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Ness
Eerie, unsettling and hauntingly beautiful - a new collaboration from the bestselling creators of Holloway, Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood
'Ness goes beyond what we expect books to do. Beyond poetry, beyond the word, beyond the bomb -- it is an aftertime song' Max Porter, Booker-longlisted author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
Somewhere on a salt-and-shingle island, inside a ruined concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, a figure called The Armourer is leading a ritual with terrible intent. But something is coming to stop him.
Five more-than-human forms are traversing land, sea and time towards The Green Chapel, moving to the point where they will converge and become Ness. Ness has lichen skin and willow-bones. Ness is made of tidal drift, green moss and deep time. Ness has hagstones for eyes and speaks only in birds. And Ness has come to take this island back.
What happens when land comes to life? What would it take for land to need to come to life?
Using word and image, the pair have together made a minor modern myth. Part-novella, part-prose-poem, part-mystery play, in Ness their skills combine to dazzling, troubling effect.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of The Lost Words with Jackie Morris , The Old Ways and Underland . Stanley Donwood is an artist and the author of Slowly Downward , Household Worms and Bad Island .
'Ness goes beyond what we expect books to do. Beyond poetry, beyond the word, beyond the bomb -- it is an aftertime song' Max Porter, Booker-longlisted author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
Somewhere on a salt-and-shingle island, inside a ruined concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, a figure called The Armourer is leading a ritual with terrible intent. But something is coming to stop him.
Five more-than-human forms are traversing land, sea and time towards The Green Chapel, moving to the point where they will converge and become Ness. Ness has lichen skin and willow-bones. Ness is made of tidal drift, green moss and deep time. Ness has hagstones for eyes and speaks only in birds. And Ness has come to take this island back.
What happens when land comes to life? What would it take for land to need to come to life?
Using word and image, the pair have together made a minor modern myth. Part-novella, part-prose-poem, part-mystery play, in Ness their skills combine to dazzling, troubling effect.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of The Lost Words with Jackie Morris , The Old Ways and Underland . Stanley Donwood is an artist and the author of Slowly Downward , Household Worms and Bad Island .
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First published November 7, 2019
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About the author
Robert Macfarlane
111 books4,473 followersRobert Macfarlane is a British nature writer and literary critic.
Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about landscape, nature, people and place, including Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words: A Spell Book (with the artist Jackie Morris, 2017) and Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019). His work has been translated into many languages, won prizes around the world, and his books have been widely adapted for film, television, stage and radio. He has collaborated with artists, film-makers, actors, photographers and musicians, including Hauschka, Willem Dafoe, Karine Polwart and Stanley Donwood. In 2017 he was awarded the EM Forster Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 228 reviews
January 6, 2020
Ness feels like a modern mythology — a story more felt than understood, more intuited than dissected.
The setting for Macfarlane’s eerie, spectral fable is Orford Ness, “an island of secrets”, a “cold marsh”, a “a locked-in place that shifts in its sleep”. Used as a secret military base during most of the 20th century, Orford Ness was a site for bomb testing and atomics weapons research before it was converted into a nature reserve. Video tours of the place and its abandoned pagodas evoke an eerie sense of desolation — a haunting premonition of what the world will look like once the human species has managed to destroy itself. This is the same feeling that the prose poem and line drawings in Ness evoke.
The plot, if you can call it that, draws on the geomorphology of the place — the shingle spit, moss, lichen, marsh, brackish water and wildlife — to chart the clash of human and environmental forces. The human aspect is represented by six archetypal figures (the Armourer, the Engineer, the Botanist, the Ornithologist, the Physicist and the Bryonist) who are engaged on a course of destruction, while the environmental opposition is symbolized by five elemental beings (called “It”, “He”, “She”, “They” and “As”). These beings can be briefly, if inaccurately, summarized as ocean gyre, bird song, vegetation, rock formation and dark matter / nothingness.
If the above premise sounds rather vague and impressionistic, that is because Ness feels like an echo, a theme song to a larger, implied epic. And yet, it is a text that lingers and grows on you, like the moss and hyphae that populate its story.
Mood: Otherwordly
Rating: 7.5/10
Also on Instagram.
The setting for Macfarlane’s eerie, spectral fable is Orford Ness, “an island of secrets”, a “cold marsh”, a “a locked-in place that shifts in its sleep”. Used as a secret military base during most of the 20th century, Orford Ness was a site for bomb testing and atomics weapons research before it was converted into a nature reserve. Video tours of the place and its abandoned pagodas evoke an eerie sense of desolation — a haunting premonition of what the world will look like once the human species has managed to destroy itself. This is the same feeling that the prose poem and line drawings in Ness evoke.
