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A review by sadie_slater
Waterlog by Roger Deakin
3.0
In 1997 Roger Deakin, environmentalist, film-maker and keen swimmer, embarked on a journey through Britain, swimming in rivers, lakes, outdoor pools and the sea. The book he wrote about it, Waterlog, has become a classic of the nature-writing genre. I first heard of it when I read Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, which is in part a memorial to Macfarlane's friendship with Deakin, last year, and picked up a copy a few months ago.
Waterlog's subtitle, 'A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain', suggests a linear progress through the country, but in fact Deakin follows a meandering course, concentrating mainly on the West Country and East Anglia, close to his Suffolk home. He makes one visit to Wales, spends some time in the Yorkshire Dales and swims off the west coast of Scotland before returning south again with only a brief stop in Northumbria. Huge areas of the UK are left unexplored, including (sadly for me, at least) pretty much all of the lakes and waterways I'm most familiar with (bar a brief dip in the Windrush near Burford). Nevertheless, it's a fascinating book. As well as describing his swimming experiences, Deakin writes thoughtfully about the history, natural history and cultural importance of the bodies of water he swims through, and his beautiful descriptive prose left me longing to visit the places he describes (although not to swim, except in the few outdoor pools and lidos he swims in; I love swimming, but as a short-sighted person of a nervous disposition, and one who once nearly drowned in Walden Pond, I'm happy to be a pool-based swimmer and to experience nature by walking, or maybe occasional paddling, instead).
However, for me, Waterlog does suffer somewhat from being an example of what Kathleen Jamie, in her London Review of Books review of The Wild Places, dubbed 'the Lone Enraptured Male'. Yes, occasionally Deakin talks to locals: the last eel-fisher in Ely, an artist working in the Medway estuary, a farmer and cider-maker in the Somerset Levels, but with the exception of a woman referred to only as Judith whose family own an old mill in the Avon near Evesham and swim there all summer, all of these are male. Sometimes he quotes other writers who have visited the same waters, but just about all of them are male too, and most of the time the only voice we hear is his. And his voice is a voice which, quite unconsciously, sees the world as being about men and doesn't really consider women at all (the most egregious example of this comes towards the end, when he mentions a prep school which once required boys and girls to swim naked together up to the age of 12, and describes the acute embarrassment of the older boys struggling to hide their arousal while the by-then-pubescent girls changed, without ever seeming to pause to consider that it was probably pretty embarrassing for the girls as well) and which takes a distinctly male attitude towards the sensual experience of outdoor swimming, with the water he's swimming in subtly characterised as female in a way that made me cringe a bit (the most obvious and explicit example comes when he is swimming his way across Norfolk and enters the River Wissey "feeling like a philanderer of rivers, with the water of the Little Ouse still in my hair", which was an actual full-body wince). I did still enjoy the book, but this stopped me loving it as I might have done.
Waterlog's subtitle, 'A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain', suggests a linear progress through the country, but in fact Deakin follows a meandering course, concentrating mainly on the West Country and East Anglia, close to his Suffolk home. He makes one visit to Wales, spends some time in the Yorkshire Dales and swims off the west coast of Scotland before returning south again with only a brief stop in Northumbria. Huge areas of the UK are left unexplored, including (sadly for me, at least) pretty much all of the lakes and waterways I'm most familiar with (bar a brief dip in the Windrush near Burford). Nevertheless, it's a fascinating book. As well as describing his swimming experiences, Deakin writes thoughtfully about the history, natural history and cultural importance of the bodies of water he swims through, and his beautiful descriptive prose left me longing to visit the places he describes (although not to swim, except in the few outdoor pools and lidos he swims in; I love swimming, but as a short-sighted person of a nervous disposition, and one who once nearly drowned in Walden Pond, I'm happy to be a pool-based swimmer and to experience nature by walking, or maybe occasional paddling, instead).
However, for me, Waterlog does suffer somewhat from being an example of what Kathleen Jamie, in her London Review of Books review of The Wild Places, dubbed 'the Lone Enraptured Male'. Yes, occasionally Deakin talks to locals: the last eel-fisher in Ely, an artist working in the Medway estuary, a farmer and cider-maker in the Somerset Levels, but with the exception of a woman referred to only as Judith whose family own an old mill in the Avon near Evesham and swim there all summer, all of these are male. Sometimes he quotes other writers who have visited the same waters, but just about all of them are male too, and most of the time the only voice we hear is his. And his voice is a voice which, quite unconsciously, sees the world as being about men and doesn't really consider women at all (the most egregious example of this comes towards the end, when he mentions a prep school which once required boys and girls to swim naked together up to the age of 12, and describes the acute embarrassment of the older boys struggling to hide their arousal while the by-then-pubescent girls changed, without ever seeming to pause to consider that it was probably pretty embarrassing for the girls as well) and which takes a distinctly male attitude towards the sensual experience of outdoor swimming, with the water he's swimming in subtly characterised as female in a way that made me cringe a bit (the most obvious and explicit example comes when he is swimming his way across Norfolk and enters the River Wissey "feeling like a philanderer of rivers, with the water of the Little Ouse still in my hair", which was an actual full-body wince). I did still enjoy the book, but this stopped me loving it as I might have done.