W: Stanley Donwood, Robert Macfarlane, welcome to Waterstones.
SD: Hello RM: Martha Greengrass!
W: We're here to talk about Ness and which is one of the most wonderfully strange books I
think I have ever come across in my entire 15 years. But it's wonderfully
strange. I wanted to start by asking how you talked about it
to each other as an idea, as a project how have you been discussing it?
SD: That's a very good question I can't remember the genesis of it at all.
RM: We swam.
SD: We swam. We talked about it in the sea.
But why were we talking about it?
RM: Well I've been I've been going to
Orford Ness, which is the landscape, unnamed landscape at the origin of this
book, for nearly twenty years now. And nowhere has drawn me back more and more
often. And it is a place of strange-ness and weird-ness and unsettling-ness and
all sorts of other nesses. And Stanley lives on a ness.
SD: Yeah, I'm from East Anglia so when I was a kid I was really keen on castles
so my parents took me to Orford Castle which was an early military structure and
I really strongly remember seeing this island that in those days was forbidden
it was a secret island. So no one could go there and there were these
strange structures like sort of ziggurats on legs that you can see across towards the sea
in this sort of grey light of the East Anglian Coast.
W: Strange. When you're there as a place 'cause I haven't ever been there, what is it
like to be there. How, I mean it's clearly inspiring for both of you,
but I just wanted to get a sense of the feel of that place.
RM: I mean for me it's haunting because it is where
a willful natural presence, powerful natural presence of the sea but also of
hare's the size of deers, of short ears, owls, of shingle moving and shifting in storms
collides with a history of British militarism. So for 70 years, 1913-1983
the ness was where the British government carried out secret military
tests. Everything from rifle ballistics in the First World War to
atomic weapons environmental testing, so detonators, centrifuges, casings etc; they
were all tested there. So it's a place where... it's a place of death and a place of life
SD: And the whole coast there is...it's a friable, it's where
the land meets the water and you're never quite sure which is which. Which one is...
they're vying for primacy in a way. So Orford, the town,
you reach by going through this enormous Forrest that until the end of
the Cold War was home to USAF long-range bombers and nuclear weapons. And you
reach this the village of Orford, which was a very important medieval town until
the sea spread along ton of shingle across the harbour which grew and grew and grew.
Long shore drift became Orford Ness, became this untrue island.
W: I think, reading the book, it does draw you into this landscape and give you a very
strong sense of it. I mean I was aware when I was looking at the images in
the book, the thing that struck me was this sense of a vanishing point.
A lot of these images are drawing you kind of away and into the distance.
SD: The first thing I did on each picture was to draw
the horizon, which is exactly the same horizon on every picture. So it's
always two thirds of the picture is land and a third is sky.
W: That's fascinating and it seemed to me that both in terms
of the the kind of prose and the image, the human is very removed
from it in some ways. That it's kind of drawing you from a kind of human
environment into something that has all sorts of other things creeping into it.
Was that consciously, as you were writing, something you were aware of?
RM: Yeah I guess so. I mean there are these human presences,
principally The Armourer, this great sort of technocratic managerial death-
dreaming figure, who maybe has some contemporary echoes but is also a
version of a militarized man and power that has been present
since Beowulf, since Gawain and the Green Knight. Since every story we've told
really. And then against that person, that force, comes nature in
its lively, versatile, more than human forces. Very strange sort of
superheroes, these five - he, she, they, as, and it - that gradually come to take over at
the green chapel, the site of the laboratory of the book really, of the
theatre of war if you like in the green chapel.
SD: That's the organic encroaching on the mechanistic somehow. The idea of the landscape
being used for these aggressive, nefarious purposes and then in
the end, there isn't anything to stop these forces, the forces of nature, from
doing whatever nature wishes to do.
RM: But that takes time and in a sense we're
living through a phase now where we don't have that time for
recovery, in fact I think it is a sort of dream or a
bad dream born out of the last years of crisis, of anxiety.
SD: A fever dream of the Antropocene, as you called it.
RM: I don't know of that comes across.
W: I think it does, I think it really does. And I think there is a sense
for me of the kind of nuclear testing site of that history and
that threat coming up against the current climactic threat that we're under.
SD: Nuclear fear was the climate change of the 1980s, for my formative years.
I don't think the term global warming was bandied about at all until the mid '80s.
RM: Nuclear winter
SD: And it was very present in East Anglia because that was where all of the flat land was for all
of the airfields for the limited nuclear theatre. It was a
serious policy. To have a contained war using what we call
tactical nuclear weapons in the European theatre.
