ONE NIGHT IN THE AMAZON basin, out of her head on the local hallucinogen, ayahuasca, Jay Griffiths shape-shifts, and enters the mind of a jaguar. She finds herself prowling the High in Oxford, and roaring in “untetherable rage” at the Bodleian Library “which houses with such care all the dry knowledge of years, while the Amazon burns” – and which now, of course, houses her own incandescent book, itself set out so carefully in 100 thematic sections.

This is just one of the paradoxes that haunt this kalaeidoscopic narrative, which is nothing less than a seven-year odyssey after that fugitive, barely definable quality “wildness”, the anarchic vitality that drives natural creation, the wellspring of the human imagination. Wild is not just about the knowledge of nature, but the nature of knowing.

But isn’t wildness obsolete, irrelevant? Isn’t it what civilisation was meant to defeat? It almost has defeated it, but Griffiths’s impassioned argument is the same as Henry Thoreau’s: “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” and that we lose touch with this deep, intuitive vitality in minds and beings at our peril. She could have followed her quest by sitting quietly in her garden for seven years and contemplating the lives of ichneumon wasps. Instead, she follows a well trodden path – into some of the world’s elemental wildernesses of forest, ice and rock. This isn’t out of bravura, though she is a brave woman. Nor from that sense of pious masochism that drove Christian missionaries into these territories, and who are most satisfyingly damned throughout her book, as the true destroyers of Eden.

She chooses these places because she cannot agree with the conventional wisdom that human beings are a stain on the wilderness. She sees us – or at least our feral souls – as part of nature, linked by our shared history and genes. She wants to understand the contract made by people who have lived in these wild places for millennia, to read the constitutions of their “ecocracies”.

In the Amazon she goes mind-trawling with shamans, and introduces one of her central themes: the wild vitality of language, which she sees as a direct mental correlative of the luxuriance of the natural world. The Desana people have words for intermediate colours in different kinds of light. But then the English have 50 vernacular names for the foxglove: the special intimacy of “indigenousness” is not as absolute as she sometimes argues. Her excursion into the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, conceived as a project to tame the language but ending up as a riotously proliferating organism, “glorious proof that language was unfixable and nomadic, wildly profuse and forever free” is typical of her discursiveness. Her pages are like tree-roots (etymologically connected, of course, to radical and route), dancing from mound to hollow, absorbing the nourishment of often very unwild history, anthropology, politics and science and sprouting into exhilarating prose.

She describes a whale hunt with the Inuit with a mixture of electrifying detail and deep-rooted Western nausea, and witnesses a people poised on a paradox: following an age-old survival practice and despising “the people who change nature”, while buzzing about the ice with automatic rifles in American 4x4s.

In the Arrernte Desert in Australia she walks songlines with Aboriginal companions. She sees mirages and the intricate network of canny, sand-wise organisms – the singers of the songlines – with the intelligence of a naturalist and the luminous originality of a visitor from another planet.

Diving with the Bajo “sea gypsies” off Indonesia, she recalls the US Navy using dolphins with bombs strapped to their backs as proxy terrorists. She fantasises that whales may be engaged in song-cycles thousands of years old. And in what is, for me, the most beautiful passage in the book, she rhapsodises about the reef-fish as if they had been alchemised out of music and phosphoresence. Yet, against her view elsewhere that names are a kind of entrapment, she dubs them all, recognises their individuality. Water is her natural element. She relishes its flux and femaleness, its refusal to be contained, its Promethean soupiness. Her tongue-in-some-where field guide to her own genitals makes them sound like a World Heritage wetland.

Wildis sensuous, cocky, magnificent, overwrought, liberating, maddeningly contradictory. Her powerful argument that the wild is our true home, its rhythms and archetypes embedded deep in our cultural and genetic inheritance, is weakened by the unattainability of these distant “self-willed lands” and ways of life.

It is as if the wild is a privilege, or a dream. But of course it is everywhere, in the scream of swifts over cities and the worm under the plough. (“Beneath the pavement, the beach,” they shouted in Paris in 1968). And in losing herself in its riotous energy she has underplayed one crucial point. Unlimited wildness, free-form chaos, leads only to dissolution. Wildness survives by temporary settlement into pattern and order.

Griffiths understands this. I think she simply feels that the ordered part of this cycle has ruled the roost too long. And implicitly the paradox of her book squares the circle. The puffs on the cover make much of its “wild” style. But its prose is anything but wild. It’s explosive and exciting, but in its Joycean wordplay, its meticulous scholarship, its ironic wit, its crafted cadences, it is a perfect example of sharp and organised Western intelligence. As Gary Snyder advised in A New Nature Poetics, writing should “be crafty and get the work done”.

We can’t go “back to nature”. But our best hope might be to go forward with it, using the richness of our imaginations and knowledges. Wild is a profoundly important contribution, a raging oratorio to animism thankfully transcribed in a very readable notation.

WILD: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths

Hamish Hamilton, £20; 374pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £18 (free p&p)

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