Latitudes review – ‘Adventures in far-flung places’

Author Jean McNeil. Photograph: Diego Ferrari

For most of us, relationships with people are at the core of daily life. Yet beneath these obvious attachments, we are also tied to landscapes, seascapes and other portions of the globe’s surface that we inhabit and visit.

Tragically, the one is undoing the other, as our run-of-the-mill existences are gradually tearing apart the fabric of the natural world.

Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet by Stoke Newington-based author Jean McNeil explores this contradiction with both analytic rigour and literary passion.

Part memoir, part travelogue, part essay, the book riffs off McNeil’s adventures in far-flung places: Greenland, the Namib desert, Antarctica, African savannas, Costa Rican cloudforests, the Falkland/Malvinas islands and the high seas between the South Atlantic and Europe.

You may have been to Costa Rica, Kenya or South Africa, but for most readers the other locations are novel terrain whose description is of interest in its own right.

Delve deeper and you‘ll be needing to re-evaluate your own relationship to the planet.

Were you to train as a safari guide, as McNeil does in Kenya and South Africa, you’d be having daily near-death experiences.

Had you the author’s opportunity to be writer-in-residence on an Antarctic expedition, scientific evidence would fill mind and eye for freezing weeks on end.

If you decided to trek 150 kilometres across a desert in Namibia, your bandaged feet would dominate your thoughts.

In each case, you’d be living quite precariously at the mercy of the natural world.

Would you allow that? For many, the answer would probably be: “I’d rather read the book”.

And reading the book is a good idea, for McNeil is intent on making us better understand place.

Her ‘thesis’, she explains, is that we don’t, and her lyrical accounts of exotic locales drill into us how poorly we listen to the world we inhabit.

Latitudes is for all its aesthetic intensity a melancholy volume, with an elegiac tone that is at points overwhelming.

At the same time, it is a book that will linger with you long after you have turned the last page.

Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet by Jean McNeil is published by Barbican Press. ISBN: 978-1-909954-11-3; RRP 12.99.