Connemara: Listening to the Wind (review)

Tim Robinson's latest nonfiction work returns to what Robinson does best: an intense dissection and examination of a particular landscape. Though readers will draw obvious connections to his Stones of Aran (1995), Connemara exists on its own, without needing comparisons to its sibling. Nor is the new volume a repetition of Aran on a different landscape. Connemara: Listening to the Wind extends Robinson's deep connection with what surrounds him, an examination of what makes this place valuable: not only geography and story, but also botany and people, history and emotion, and the juxtaposition of complexity and simplicity. The basic premise of the book is more than just an examination of a place; Connemara is a puzzle, made up of disparate elements that strengthen the picture of the whole. In such a complex landscape, any writing that makes it valuable to the common reader must be equally complex to convey that wonder clearly.

Immediately, the most recognizable trait of Connemara: Into the Wind is the language, quintessentially Robinson's, which mirrors the complexity of the land and its language in sentences that are somehow lucid even while unapologetically dense. In the first essay, "Scailp," Robinson writes of walking, the only mode of transportation that will offer any real relationship with the land. He writes that

Ideally, I feel, a walk should be undertaken with respect for its own timescale and structures and ceremonies of mood one brings to the hearing of a piece of music. Conversation, except on what's to hand or underfoot, is redundant, inopportune. Solitude is best. I cannot dance, perhaps because dancing takes place on the flat, on a surface that suggests no rhythms and leaves my will floundering in self-consciousness; instead I aspire to a compensating gift of walking, not in a way that overcomes the land but in one that commends every accident and essence of it to my bodily balance and my understanding. Sometimes, though, after one of these almost ceremonial or ritual walks I am disappointed to find very little in my mental knapsack; I have taken the distance only in my stride and not in my mind.

The language is formal, even to the point of avoiding contractions where they might fall naturally in speech. This, in turn gives a tone to the reading—and to the walking—that requires respect, focused attention, and an intelligent diligence. Robinson is not undertaking this walking casually, and neither should his reader undertake the reading casually. Anything that remains at surface-level is inappropriate in this place.

Beyond the tone and the phrasing, Robinson's attention to his language allows him into an intense specificity of expression. For instance, in "The Last of the Turf," he writes that

That prompted a curious thought: if the bottom of, say, a six-spit-deep bog is three thousand years old, then one end of a sod of turf is five hundred years older than the other. Suddenly the sods appeared to me as compass needles torn out of their natural alignment in the time-field, their orientation to the centre of the earth.

These moments are immediately rewarding, bright flashes that illuminate the reader and the landscape. Delightful phrases occur elsewhere throughout the prose: in "Holiday Island," "the shoreline is a necklace of incidentals" and in "Inis Ní in Winter," he writes that "On a sunny day when the waters, mountains and sky are a thesaurus of synonyms for 'blue' one can overlook the dereliction at hand." In every essay, Robinson displays his nail-on-the-head genius for phrasing that readers have come to expect.

Often, Robinson will start his meanderings on the large scale and move to the small scale or he will move from historical to geological to botanical, just to see this place from all possible sides. This has the effect of holding a cube in both hands and turning it around to see how the light falls on each plane from the other side. For instance, in...