Robert Macfarlane has once again, partnered with artist, Stanley Donwood to create a strangely eerie little book that lingers in the mind long after you have put it down. A kind of prose poem, this is set in a fictional space that is based on Orford Ness in Suffolk, an ever shifting spit of shingle and sand, sitting just off the shoreline and which, for decades was used by the military as a testing ground for everything from machine guns to bombs. In this tale, the characters meet at the Ness to prime and set off a bomb. They take it in turns to tell their stories and sing the bomb into being but as they enter into the church like ritual, nature intervenes and begins to alter, at first imperceptibly and then with increasing force and presence the destructive nature of their presence and purpose. This is deeply weird, in the oldest and truest sense of the word.

A new Robert MacFarlane is always a cause for celebration for me. Ness is something quite different though and very difficult to pin down. In fact the first time I read it, yes I have read it more than once already, I was left unable to find the words to describe it. Just...astonishing. Even after another reading it was still difficult to pin down – its not quite poetry but also not quite prose; so very like his usual excellent nature writing but so very otherworldly like the best folklore. Then there are the illustrations which add to this sense of, probably, East Anglian bleak decaying coastal landscapes with life winning through despite the ruination. It is a fable or perhaps an allegory of man and the land, nature and the manmade. The language pulsates throughout like the incessant waves on the shore of the beach. The characters, besides the ness itself, are on one side the Armourer, the Botanist, the Ornithologist, the Engineer, the Physicist and the Bryologist; and on the other it, he, she, they and as – more nebulous but perhaps more powerful for it. It deserves to be read over and over again and you will be rewarded by a slightly different experience of it each time. “Song of the Bomb, the arming song, the firing song.”