The plot, if you can call it that, draws on the geomorphology of the place — the shingle spit, moss, lichen, marsh, brackish water and wildlife — to chart the clash of human and environmental forces. The human aspect is represented by six archetypal figures (the Armourer, the Engineer, the Botanist, the Ornithologist, the Physicist and the Bryonist) who are engaged on a course of destruction, while the environmental opposition is symbolized by five elemental beings (called “It”, “He”, “She”, “They” and “As”). These beings can be briefly, if inaccurately, summarized as ocean gyre, bird song, vegetation, rock formation and dark matter / nothingness.
If the above premise sounds rather vague and impressionistic, that is because Ness feels like an echo, a theme song to a larger, implied epic. And yet, it is a text that lingers and grows on you, like the moss and hyphae that populate its story.
Mood: Otherwordly
Rating: 7.5/10
Also on Instagram.
November 7, 2019
On a shingle island, a figure called the Armourer is at work. He is standing in the Green chapel and is assisted by the Engineer, the botanist the physicist and the ornithologist. He is invoking the Firing song, a dark ceremony that will bring destruction. Five human-like forms are converging on the Green Chapel and are intent on stopping him.
She makes green & green fills the air around her & warps hard into objects within her radiance.
There is Drift, who is a world shaper, He who is water, She who is earth, They who are rock and As who is the very air around. They are moving through land, sea, time and space to the Green Chapel where they will become one, where they will become Ness. They want their island back.
Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness
This is a stunning if slender book. It is part story and part poem, with taut writing that writhes with dark metaphor. Macfarlane takes familiar tropes from folk horror, dystopia, science fiction and drapes them over this unreal landscape to make a thriller that is as troubling as it is surreal. A hagstone allowing a glimpse of the future and the past separate each section. This unreal landscape of shifting shingle and harsh military structures is bought to chilling life by the stunning art from Donwood that captures the eeriness of the place. Very highly recommended.
She makes green & green fills the air around her & warps hard into objects within her radiance.
There is Drift, who is a world shaper, He who is water, She who is earth, They who are rock and As who is the very air around. They are moving through land, sea, time and space to the Green Chapel where they will become one, where they will become Ness. They want their island back.
Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness
This is a stunning if slender book. It is part story and part poem, with taut writing that writhes with dark metaphor. Macfarlane takes familiar tropes from folk horror, dystopia, science fiction and drapes them over this unreal landscape to make a thriller that is as troubling as it is surreal. A hagstone allowing a glimpse of the future and the past separate each section. This unreal landscape of shifting shingle and harsh military structures is bought to chilling life by the stunning art from Donwood that captures the eeriness of the place. Very highly recommended.
Read
January 8, 2020A prose poem inspired by Orford Ness, a place I have never visited and which could now only disappoint me. Rob Macfarlane writes, with haunting, louring illustrations from Stanley Donwood, the pair of them weaving modern myth from the site's history, a history that helpfully already has the contours of legend – an outlaw terrain become a place of military experimentation, which in turn has now softened into a nature reserve. Here it is the Green Chapel, on which five strange voyagers converge to prevent one final destructive forging by the Armourer and his congregation. Calling it the Green Chapel nods to Gawain And The Green Knight, of course, and that gives some idea of the mood here; it feels like eavesdropping on a ritual from some distant and half-understood culture, even as it's threaded through with references to the stuff of everyday life, from songbirds and winds to Lego Star Wars figures. But really it could be any clash of pantheons, of life and death, from the oldest Chaoskampf myths through to the latest superhero film. You could also draw a parallel with Alan Garner's Boneland – a fractured telling, and one which could hardly have happened without modernism, that nonetheless creates a feeling of something primal and ancient.
All of which said, it's not the first book this year where I feel obliged to mention the more mundane consideration of cost to reading time; £15 for an already slim volume with plenty of blank space. It's a lovely object, and one I was lucky enough to find in the library, but for those whose local services have been hit harder by the cruel ongoing absurdity that is austerity, it's hard to unreservedly recommend as a purchase. Part of me wonders if it might not be more at home as a performance, where its quality of litany and its story of coming together to thwart the seemingly inevitable could be a powerful combination.
All of which said, it's not the first book this year where I feel obliged to mention the more mundane consideration of cost to reading time; £15 for an already slim volume with plenty of blank space. It's a lovely object, and one I was lucky enough to find in the library, but for those whose local services have been hit harder by the cruel ongoing absurdity that is austerity, it's hard to unreservedly recommend as a purchase. Part of me wonders if it might not be more at home as a performance, where its quality of litany and its story of coming together to thwart the seemingly inevitable could be a powerful combination.
July 20, 2020
3½ *
Bijzonder boekje dat zeker gebaat is met meerdere herlezingen.
Bijzonder boekje dat zeker gebaat is met meerdere herlezingen.
