WILD: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths

H Hamilton £20 pp374

Jay Griffiths is an ardent traveller to distant places, in search of wildness and wilderness. She has spent time in West Papua and aboriginal Australia, lived with shamans in the Amazon and Inuit in the Arctic. From an early age, she explains, “I wanted to live at the edge of the imperative, in the tender fury of the reckless moment . . . [to] lay my passions where they belonged, flush with wildness, letting their lines of long and lovely silk reel out in miles of fire and ice.” This lifelong quest has left her with a real empathy for indigenous people, an unsentimental understanding of nature (sublime, unfathomable, sometimes destructive, never cruel) and a deep love of the wild. It has also made her not only a nature lover but a nature preacher and given her an unfortunate writing style (see above): a kind of unstoppable logorrhoea.

We learn only snippets about her background. She ran away a lot. She was briefly a born-again Christian. “There was a library in the house where I grew up.” The born-again bit may be significant: she abandoned the substance but not the style. And the library perhaps explains the carefree, career-free, globe-trotting lifestyle. When she broke up with a boyfriend, “I was mad with grief, Lear on the heath.” Other girls seek solace in a bottle of Baileys, but Griffiths repaired to a Buddhist monastery in Mongolia, to visit a “Kazakh shaman who healed with herbs,” recited verses from the Koran, and had “electricity in his hands”. It’s a free country, of course, and no sin to be brought up in a house with a library, or to jet off to Mongolia, or the Andes, or Burma, “living for six months with the Karen hill tribe”, whenever you feel the urge. Lucky you. But while one is amused to learn she is doing her bit with all those long-haul flights to keep the planet’s climate nice and cosy, Griffiths’s account of her lifestyle must be said to lack a certain self-awareness, let alone sense of humour.

This is made worse by her concomitant detestation of those who do not spend time with Kazakh shamans, but stay at home in the dull grey streets of little England: a world of “supermarket aisles, tinned thought . . . one-brand, off-the-shelf, right-wing views . . . pavements for those who take no risks . . . semi-detached houses, semi-the-same, semi-skimmed milk, semi-tasted and always lukewarm”. It is just possible, of course, that “the hollow men, the stuffed shirts” in their “overheated suburbia”, living out their pointless trivial little lives in those wretched semidetached houses, without their own library, have reasons for not emulating her. Lack of money, maybe; having to take the kids to school; working nine to five every day down at the local travel agency, booking flights so that certain more privileged people can jet around the world, look down from five miles up and despise them.

Allied to this is a blanket cultural repudiation of the West. Missionaries are evil, the Church has always hated nature, Christianity stinks (although the Koran is okay apparently, especially in the hands of an exotic Kazakh shaman: terribly in favour of women, nature, polytheistic tribal peoples and all that), western-style capitalism is uniquely responsible for species extinction. No mention of what happened to the fauna of New Zealand, Mauritius or North America, long before wicked, nature-raping, Bible-bashing whiteys first stepped ashore. And despite the years Griffiths has spent with indigenous peoples, she has apparently never noticed that the one characteristic they lack is a cultural self-loathing so profound that it forces them to disavow their roots, race and religion, and set off round the world sampling other people’s.

Package all this in a style that reminds one most of all of the lush parodic prose of Cold Comfort Farm (“My blood could only truly flow if it coursed into red, red earth . . . if I could dive into an oceanful of trilling fish . . .”) and what might have been an exemplary and inspiring guide to feeling more alive, rooted in the earth we belong to, induces only an unattractive snort of laughter.

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