Wild: An Elemental Journey

I don't normally read travel writing. Probably because much of it seems formulaic somehow: person from country A moves to country B, humorous misunderstandings ensue. This book is not like that.

I work in a bookshop. To be more specific, I am a children's bookseller. That means if you want to know the title of the fifth book in the 'Beast Quest' series or whether your nine year old would be able to read 'The Wee Free Men', I'm the person to ask.

I don't know quite so much about the rest of the books in the store but I do know a little about travel because all the travel books come in with the kid's stock. The first thing I always do when I open a box, is pull out all the travel stock and send it to our travel department on the floor above.

As I was shuffling stock from one box to another two weeks ago, I came across this book. The cover looked interesting and when I opened it up to the first paragraph, this is what I read:

'I felt its urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the colour of ice an invitation: come.'

I wanted to read the rest, so I put the book to one side for payday and continued unpacking.

I was paid a week ago and I started reading this then. The book is divided into segments: Earth, Ice, Water, Fire, Air and Mind and I read one each day (with the exception of my day off). In each section Jay Griffiths visits a place - the Amazon for earth, the Australian outback for fire, etc - and meets with the people there, describes the land and deals with the idea of 'wild'.

Parts of it worked really well for me and parts of it didn't.

There's a lot of anger in this book. Griffiths is angered by what the western world is doing to these people and to the land and, in most cases, rightly so. It upsets me that there are still people considered to be 'savages' in a World where I thought we'd learned our lesson. It upsets me that we're destroying the environment: deforestation in the Amazon, global warming in the arctic, mining in West Papua. It upsets me that to continue with our current lifestyle, we take and take and take without giving back.

The trouble is that this book is so angry about it that I almost gave up reading. Not because it was hard to read about the toll my own life must be taking on these people and places. Although it was sometimes difficult. I almost gave up reading because Griffiths is so angered that for one entire 70 page section, she talks of almost nothing else. Her anger runs away with her and takes the narrative with it.

It also bothered me that, in places, she sexualised the landscape to a degree that made me uncomfortable. There is a lot of discussion of phallic imagery, of a male-dominated world, of exploration as rape and although some of it was necessary, a lot of it was not. It's why I wouldn't be comfortable recommending this book to customers in my store. There were times when I felt uncomfortable reading it and I wouldn't in good conscience be able to tell anyone that it wouldn't make them uncomfortable too.

Also, she has a serious problem with Christianity, which jarred uncomfortably for me with her treatment of every other religion she discussed. She seemed to be completely fair-minded in her treatment of culture except when Christianity became involved.

Having said that, I do think this book is worth reading. It does raise some important points and, more importantly for me, it is well written. Griffiths is well-read, has done her research and often expresses herself beautifully. You just have to muscle your way through the fire sections and onto air, where she writes:

'I remember little about the climb now. I remember it was tough, I remember feeling as if I were a giant, in my seven-league boots, one boot in Italy, one in France, and I remember a feeling of dazzling glamour, brightness dancing outside me, brightness dancing within me. I gasped at a rush of ice on my cheeks. The air was singing in my ears eight octaves higher than human hearing. My cuffs and scarf were covered with frozen diamonds, and I swept up a handful of crushed stars in my hand and in sheer glee hurled them back at the sky. There was ice in my hair and sun in my eyes so bright that snow shone inside me and when I spoke there were no words but only the voice of the wind, and I laughed aloud at my own translucence. So immersed, so unimportant, so careless of myself did I feel that the mountain was all that mattered and it included me in its massif - an elation so enormous that I was utterly lost and happy to be so: so minimal myself, so mountainous.'