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Can a river be a person?

Macfarlane starts off small. It is 2022, and the local spring is running dry. 'Has the water died?,' his young son asks. It's a query that will recur throughout this book. But by 'If you find it hard to think of a river as alive, try picturing a dying river or a dead river,' he notes. 'This is easier.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Related : Although it may be the logical next step, the author takes a greater leap in his choice to use anthropomorphic grammar. Instead of saying, for example 'a river that flows,' he writes, 'I prefer to speak of rivers who flow,' treating rivers and other bodies of water as if they were people. Macfarlane's smooth prose doesn't often rely on this construction, but it is jarring at first. For readers who accept the conceit of the book, however, it is part of the package, and this grammatical anomaly, initially off-putting as it may be, becomes as smooth as a river stone over time, in part through usage and in part thanks to Macfarlane's copious quotations from indigenous sources who do the same. Advertisement The personal explorations chronicled in the book are equally adventurous. Although the author starts with the spring near his home in Cambridge, England, with detours to other bodies of water, including the Mississippi, the Arno, and the Ouse, the bulk of this book is centered on explorations of three threatened waterways, in the company of the locals who know them intimately and are fighting for their preservation. The first of these adventures has him hiking through the mountains of Ecuador's steamy Los Cedros forest. He and his colleagues are tracking the area's namesake River of the Cedars. Like the other waterways of this watershed, such as the Puyango-Tumbes River, it is being polluted by the residue left by gold mining. His next great adventure takes him to Chennai, India, where the Adyar has essentially been killed by development and industrial pollution that also poisons the air around it. The final journey involves kayaking through the Mutehekau Shipu Basin in Canada, a strenuous trip that sees him bleeding from black fly bites and capsizing in 'a welter of white water' in life-threatening rapids. Related : The scholarship underpinning these adventures is impressive. As Macfarlane undertakes each journey, he casually references both history — citing, for example, humanity's 'drive for control' over rivers, begun more than 5,000 years ago on the Yangtze — and literature, from Gilgamesh on, as well as current environmental legislation, such as the Whanganui River Claims Settlement Act of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Throughout, he weaves in personal stories of activists and beliefs from riverine cultures as far-flung as India's Idu Mishmi and Canada's Innu, building a foundation for his case that is both deep and broad. Advertisement But it is the author's language that takes the biggest leaps. Macfarlane is a lyrical writer, his prose packed with alliteration and imagery, much of it connected to rivers and water. But while the overall effect is hypnotic, at times his metaphors are strained. 'I'm pierced again by hope and futility: the two streams of the waterfall,' he writes. And not all his imagery hits home: 'the mintcake-white hyperbolic love-token of the Taj Mahal' is as over-ornamented as the structure it seeks to ridicule. Coupled with the copious references, the result is dense and can be hard going. However, for all these missteps, this is a profoundly beautiful and moving work. Watching dragonflies in India's Vedanthangal bird sanctuary, which has been polluted by the industrial giant Sun Pharma, he notes, 'the sunset has slaughter in it, and spills scarlet onto the vast clouds massing inland.' Elsewhere, a butterfly passes, 'a scrap of silk on a 500-mile migration,' and 'a golden plover cries like rain.' By the time we arrive, with Macfarlane, at the thundering gorge at the mouth of the Mutehekau Shipu, we are ready to 'hear speech … tumbling out of this mouth,' which the author translates in a breathless, elegiac roar. We are ready to go with the flow. IS A RIVER ALIVE? By Robert Macfarlane W.W. Norton, 384 pages, $31.99 Advertisement Clea Simon is the Somerville-based author most recently of the novel " ."