Norwegian Wood by Lars Mytting & The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees by Robert Penn – review
This article is more than 8 years oldA simple, elegant book about how to fell trees is this year’s most surprising bestseller. In the age of mediated reality, wood is back in fashion
It is intriguing that for decades “wooden” has been a decidedly pejorative description. No actor or sportsman wanted to be called “wooden”. Until a few years ago, there was no material or fuel as unfashionable as wood. In an age of dirt-cheap oil, open fires were seen on as labour-intensive and hastily bricked up. Very few sculptors – bar the incomparable David Nash – worked in wood, and only prophetic writers such as Bruce Stanley (Forest Church) or Roger Deakin (Wildwood) dared talk about the transcendence of woodlands.
Now, at last, wood is being rehabilitated. More than that: it is suddenly fashionable, and Norwegian Wood has become one of the most uplifting publishing stories of 2015. A simple, elegant book about how to fell trees – about how to move the timber and then split and stack the logs in the most efficient, aesthetic ways – it has already sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It is one of those books, full of lush, earthy photos, about which people seem to become almost evangelical.
The reason for its appeal is clear: in this depressing age of bombs and bullets, of financial instability and screen-mediated reality, there is something honest, solid and reassuringly ancient about wood. As Lars Mytting says about the woodpile: “Its share price doesn’t fall on the stock market. It won’t rust. It won’t sue for divorce. It just stands there and does one thing: it waits for winter. An investment account reminding you of all the hard work you’ve put into it.”
It helps that Mytting is able to put primitive yearnings into lyrical prose. He quotes beautiful poems, like one at the beginning of the book by Hans Børli: “The scent of fresh white wood / in the spring sap time: / as though life itself walked by you, / with dew in its hair.” And the fact that he is Norwegian gives him much authority and many anecdotes: in Norway, 25% of energy used to heat private homes comes from wood, and half of that wood is chopped by private individuals. It is a country obsessed by all aspects of firewood, and, as Mytting jokes, many weddings and funerals have seen heated arguments about the best make of axe, or whether wood should be stacked bark up or bark down.
He makes a convincing case for the superiority of wood compared to other forms of heating: the glass doors of stoves radiate heat, he says, and the flames and glowing embers release electromagnetic, infrared radiation rather like sunlight, bringing “a feeling of wellbeing and security”. The intake of oxygen encourages air circulation and the stoves absorb dust. Add the smell of woodsmoke, and the hypnotic dance of the flames, and one understands “the primordial magic of the fireplace”. Something we actually need, he quips, really does grow on trees.
But as well as the lyrical passages, there are plenty of facts: you will burn 1,168 kilocalories an hour lugging timber (compared with 74 watching TV or just 510 playing football). Mytting says that Norway burns 1.5m metric tonnes of timber a year. If all those 1ft (30cm) logs were stacked 6.5ft (2 metres) high, the woodpile would be 4,474 miles (7,200km) long. An unmanaged birch wood has a mean annual growth of just one metric tonne an acre, so each household requires 1.5-3 acres (0.6-1.2 hectares) of forest to provide it with 12,000 kilowatt hours a year.
The book is a sort of how-to guide for amateur and professional, alike. There is plenty of intriguing advice about clever ways to move logs using nature: sliding a trunk on ice or, the oldest and easiest means of transport, floating it on water. Although a paean to birch, the “queen of the Norwegian forests”, Norwegian Wood also discusses the value of other species, and Mytting writes about why certain logs are preferred: “the snap and crackle of the conifers … the broad, flat flame of the aspen … ” It is interesting that the counsel about axes is normally to go for something lighter and smaller: “twice the speed quadruples the force of impact”. There are many great tips, such as the old Norwegian habit of smearing the ends of chopped logs with snow: the morning sun melts it, and come nightfall it will freeze, stretching apart the fibres so that it cleaves with the first blow of your axe.
Perhaps most enjoyable are the brief portraits of Norwegian eccentrics and their beloved woodpiles. One retired engineer sculpted a portrait with his woodpile of Queen Sonja and King Harald V on the king’s 75th birthday. And I liked the sound of John Svensson, a chainsaw salesman and survivor of torture in the second world war, who, incensed that a government delegation didn’t allow him to demonstrate his chainsaw, felled five trees to stop them getting away. When he was berated by a local newspaper, he rolled up and cut the editor’s desk in two (before returning to apologise and offer to replace it).
Mytting discerns something called the “wood age” in retired men, when they start to spend huge amounts of time (98 hours a year) preparing next winter’s log store. And he touchingly notices how his elderly neighbour seems to be reinvigorated when he is out sorting his logs.
There is lots of folklore too. In Scandanavia, he says, it is common wisdom that you can tell a lot about a person from their log store, and women looking for a potential husband would always investigate how he stacked his wood. There is a list of stacking styles, and the character faults associated with each (the description that most fits my own woodpile certainly skewers me: “Big appetite for life, but can be rash and extravagant”). Mytting mentions an old statute book from 1687 that forbade anyone passing between a pregnant woman and the fire because her child would be born with a squint.
The Man who Made Things out of Trees is a rather bizarre title as it completely misrepresents Robert Penn’s book. It is not about one man making things from many trees, but about many people making things from one tree. As he graciously acknowledges, Penn was inspired by two similar ventures – the famous Onetree and OneOak projects – and he decides to do the same with an ancient ash, commissioning craftsmen to make wheels, toboggans, a hurley, a desk, handles, paddles, pegs, panelling, arrows, spoons, bowls and so on.
Along the way the book becomes a eulogy to the importance of ash throughout human history: almost any settlement with Ash- (or “aesc” or “eski”) in its title owes a debt to Fraxinus excelsior, so not just Ashbury, but also Esher and Eskdale.
It is an engaging combination of travel, history and nature writing. Penn goes to Austria, America, Ireland, and to various corners of the UK, to learn more about the ash and its uses. Like Norwegian Wood, it is fascinating to read about the science behind a subject that seems, on first appearances, so simple: wood is “anistropic” (meaning it has different mechanical properties in different directions) and is “hygroscopic” (trying to attain a state of equilibrium with the surrounding air moisture, absorbing and adsorbing water).
There are plenty of other delightful words from the woodworking lexicon that sound as reliable as the wood itself: the felloes (the rims of wheels), a flitch (a stack of boards cut from the same log), quarrels (a crossbow’s projectile), a bloomery (a furnace for roasting iron ore) and fiddleback (a decorative feature in maple wood). Penn spends time with many dogged, almost devout, craftsmen, collecting words and the beautiful products they create for him, but also eloquently making the case for wood as a sustainable material not just of the past, but for the future.
Penn is at his best when he talks about the almost mystical balm of woodlands. After one bereavement, he describes how trees guided him “through the dark forest of loss”: “the meditative work of stacking timber and piling up brash had whittled away at my grief”. He writes beautifully about the “hair-raising, transcendent sense” of being among the trees, of the “spirit of all the people who have ever known the woods”. So it’s not just that wood is a fashionable medium or fuel again; woodlands are slowly becoming appreciated as sources of healing and of spirituality, places where we can reconnect with something at once solid and numinous.
Tobias Jones’s latest book is A Place of Refuge: The Story of Windsor Hill Wood (Quercus). To order Norwegian Wood for £16 (RRP £20) and The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees for £12.99 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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