Philip Marsden: Under a Metal Sky review - rock and awe

Working on materials was basic to human culture from the start: chipping at flint to make a hand-axe; fashioning bone or wood; drying hides. In time, people discovered that some materials, especially when put to trial by fire, were special: harder, shinier, more attractive, or more deadly.

Philip Marsden is interested in those materials, yes, but especially in the now-buried traces of their excavation. And his latest book – Under a Metal Sky: A Journey Through Minerals, Greed and Wonder – is interestingly difficult to characterise. It’s a blend (an alloy?) of geology, archaeology, technological, literary and economic history, and discursive travelogue.

The landscapes visited are mostly ones marked by old workings, by disused shafts and tunnels, ruined outbuildings, cold furnaces, spoil heaps, and toxic ponds. They begin and end in Cornwall, long a vital centre of tin production, now hoping for a mining revival to exploit that 21st century desirable, lithium. The other sites he reports on are all in European – or Europe-adjacent (Georgia) – countries.

It is an idiosyncratic trail through the recovery and exploitation of minerals, which allows Marsden to fashion an account which is neither a complete history, nor a global view of the subject – though he fills in some of both from background sources. His aim is more to provoke reflection on how we relate to the Earth and its resources, and to excavate some old beliefs about that along with the material traces he displays.

As well as tin, we learn about bronze, silver, radium, mercury, copper, gold, ochre – an earlier mineral marvel that brought decorative colour into human lives, as attested by the bones in many burial sites. Oh, and peat, also now a mineral, apparently. Well, it did yield bog iron, but the main reason for including it here seems to be to allow a trip to the Netherlands, and a consideration of swamps, and then the clearing of swamps in Goethe’s Faust as a symbol of humans striving to control our environment.

It’s a characteristic move. We are, generally, following the author’s train of thought more than his various excursions on cargo barges, canoes, trains, buses or hiking trails. And that involves investigations of pre-modern views of the universe, especially the Hermetic tradition’s embrace of a unified cosmos in which substance and process are intertwined. This is a world of affinities and correspondences, reflections and refractions, rather than boring inert materials and linear cause and effect. In particular, the heavens and the Earth each contain an image of the other – such that, for example, in myths from as far apart as Finland and Pharonic Egypt, the very sky is metallic.

So, Marsden invites us to consider the history of metals as a pageant of human ingenuity as well as human greed, emblematic of our steady development of dominance over the planet – and over other people – but also of hubris and despoliation. The mineral-centric history he does relate sees him enliven his narration with a kind of metallo-determinism, in which bronze, silver, or uranium, “drive” – the verb he repeatedly deploys – crucial developments. Well, perhaps. It’s about as convincing as any other claim that one single kind of thing is the key to all human history, I suppose. At the same time, he invokes Goethe, who “bobbed about in a sea of pantheistic reverence”, and William Blake as inspirations for new/old ways of considering our place in a material world. 

This reader wasn’t entirely convinced on that score, either. Blake was brilliant and fascinating but also steeped in a kind of craziness that was largely incomprehensible even to sympathetic contemporaries. But there is enough of the wonder in Marsden’s subtitle captured here to keep one reading. There is wonder at the astounding achievements of communities built around work that consigned many of their folk to live most of their lives underground. And at the trading networks – and, ultimately, empires – built on what they brought to light. The ideas that grew out of ore-bearing soil are also wonderful in their way. As Marsden says, “Metallurgy was not just tool-making. It was always an alchemy of sorts, a kind of communing with the living earth.” But while they are important for establishing a richer view of the history of metals, I suspect the author’s suggestion that they have contemporary resonance is unlikely to catch on.

• Under a Metal Sky: A Journey Through Minerals, Greed and Wonder (Granta Books, £20)
• More book reviews on theartsdesk