kind of text. Although based on Orford Ness, the shortening of the title to Ness is our first hint that this is a more universal, more mythical text. Ness also suggesting the suffix -ness, makes this book perhaps a description of qualities: strangeness and eerie-ness.
Throughout Ness, a ritual is taking place in a building called The Green Chapel. It is one of the ruinous buildings in which bomb casings and fitments were tested for the nuclear program of the 1950s. Whilst the Americans were busy exploding bombs in the Pacific, our role centred on the mechanics of the weaponry such as detonators and containers. The ritual is being performed by characters with titles like The Physicist, The Ornithologist and The Bryologist all led by The Armourer. If the ritual comes to its conclusion, something apocalyptic will be set in train. "Ness draws on numerous myths and legends but most of all it looks to " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in which The Green Chapel is called “the most accursed church”. The Green Chapel is where Sir Gawain must face his certain end. Gawain travels to the chapel and his death at the hands of The Green Knight. The actual building on Orford Ness has a series of large, elongated crosses on the wall, like a kind of modern gothic, they were tracks that were used to lift and hold the weaponry. The ritual is one which is intent on bringing us all to our end in nuclear conflagration.
Standing opposed to this ritual are five creatures called As, It, He, She and They. The five are moving inexorably towards the Ness and the Green Chapel. Each creature has a different character. A lesser writer would have opted for a purely elemental division but that would have been unreal, merely a cipher. These are nature spirits and monsters, they are made real by their specificity and by a refusal to be romanticised. It, is also named Drift. It is the spirit of oceanic movement, a swirling, immensely powerful creature that has lasted through all time and will continue to the end. But it is not ‘pure’, it is not some avatar of pristine nature, “its bones are plastic, it builds itself from pallet slat & bottle-top, rises from sift, is lashed and trussed with fishing line”. They, is a spirit of stone and shingle, “rock-cored flint beings” both one and many at a single moment. As, is an aerial spirit, a moist, misty creature “who exists only as likeness, moves as mist & also as metal.” There is a spirit of heaving soil, of loam and mycelium, of lichen, fungi and moss. There is an arboreal spirit; instead of simply describing a tree-made-sentient, this is a creature of water and marshes, as much Bird in its dynamics as Tree “by day from his throat fly finch & fire-crest & in anger he speaks only in swifts”.
These five beings seem like the natural conclusion of all Macfarlane’s writing to date. His books about ancient tracks, mountain fastnesses and strange underground realms are about responding to the reality of a place, to its spirit and the spirits that inhabit it. When it comes to writing a new myth, Macfarlane doesn’t reach for stock characters off the shelf—these are the actual spirits of Ness. These strange, impure, momentum-filled monsters are the spirits that he has encountered on his countless journeys to and over the Ness. We are left feeling that if we were to visit, we too would meet these creatures.
Ness is a meditation on permanence and transience. It appears the five are going, like Gawain, to meet their certain death in The Green Chapel, in nuclear cataclysm. In fact, the ritualists never stood a chance. The precision of scientific splitting is overmastered by creatures of agglomeration and stickiness. The infinitesimal second of explosion is damped by the timescales of geology. The power of the creatures is that their existence is not contingent on anything human and given time, deep time, they will dismantle the ritual, the military buildings and the Ness itself.
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Reading Ness has forcefully reminded me of a chance encounter I once had with an old lady who, for reasons I never fathomed, had been to visit Dungeness. It is another place where we have retreated to in order to take atoms apart. It is dominated by a nuclear power station. I told her about Derek Jarman, the queer filmmaker who famously lived there and created a garden behind his cottage on the shingle. She looked at me and said with eyes that seemed nearly afraid, “It was a strange place, it seemed to me it might be either the beginning or the end of the world.” Perhaps all Ness has this quality, perhaps this is why It, As, He, They, and She are conjured, to keep the world from ending, to hold onto its being.