Robert Macfarlane is absolutely not what I'm expecting.
Bestselling author, respected University academic, chair of judges for the 2013 Man Booker prize? Forgive me for assuming he'll be a touch – well, snooty.
Thankfully he's quite the opposite. Affable and quick to laugh, Robert is easy-going company as we amble around the elegant gardens of Emmanuel, where he's been a fellow since 2002. “I’m so lucky here in being able to write and teach,” he says, as we settle on a bench. “Those are the two things I love doing - I’m not very good at much else.”
Don’t be fooled: Robert is more Action Man than bookish don. Passionate about the countryside, he's about to go climbing in Scotland before (claustrophobics look away) caving in the Mendips – and it’s his lyrical musings on such adventures that have won him worldwide acclaim.
Born in 1976, Robert grew up in Nottinghamshire “in a very outdoor-loving family. We went wherever there were mountains and islands, which was usually a long way from Nottinghamshire.” Did he always love being outside? “Depends who you ask! In my memory, yes; in my mother’s memory, I refused to take the dog for a walk.”
It was mountains in particular that appealed to a young Robert: “I was an incompetent climber but an avid climber,” he says with a smile, “and that makes for a dangerous climber.”
From the tender age of 6, he braved all manner of rock faces, “until 1999, when I lost my nerve in the Alps. I got to what’s called a ‘donkey ride’, where you reach a fin of rock and you can’t really climb around it. The safest way to get across it is to donkey ride it,” he says, demonstrating how he’d put a leg either side and shuffle forwards on his bottom, “but there was a thousand-foot drop on either side. My mind was willing but my body was not, and we turned back.
“So I just had to think quite hard about what I wanted from the mountains. And it was great, because that began whole 15 years of thinking and writing about our imaginative relationships with places.”
Robert’s first book, Mountains of the Mind (2003), did astonishingly well, beating that year’s Booker winner (DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane to win the prestigious Guardian First Book Award. He was just 26.
“It was a total surprise and completely wonderful,” he recalls. “I got a phone call from my editor saying ‘You’ve won!’ just before I went into a governing body meeting, which is where all the fellows sit like a quorum of ravens. I sat there hugging this secret to myself, thinking ‘I just wonder if everything’s changed a little bit?’ And so it had.”
Universally admired, the book went on to win more awards, and was adapted for BBC 4; his second, The Wild Places, was picked up by BBC2, and a recently-resurrected work by (long-dead) Scottish nature writer Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, will see a rather reluctant Robert back on our TV screens once again.
“I don’t think I’m naturally good in front of the camera,” he says, with a faint wince. “It famously soaks up 90 per cent of your energy, so I have to be more pantomime than I am. The BBC were keen to adapt the most recent book I wrote, The Old Ways, but in the end I just felt I couldn’t go back to the same places and summon up the energy, so I said no.
“But I feel so passionate about Nan Shepherd’s work - she writes incredibly about just walking and thinking and allowing places to surprise you - and I love the Cairngorms so much, that going up there for a few days to walk and talk is what I’d do anyway.”
Robert met his wife Julia while they were undergraduates at Cambridge. She’s also an academic, specialising in contemporary China, “so the children (Lily, 10, Tom, 8, and Will, 1) are growing up learning Chinese, which means they can insult me in Mandarin with impunity.”
Do they share Dad’s passion for nature? “They love being outdoors. Every couple of months the older ones go up to the Lake District, where my parents live, and spend a lot of time chucking stones in lakes and running down hills very fast.”
So compared to the beautiful Lakes, doesn’t he find Cambridgeshire's landscape a bit – uninspiring? “Hey, easy!” he cries in mock shock. “It is an odd place for a mountain person to end up,” he concedes, “but actually so many mountain lovers end up here, because it’s an incredible city to live in.
“I’m in the mountainous region of Cambridge, down by Addenbrooke’s: we’ve got the Gog Magogs, which are basically the Himalayas round here. We’re right on the fringe of the city - what Victor Hugo called the ‘bastard countryside’ - where the city frays into the country and the country frays into the city. I’ve learned to read it and to love it; its beauties are not simple.”
Oh you’re so poetic, I simper. He laughs. “Well there always seems to be a pair of pants hanging on the hawthorn hedge near where I live.”
Being so near the hospital inevitably means living under the flight path of the East Anglian Air Ambulance (EAAA), a service Robert had to call upon five years ago “when Lily had her accident, and the orange angels descended from the sky. They were amazing, absolutely amazing.”
The Macfarlanes were half-an-hour into a Suffolk holiday when they decided to go for a bike ride. Tom, then 2, was in a child seat on the back of Robert’s bike while Lily, then 5, was at the front.