W: It struck me I was thinking about about Nether, the image that was used as the cover of
your book Underland. And the fact that there is that
same juxtaposition there of, you know, of the nuclear flare and people go, isn't that a beautiful sunset.
And I think that's there in both of your work, that sense of marrying up
things that are beautiful and...
SD: When Rob was asking about using that picture for Underland
and I was like, why? But then you know when I read the book - oh I see - because it does make
perfect sense with the opening and closing at Underland.
W: But is that something that you see around you when you're
thinking about creating art and literature, that sense of
being able to see those two things in parallel around you all the time?
Things that are terrifying and horrifying and also beautiful?
RM: I think that's one reason why Orford Ness particularly is central, it's become
a sort of Tintern Abbey for the contemporary. It's become this site of
ruination, of violent histories, saturating landscapes, of terrible
futures postponed but not necessarily canceled. But also folded through with
this strange vitality of the living world which is you know in many ways
neutral and indifferent to our schemes but which we have, you know,
we've increasingly made restless, folded into our geological projects, our
military projects. So Orford Ness becomes this metonym for a state that we
are now in. It is a place of clash and crisis and juxtaposition. And that's
what makes it so eerie for me in a very modern sense.
W: And there is something so deeply mythological about this book and I wondered whether in the face
of where the planet is now and whether you think we need new
mythologies and new kind of ways of looking at and discussing the world?
SD: I don't think it can hurt. There are very many things we need more urgently but I
think this sort of... a kind of more, as you say, a mythology I suppose, a modern mythology.
A way of making sense of something which is, there is no sense that can be
taken from the current situation. So I don't know whether...is this a sort of symptom?
RM: Yeah I think it's a symptom. If the fever dream is a symptom. This is the book about
which I've known least of all the books I've written. It is mysterious.
I said somewhere that Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are both
really about men going out to sort of kill the wild if you like. Gawain goes to
behead the green man, Beowulf and the Geats go out to kill the wild things of
the moor and the lake. And these are not stories we need now, but they're embedded
deep and early in culture. And so yes I think retellings in which forms
of power and forms of organization that have got us into the situation we're in now...
SD: There's an inverted pyramid of power. Whereas you had this man, a
powerful man going out to subdue the wild nature and then to invert that now
seems to make a lot of sense because that is what has to be done if
there's going to be any semblance of a future for this species on this planet.
RM: There are some jokes in the book!
W: There are some jokes. I just wanted to ask you briefly
about collaboration as well because it's something that seems to,
you've both collaborated a lot doing your careers and I just wondered what it
was for each of you that you find particularly inspiring about working
with other people, not just on your own.
RM: I'm just awed by other people's
specialisms. I feel like I have a mini sort of half specialism of being able to
put words sort of in an order and that's it. I can't draw, I can't sing, I can't
dance and I definitely can't make music and so when I work with people like Stanley's
talent and vision, or musicians, or artists, photographers, it just amazes me.
And then it becomes this very vibrant, I could never have written this book on my
own. It was years of swimming, talking, stalling. Getting stuck
and kind of coming back.
SD: Other things getting in the way.
RM: So for me it's a thrilling kind of energy circuit that fizzes away.
SD: I like working with other people. So I've very little faith in my own work so it's kind of,
if I get somebody else involved it's not just my fault, I can share the blame.
RM: That's how it is, is it?!
SD: I was thinking more about Radiohead to be honest.
W: It's good you're finding this out now. And then my last question was really that I
think when I started reading Ness, I was quite overwhelmed by the sense of
this crisis that is there and I think that my thoughts were probably
quite dark in the initial pages. But as I got through it
and kind of worked my way into it,
I did find that but by the end of it there was another strand that
was alongside that and it was a sense of there being kind of hope in there as
well. And I wondered whether for you both, whether you see this as a
hopeful book and indeed whether you have hope for the future or how do you
feel about about about our prospects?
SM: I'll pass on that! I'll let Rob come up with something.
RM: Well, the five forces, the five figures,
I find them, I wanted to make them with a kind of beauty and awe. They're not human
they're all that is extraordinary in the more
than human world. Funghi and currents and creatures and wood and birds; all
collaborating in this great project of being. So there is a hope in
that and eventually they do convert The Armourer.
But the bigger hope question. Well, I feel that we know
better than we ever have before what we need to do and we have less time
and in a sense less possibility in which to do it. So we're sort of half the way
there in terms of the visions but the futures remain dark.
SD: There's a concerning direction of travel.
W: I think I would agree with you but I think I am
also very glad that there are books like this out in the world. As you say, there
are more pressing things perhaps to do but I think this is as
important. And it is a beautiful, beautiful thing. So thank you.
SD + RM: Thank you very much.