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along with a free £20 £10,000 or Waitrose Voucher. Go to spectator.com. UK forward slash voucher. Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and I'm very pleased to have this week as my guest, the writer Robert McFarlane, whose new book asked the question in its title, Is a River Alive?

Well, can you talk a bit about how this question started to weigh on you?

And in a sense, how strong a hunch you had of the answer you'd come to when you started writing the book?

Well, it wasn't so much a weight as a kind of a nag, a sleeve tug.

And I wrote it down first.

I tracked it back about five five years ago and it was

in a little family of questions can a forest think does a mountain remember and is a river alive

and they were all good good questions to think with but this was the one that kept tugging

and plucking at my intellectual

sleeve. So in the end, yeah, I spent four years trying to answer it. And my son, as I write

earlier on, my son asked what the title of the book I was working on was. He was nine at the time

and I said, is a river alive? And he said, well, duh, that's going to be a short

book because the answer is yes, but it did turn into a longer book, a much longer book,

because it is a very complicated question. Well, it's a question that in one respect is one that has

a very old answer in the shameistic and animistic traditions.

I think a surprise to a lot of your book's readers, including me, is that it has a sort of

slightly older answer in modern jurisprudence than we'd expect that there's, you know,

from the early 70s, this question was starting to be asked in one form or another.

Can you kind of explain that a bit?

...