“We were whizzing along a quiet country road, and she got her foot tangled up in the spokes at high speed,” he recalls. “That’s what stopped the bike, as it were, and the whole bike went over. Her foot was pretty badly mangled.
“We were all stunned; it was terrible, awful. I just didn’t know what to do; we were in a reception pocket as well, so the friend I was with ran until he got reception, called 999, and they sent the chopper.
“Down it came in the cabbage field right next to us, and these amazing guys jumped out in their jump suits, stuck morphine up her nose, and the next minute she was giggling. It’s magic stuff.”
And Tom? “He was fine. He landed on his head, as we all did, but we were all in our helmets. I’d never put a child on a front bike seat again; that was my mistake,” he adds. “I think she was just a bit old for it really, and her feet were dangling down rather than tucked up in those little foot holders. But it all ended fine. She does gymnastics and all the things 10-year-old girls love doing.”
Not surprisingly, Robert is an avid supporter of the EAAA: “I can’t quite believe that they’re donor-funded. That just astonishes me, so I’m doing anything I can to help them. It just seems very natural to get involved with a charity that’s done you well.”
A rather fancy feather in Robert’s cap was chairing the judging panel for the most recent Man Booker prize. How did it feel to be asked? “Really nice. I’d actually judged the prize before, when I was much younger, so I sort of knew what was doing.”
The task involved devouring a whopping 151 novels in 200 days, “which was full-on. I had a very small baby and a very big pile of books...” Sounds like my idea of heaven, I say. “Exactly! People talked to me as if I’d contracted some kind of disease, and said ‘Oh, poor you, what’s it like?’ And I had to say ‘I get to read novels all the time!’
Were there any stinkers? “There were dozens of stinkers! But there were many very fine novels, so there was a little bit of difficulty bringing that down to 13 for the long-list.”
The eventual winner was New Zealander Eleanor Catton, with her novel The Luminaries: “When I announced her name, the cameras all swung to her, and for about three seconds she didn’t move. It was lovely watching someone’s world change in almost every way.” She was, he says, a worthy winner: “and a very wise person, who I think will wear the difficulties of being that famous very, very well.
“It’s an astonishingly ambitious book,” he adds. “It’s very experimentally complex, but it also offers the traditional pleasures of plot and mystery. It also has a great sense of landscape; it turns out she loves climbing. That was not on my mind when we decided!”
And why has Robert not tackled fiction? “Ha! I have issued instructions to good friends to tape my fingers together if I ever mutter anything about writing a novel. There are more than enough novels in the world; one more mediocre novel by someone who should know better is not required.”
But he’s won so many awards for his writing! “Not for fiction.” Surely there’s a correlation? “I don’t think there is. Brilliant novelists do not make brilliant travel writers; brilliant poets do not make brilliant novelists. Very occasionally you find writers who are astonishingly amphibian and can move between different forms. I’m not one of them.”
How does he know? Has he tried? “Yes. I’ve also written poems, and I realised at an appropriately young age that while I might be able to write poetically, I was not a poet, and that lyricism was probably better contained within prose.
“It’s not that I feel that I’m wearing a straight-jacket,” he insists. “In fact non-fiction feels to me as creative and experimental as any novel could be. So I’m very happy to teach and read and judge fiction, but the gaffer tape is to be brought out if I ever try and write it.”
So what’s next for Robert? “I’m finishing a book about language for landscape, and I’m very slowly working on a book called Underland, about the incredible world of stuff that goes on underneath us. I’m also starting to work with a couple of young film-makers, which is very exciting. I’d quite like to adapt some ghost stories - I’m getting interested in the eerie.
“So I suppose if I want to do anything, it’s more collaborations with artists, musicians, photographers - whatever comes along, really. And interesting things keep turning up.”
It sounds like a lovely life. “I’m extremely conscious of that,” he nods. “I mean that in the sense that I feel incredibly fortunate, rather than I feel in any way complacent about what I have, so I give thanks for it. Often.
“I’ve kept writing, and in fact I’ve got RSI at the moment because I’ve been typing too much. Actually maybe this is a version of the gaffer tape,” he laughs, then bellows, god-like: ‘Stop writing!’”
Crikey, let’s hope he never does.
The EAAA
The East Anglian Air Ambulance charity was born in the summer of 2000 following a tragic accident in Newmarket. Frankie Dettori was involved in a plane crash in which the pilot died; he launched the appeal a couple of months later.
Today, the EAAA has two helicopters; between them, they can reach a patient anywhere in Beds, Cambs, Norfolk and Suffolk within 25 minutes, and have saved countless lives.
Visit eaaa.org.uk for details about how you can donate.
April 2014 (c) Cambridge News