June 15, 2020
3,5
Na zeventien jaar bergtoppen en grotten trotseren om de natuur enthousiast en erudiet in boekvorm te vereeuwigen, neemt Robert Macfarlane met deze geïllustreerde allegorie een zijsprong. ‘Ness’ is een 'vergaansmythe' waarin biologische oerkrachten zich bundelen in hun opstand tegen het metalige en plastic antropoceen. Ondanks de beklemmende poëzie die - net als in het geslaagdere ‘Lanny’ van Max Porter - trapsgewijs door driftige natuur overwoekerd lijkt, laat het ongrijpbare vertelsel de lezer met halflege handen achter.
Na zeventien jaar bergtoppen en grotten trotseren om de natuur enthousiast en erudiet in boekvorm te vereeuwigen, neemt Robert Macfarlane met deze geïllustreerde allegorie een zijsprong. ‘Ness’ is een 'vergaansmythe' waarin biologische oerkrachten zich bundelen in hun opstand tegen het metalige en plastic antropoceen. Ondanks de beklemmende poëzie die - net als in het geslaagdere ‘Lanny’ van Max Porter - trapsgewijs door driftige natuur overwoekerd lijkt, laat het ongrijpbare vertelsel de lezer met halflege handen achter.
May 25, 2021
(1.5) Macfarlane is hit or miss for me. (Hit = Landmarks.) This one’s a miss, pretentious and plotless, a sort of play for five voices set at the former atomic bomb testing site Orford Ness. Environmental threat is juxtaposed with the benign neglect of a site returned to nature. The repetitive, declarative style worked well in The Lost Words, but not so here. A line I liked (though it’s marred by jargon): “She is committed to redefining decay as a form of verdancy, individuality as a biological aberration & gender as a parallax error or species anomaly.”
November 14, 2019
As good as incomprehensible but soooo beautiful :-)
Thank you Random House for the ARC
Thank you Random House for the ARC
July 6, 2022
This is eerie and profound and deep… but a teensy bit pretentious. Stagey and poemy and fabley all at once. I did enjoy slowing down to soak in the strangeness, and there was beauty and fierce imagination and powers beyond imagination, but perhaps it was just a bit too brief and arty for my taste.
May 12, 2024
Dystopische proza-poëzie dat aan mij een slechte lezer heeft. Maar goed, zelfs voor de slechte verstaander is duidelijk dat we als mens onze wereld zonder pardon aan het vernietigen zijn en dat de natuur in al zijn en haar verschijningsvormen daar een stokje voor steekt, onder meer door de mens op te slokken, te transformeren. De vorm van dit verhaal met plaatjes is origineel, maar bij mij niet op de juiste plaats.
September 25, 2021
Wat een boek. Iedereen die nieuwsgierig is naar boeken met een vorm die op geen enkele andere vorm lijkt, naar teksten waarvan je net niet vast kunt pakken waar ze over gaan, maar die toch wonderlijke, verontrustende beelden op je netvlies etsen, beelden die je nog nooit hebt gezien, beelden die ook nog eens via broeierige potloodtekeningen tot je komen, lees dit.
June 28, 2024
Completely brilliant. Best book I had read all year. I’m fortunate to have visited Orford Ness and it is as weird as the book. I have both the physical book and audiobook, the audio version is particularly wonderful as it has a score.
December 12, 2023
Goodreads recommendations fooled me again. At least now I know I just really dislike Macfarlane's style. Cool concept, too much meaningless word soup.
I did like these bits (freely edited together). As a poem it would have been beautiful:
"it, he, she, they, as
All five know where they must go &
with what they must grapple &
where they must go is to the Green Chapel (...)
The ebb tide grades shingle finer then fine,
The fall-out settles soft to the pine. (...)
It was all sea once, in a long unbroken line.
I did like these bits (freely edited together). As a poem it would have been beautiful:
"it, he, she, they, as
All five know where they must go &
with what they must grapple &
where they must go is to the Green Chapel (...)
The ebb tide grades shingle finer then fine,
The fall-out settles soft to the pine. (...)
It was all sea once, in a long unbroken line.
September 1, 2020
Prachtig, bijna Shakespeariaans geschreven verhaal, dat eigenlijk veel te kort is. De wetenschappers doen aan als oude toverkollen zingend rond het meest verschrikkelijke dat mensenhanden ooit gemaakt hebben als was het een kookpot. Het verdient het hardop gelezen te worden.
March 25, 2019
Just beautiful. I read it twice over, cover to cover. The characters are described in such detail the you can almost see, smell and hear them.
The book itself is a work of art. I am so pleased to own a copy!
The book itself is a work of art. I am so pleased to own a copy!
February 23, 2023
This story rises like the tide and the lichen around you as you read. It shapeshifts and shimmers. Utterly transporting.
