Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

Is a River Alive?

By Robert Macfarlane

WW Norton 2025

Since the answer to the question posed in Robert Macfarlane’s new book is a simple “no,” readers, including his legion of loyal fans, must seek elsewhere for the point of Is a River Alive? Those loyal fans familiar with the author’s breakout hit Underland will know much of what they’ll get in these pages even if they don’t find a point: wonderful, evocative prose and a kind of omnivorous, childlike curiosity that feels invigorating because it never feels forced.

But since a river is not, in fact, alive (they’re currents of water running along grooves in the ground), readers will still be hankering for some kind of point. It’ll only be with a good deal of embarrassment that they realize fairly early on that Macfarlane might actually be asking the question in earnest. For instance, he stops to clarify his writing influences:

I wish to say plainly and early that this book was written with the rivers who run through its pages, among them the Rio Los Cedros, the Adyar, the Cooum and the Kosasthalaiyar, the Mutehekau Shipu, the mighty St. Lawrence, and the clear-watered stream who flows unnamed from the spring that rises at Nine Wells Wood, a mile from my house, and who keeps time across the pages that follow. They are my co-authors.

Neither these rivers nor any others are Macfarlane’s co-authors. Rivers cannot be co-authors (they’re currents of water running along grooves in the ground). These and other rivers are in fact his subject, not his co-authors. But the woo continues:

The eyes of the forest are watching.

The ears of the river are listening.

The eyes of the forest can see a handful of people huddled close round the fire.

The ears of the rivers can hear one of them crying.

This is of course not true. In a stretch of poetic license, it could be allowed that the eyes of the forest are indeed watching; even a small party around (sorry: round) a campfire is certainly being watched by many nonhuman eyes at all times – birds, small rodents, snakes, insects, etc. But there’s no poetic license that can stretch far enough to allow that rivers can hear things. Rivers can’t hear things (they’re currents of water running along grooves in the ground).

Luckily, there’s a bit more to Is a River Alive than simple odd mystification. There’s the aforementioned sense of wonder, which extends to virtually every adventure and encounter Macfarlane relates:

I’d heard belugas might be in the fjord, but I still can’t credit the marvel of it in the moment. A creature I never thought I’d see in my lifetime – a white whale, a being of Arctic waters, fellow traveller with leopard seals and narwhals – right here, casually cavorting off the starboard bow of a diesel-stink car ferry four hours east of Montreal. My heart’s in my throat. My belly tumbles with the joy of it.

There’s a good deal of that belly-tumbling joy in this book, regardless of its dippy animist inclinations.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News