Wild, by Jay Griffiths

Here is a book whose style, subject and bravery demolishes the pretensions of much of what passes as serious non-fiction. In Wild, Jay Griffiths has achieved something remarkable, laying down a challenge by her fearlessness. She demands engagement, and a rejection of the monstrous passivity which accompanies the multiple destructions of our times.

Griffiths says that her subject in this "elemental journey" is wildness, the "feral grace" that underpins our humanity. She seeks a manifesto for the necessity of wildness and of wild space to the human psyche. Matching word to subject, she tears out a stupendous style, volcanic yet soft like the sound of a river, cadenced as birdsong, in a book almost onomatopoeic in the use of language to match its view of the world.

Then, in counterpoint, a hidden subject emerges: fury at the tepid formulae with which our obliteration is disguised, at the sterile approval granted to the authors and artists of smug recreations of a smug world, and at the denizens of suburbia, the "malleable clay of fascism".

In fact, Griffiths's labelling of her subject as "wildness" is a necessary ploy. For she thinks of the concept as a myth. She prefers the term "self-willed land" to describe what European literature perceives as wilderness, and suggests that wilderness itself is a concept originating in Christian Europe. Her real subject is how so-called wildness is the natural, and most graceful, state for human beings.

This sort of argument is hugely difficult because of its apparent similarity to the Romantic myth, so scorned today, of the "noble savage". To be successful, Griffiths has to immerse herself both physically and intellectually in many different cultures.

The physical immersion can only come through travelling, and the book is a fine example of a very postmodern sort of travel book. The book is structured as a journey through the elements of earth, ice, fire, water and air. In each part, she travels to some remote place and gains a real appreciation of its cultural world. We find ourselves with Amazonian Indians, the Inuit, Australian aboriginal people, the freedom fighters of Western Papua. With Griffiths's instinctive feel for the human and remarkable capacity for research, we are in no doubt as to the ties which they can feel to the land. To many of these peoples, their environment can live and breathe.

However, it is the intellectual immersion that really distinguishes her book. She can quote Bacon, Rousseau, More and Shakespeare apparently at will. Her use of etymology to reach into the core of a cultural vision is unsurpassed. In a passage on the intrusion of artificial borders in Australia, she notes that "Fence... means not only boundary but also the keeper of stolen goods, and settlers, stealing the land, fenced it before they did anything else."

Thus is the book constructed, through intuitive, poetic associations. By engaging with culture through language, Griffiths develops a sophisticated approach that can rebut the charge of a replication of noble-savage mythology. And she takes on the Western conceptual lexicon, exposing the misapprehensions on which it is based.

Her remorseless analysis destroys the purported objectivity of Western ideas and institutions. The careful reader is left in no doubt that such objectivity is a myth; that the cultural usage of Darwinism - as opposed to the theory itself - is simply an excuse for hubris and the destruction of other cultures. In Griffiths's view, European destructiveness, misogyny, exploration and history are all connected.

So this is a book which will infuriate many. Yet the fearless - nay, reckless - way in which she wades in will perhaps charm as many as it offends.

The true wildness at the heart of the book is the author's own. There is a restlessness and a pain beneath every sentence which can fill one with a deep melancholy. But there is also a righteous fury, at the destruction of a world whose every fibre is - for this deeply sensitive writer - precious almost beyond understanding. The result is a paean, a threnody, a work of great sadness and great joy. One feels for Griffiths, for whom the seven years which have gone into Wild are now over. Perhaps unconsciously, she was thinking of herself when she wrote that "the author of every masterpiece has paid an intolerable price".

Toby Green's book on the Inquisition is due in June