Neasham, Mary. “The Spirit of the Green Man”. Green
Magic, Sutton Mallet, Somerset 2004. Pbk. xii, 195pp, illus. Bibliography. ISBN
0-9542963-7-0. £9.99
I expect most people will have heard of the Green Man
figures which feature in many medieval churches and other buildings in Britain
and elsewhere. Several good books have been written on the subject. This isn’t
one of them.
There is a perfunctory first chapter which attempts in a
very poorly written and argued fashion to provide a brief history of the Green
Man figure but there’s nothing here which is new or particularly interesting.
After which the author tries to write about the “spirit” of the Green Man,
which she sees as a hybrid figure combining humanity and Nature. And so she
witters on about making the connection by sitting amongst trees, getting to know
your local fairy folk, chunks of New Age guff about chakras, before trying her
hand at a very simplistic political and economic analysis of our relationship to
the environment and how it needs to change.
Now I wouldn’t argue with her general outlook as I share
her concerns over how we are damaging the environment but her naivety relating
to capitalism is all-to evident (a green capitalism is an oxymoron). And one can
sense her closeness to “Nature”, which is most clearly shown in her brief
look at certain forests she has known and wish her well in her own spiritual
journey.
But this book is quite simply lacking in basic editorial
control. The style is wooden and clumsy and occasionally degenerates into
nonsense, e.g. the following sentence from page 138: “Trees breathe out oxygen
and as such have roots that helped created biological oxygen-breathing creatures
like us exist in the first place.” Now this is mainly the publisher’s fault
– the text has been spell-checked but insufficient attention has been taken
with checking the text for meaning.
The bibliography and further reading lists are in no
discernable order and tellingly there’s no mention of either Kathleen
Basford’s “The Green Man” or Roy Judge’s “The Jack in the Green”.
However well intentioned the book, I cannot recommend it except as a text for
would-be proofreaders and editors to practice on.
3/10
Richard Alexander