Travel:Even Hamish Hamilton, Jay Griffiths's publishers, are unsure how to define this extraordinary non-fiction book: "A one-of-a-kind book from a-one-of-a-kind author" reads their blurb. Griffiths spent seven years writing this book, and an unspecified sum of money and period of time researching it.
Her hugely ambitious subject is wilderness, which she organises into themed chapters about earth, ice, water, fire, and air, and she travels to some of the remaining wild places of the world. Among the places she goes to are West Guinea, where she talks to people who remember the cannibalism of unwelcome missionaries (human flesh, she is told, tastes like beef); indigenous villages along the Amazon where shape-shifters endure, and where she takes the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca with shamans; Ellesmere Island in the Artic where people learn the language of ice and light to hunt and survive, and where she goes to watch whaling; sad, alcohol-sodden Aboriginal Australia; and the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where the Bajo people live virtually their whole lives at sea as sea gypsies.
This is not travel for the sake of travel - Griffiths detests those travel writers who set about conquering mountains, deserts and oceans merely for the self-serving sake of such conquests - it is travel to question, analyse and celebrate what is authentic in landscape and community in some of the most remote areas of the world. Griffiths looks with often fierce polemic at what happens to these places and peoples when "civilised people" arrive. She also does an excellent demolition job on lazy, thoughtless travel writers who, over centuries, have dropped into areas, be it deserts or mountain ranges, with wads of money to buy guides to take them into the "wild" that local people will not go to for good reason, and who then depart and claim all the glory with their books. It's a form of colonialism that belongs to no particular country, but more to a state of mind.
Wild is a fat book, bursting with ideas, polemic, scholarship, philosophy, adventures, anthropology, cartography and entomology, and you are bombarded relentlessly on every page with information. On one - typical - page alone, Griffiths references seventh-century Greek poet Semonides, Ernest Hemingway, a television documentary about the Kogi people in Colombia, Joyce's Ulysses, Cleopatra and Mary Wollstonecraft. Keep up, stupid!
Wild took me a month to read, because it's so intense and hard to take for long periods, like having someone shouting in your ear non-stop. Much of the writing is overblown and weakened by the use of multiple adjectives and verbs - "life growling, flowering, leafing, hooting, wriggling and budding, flickering in a forest fiesta" - to the point of being maddening, but then some of it has the clarity and insight of pure poetry: the chapters about ice, in particular, are stunning.
You could argue that trying to understand a wild place is also a form of conquest, akin to bagging a mountain peak or converting the natives, albeit a more philosophical and cerebral one. Griffiths never really addresses her own assumption that her outlook on the wild is the best one, and while mostly it's difficult not to be thoroughly interested and engaged in her thought-provoking book, it does also get extremely tiresome to be lectured to over 350 pages: not every reader of this book is a stupid, insensitive, white westerner who has neither a conscience nor a passport.
The need for more editing is written between every line of this book. The job of researching and writing it seems to have overwhelmed her ability to edit it. When Wild works, it is brilliant, insightful, original and uplifting - when it doesn't, it's like reading a rant.
The last, very short section, is entitled "Wild Mind". As elemental a subject in its way as the more traditional ones of fire, water, air and earth, this section details a painful relationship break-up that occurred towards the end of the seven years spent writing the book. Griffiths writes movingly about the wilderness of her own deep ensuing loneliness, and shows how the wildest and most inaccessible places in life can be inside your own soul, where no one but you can ever truly travel.
Rosita Boland is a writer and an Irish Times journalist. Her most recent book is the non-fiction A Secret Map of Ireland (New Island)
Wild: An Elemental Journey By Jay Griffiths Hamish Hamilton, 350pp. £20