It has special resonance for me because I’ve visited the place it tells about, but I don’t think you need to have been there for it to move through you like a dream.
It has special resonance for me because I’ve visited the place it tells about, but I don’t think you need to have been there for it to move through you like a dream.
July 7, 2021
I'm probably crazy for saying this, but this book did not have enough vibe.
December 8, 2024
had to do an internet deep dive after finishing this one. confusing and eerie yet very poetic and enjoyable to read.
March 17, 2021
"her skin is lichen & her flesh is moss & her bones are fungi, she breathes in spores & she moves by hyphae. she is rock-breaker, a tree-speaker, a place-shaper, a world-maker"
July 1, 2020
Wow. What a read. Just blown away at what I just read. Part poetry - part novel it displays the scene of the mysterious green chapel and its relationship with the land. Obviously inspired by decrepit ruins by the sea but they have spun a story that is impossibly dense despite its short length.
Don't want to go into my interpretation of the story. That's part of the joy of reading is to piece together the narrative and metaphors.
Fan of poetry, give it a try.
Fan of high art pieces, its a must.
Its just a great read.
Don't want to go into my interpretation of the story. That's part of the joy of reading is to piece together the narrative and metaphors.
Fan of poetry, give it a try.
Fan of high art pieces, its a must.
Its just a great read.
December 27, 2022
I read this book in one day and I love it. It jumps into the storyline without explanation and it is so ominous — it only gets weirder and I am LIVING for it. I would love to just read this out loud to a friend and see their reaction as the plot unfolds. The language this book is written with is just as rich and artful as the story itself and it’s absolutely *chefs kiss*. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a short read unlike any you’ve seen before. And, I’d recommend going into it with a little background information as possible.
October 20, 2019
I am 99% sure this will be recognised as a classic. I should not have any reservations given that I've just given this 5 stars, but two things occur to me. 1. I think it really helps your understanding of this book if you have read Macfarlane's other books 2. This desperately needs a childrens version, a bit longer, less technical, more explained. That book would definitely go down as a classic.
February 15, 2020
MYCKET FIN.
November 7, 2022
In ‘Ness’, Macfarlane fashions a fabulistic allegory set on the titular coastal landform. Here resides ‘The Green Chapel’ wherein six archetypal figures (The Armourer; The Engineer, etc.) gather for a black mass intent upon bringing about Earth’s apocalyptic end. Ness, once a site of nuclear bomb manufacture and testing, now a preserved environment, is, in Macfarlane’s words, “a landscape produced by a collision of the human death drive and natural life”. Just so, this is a collaborate, collisive work, alternating between the prose poem proper and Donwood’s exquisite line drawings. The shapeshifting, impressionistic, lyrical quality—and just general strangeness—of the piece put me in mind of Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ (which is no bad thing). But this is less plot-driven; more 𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘧𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 by design and theme, contemplating slippery issues central to the Anthropocene; its (a)moral framing ruination as a potential revival for the natural world, relieved of humank̷i̷n̷d̷ harm.
September 10, 2025
Picked up this book and read it while sitting in the library, but I genuinely have no clue what I just read.
Finding a little bit of background information reveals that it's about a small island used for atomic bomb testing and nature opposing that, and I think it's trying to make a point about how we as humans are destroying nature?
Nevertheless, the premise sounded cooler than the execution.
Finding a little bit of background information reveals that it's about a small island used for atomic bomb testing and nature opposing that, and I think it's trying to make a point about how we as humans are destroying nature?
Nevertheless, the premise sounded cooler than the execution.
May 22, 2023
6 out of 5 ... an example for any narrative in the Anthropocene!!
July 20, 2025
A quirky little book I read in one sitting, part poem, part fable, it’s fragmented like Max Porter’s Lanny, though I didn’t reach for Ness as much as I did with Lanny.
Plus, it’s the same price as a full sized book. It’s a lot of money for very few words.
Plus, it’s the same price as a full sized book. It’s a lot of money for very few words.
August 13, 2024
reading this book felt like visiting a really good museum
December 29, 2021
The symbiotic nature of the illustrations and text is what makes this long poem/short prose so special. This scary almost dystopian descriptive piece leaves one feeling in awe of the all-engulfing natural world.
August 26, 2023
I didn't know quite what to expect from 'Ness' but I am so glad that I read it. This is a stunningly beautiful, affecting, and haunting prose poem, describing the land rising up in protection of itself. It reminds me of Old Crockern, the spirit of Dartmoor, and Esme Boggart, the Silt Witch of the Thames Valley, who have recently been called upon in all manner of artistic and subversive ways to protect the land and its people in recent land access and anti-eviction actions, and it would not surprise me in the least if people involved with those important campaigns had read 'Ness'. I really don't have the words to describe it, or how it effected me, but I know that I will read it many times.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 228 reviews