Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet

In this meditative essay collection, McNeil (Fire on the Mountain) draws from decades of travel to the world’s most remote places to reflect on the beauty and terror of wild landscapes that are under ecological threat. Whether she’s recounting her time as a writer-in-residence on an Antarctic research station, an observer aboard a research vessel off the coast of Greenland, or a trainee in an African safari guide program, McNeil captures nature in evocative and dexterous prose: a group of rhinos approach, “sweeping back and forth like a cadre of Mennonites scything the fields”; waves raking a reef off the coast of Kenya “appear as a lace hem to an endless blue garment.” McNeil’s laudable goal of understanding the world “on its own terms,” however, can skirt uncomfortably close to colonialist travel narratives, especially when she professes kinship with the African wilderness. While McNeil writes more than once of the suspicions she arouses while traveling as a childless, unmarried woman, she’s curiously silent about the optics of her attempts to interpret the African landscape as a Canadian who lives in London. Some blind spots aside, McNeil’s deeply felt observations offer a transporting, thought-provoking lens on nature. It’s captivating stuff. Agent: Veronique Baxter, David Higham Assoc. (Nov.)