‘Is a River Alive?’ Review: A Stilted Love Letter to the Natural World

An ecological, nonfiction work that explores the animacy and integrity of nature, the acclaimed naturalist Robert Macfarlane’s “Is a River Alive?” is an effective book with a clear message.

Divided into three different places, cultures, and rivers, Macfarlane’s “Is a River Alive?” allows readers the chance to visit the unspoiled Río Los Cedros that snakes through the misty cedar forests of Ecuador, the polluted urban Adyar, Cooum, and Kosasthalaiyar rivers of Chennai, India, and the endangered Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, of Canada. Each chapter offers a crystallized, frozen glance of the animate, ever-changing rivers as they exist now, leaving readers with a profound understanding of their fragility and a resulting urge for their preservation.

In each of his moving accounts, Macfarlane centers the conversation on the rivers themselves, but he doesn’t hesitate to provide extensive background information on the status of the ecological preservation of each setting and the rivers’ relationships to surrounding societies and environments. He consults expert naturalists in various fields and recounts not only his own but others’ experiences with the sites.

What results from this groundwork is a raw, delicate glimpse at the power and strength of the natural world, leaving readers with a strong acceptance of Macfarlane’s argument — that a river is alive.

In spite of the convincing argument, one weakness of Macfarlane’s “Is a River Alive?” is the overflow of awkward pseudo-poetic statements, which distances the book from the readers. Their exaggerated, unnecessary nature states the obvious and detracts from the natural flow of the writing, inserting a hue of pretentiousness. Natural descriptions, particularly ones of such incredible and exquisite locales, thrive in their simplicity. In other words, they speak for themselves. By adding sparse instances of overly poetic commentary to an already poetic subject, Macfarlane seemingly distrusts his readers’ ability to see and understand the depth of the topic on their own.

While these inconsistent moments of blunt poetic style may just be an echo from Macfarlane’s past writing — like his collection of poems in “The Lost Words” — merging nonfiction with occasional clips of poetic prose can be a difficult feat; Such inclusions are often distracting at best.

On a similar note, while Macfarlane’s descriptions of the natural world often tend to be precise and clear, this clarity is at times blurred by a commanding influx of similes and comparison-based descriptions. At times, it feels as though every other description is rooted in a simile, which — per the nature of similes themselves — relies on the image of something else to bolster a description and, as a result, shifts the focus. Macfarlane’s extensive reliance on basic figurative language not only feels repetitive but, again, distracting.

Lastly, in attempting to answer its titular question, “Is a River Alive?” jumps straight to the answer in its emphatic affirmative. In each formulaic chapter, Macfarlane’s description of the river and setting reaches this answer too quickly. In other words, Macfarlane’s approach to this central question is based on the assumption that the readers already agree with it. To readers unacquainted with the powerful, living side of rivers that Macfarlane describes and in need of more persuasion before accepting the thesis, the book may come across as unaccommodating.

As a result, coupled with an undue saturation of poetic and figurative language, Macfarlane’s text comes across as pretentious and assuming at times, leaving little space for those who do not pick up the book already convinced of the central question.

—Staff writer Thomas A. Ferro can be reached at thomas.ferro@thecrimson.com.