Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane, Granta, 拢20, ISBN 1862075611 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
UNTIL relatively recent times, no one in their right mind could have written about 鈥渙ur love for mountains鈥�. Mountains were horrible, sinister excrescences on the Earth鈥檚 surface, to be avoided if possible, journeyed through in terror if necessary and well-known as the haunts of monsters.
It was a combination of the aesthetic and the scientific that led to a change, explains John Macfarlane in this magnificent book, along with a growing appreciation of the spectacular beauty of mountain landscape, curiosity about their geology and the effects of altitude. Mountain climbing became a fashionable, exciting sport and appealed so much to the British that some peaks captured the national imagination: the Matterhorn, for instance, and above all Mount Everest.
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Captivated by mountains in his youth, Macfarlane is a splendid writer about all this. Mountains of the Mind is a tumult of delights all the way. I found it particularly rewarding on early puzzling about the origin of mountains. Orthodoxy maintained that they had been created and would remain fixed for ever, but by the 18th century some had begun to speculate that a stupendous catastrophe had formed them or that they had been sculpted by what Macfarlane calls 鈥渢he conventional ordnance鈥� of nature 鈥� rain, snow, frost, river, sea, volcano and earthquake.