Rereading: A Land by Jacquetta Hawkes

Jacquetta Hawkes's extraordinary book A Land, first published in 1951, begins with a warning that is also a boast. "I have used the findings of the two sciences of geology and archaeology," Hawkes declares, "for purposes altogether unscientific." So – provocatively – starts her deep-time dream of 4bn years of Earth-history, whose "purposes" are to demonstrate that we are all "creatures of the land", substantially produced by the terrain on which we live, and to advance a synthetic cosmogony of consciousness, culture and geology.

Ardent and personal, A Land became a bestseller, and one of the defining British non-fiction books of the postwar decade. Sixty years on it reads, fascinatingly, as a missing link in the literature of nature and landscape. It seems both a period piece – as of its year as the Festival of Britain, the Austin A30 and The Goon Show – and Delphically out-of-time in its ecstatic holism. "The image I have sought to evoke," Hawkes writes – no, intones – in her preface, "is of an entity, the land of Britain, in which past and present, nature, man and art appear all in one piece."

Hawkes knew she had written an unclassifiable work. It is, she observed in 1953, "an uncommon type of book, one very difficult to place in any of our recognised categories". The difficulty of placing it arises because it dons and discards its disguises with such rapidity. It appears at different points to be a short history of Planet England; a geological prose-poem; a Cretaceous cosmi-comedy; a patriotic hymn of love to Terra Britannica; a neo-Romantic vision of the countryside as a vast and inadvertent work of land-art; a speculative account of human identity as chthonic in origin and collective in nature; a homily aimed at rousing us from spiritual torpor; a lusty pagan lullaby of longing; and a jeremiad against centralisation, industrialisation and "our" severance from the "land".

It is, in fact, all of these things at times and none of them for long. Its tonal range is vast. It possesses echoes of the saga, shades of the epic, and tassels of the New Age. It brinks at times on the bonkers. It is flamboyant enough that I can imagine it reperformed as a rock opera. Hawkes disarmingly refers to the book as a memoir, but if so it is one in which the autobiographer investigates her formation over the entirety of global history. This is a work of back-to-nature writing which advocates a return not just to the soil, but right down to the core.

In its obsession with the "clear" and "firm outlines" of landscape forms, A Land reads like Roger Fry on rocks, and in its preoccupation with synchronicities like Gurdjieff on geology. Its politics are sometimes troubling (allusions to "race" and "stock"), but mostly animated by a federate vision of the nation as a mesh of loosely linked locales. The book is not a muddle, exactly, for out of its contradictions arise its charisma; it is not wise, exactly, but its intensity approaches the visionary. Harold Nicolson, whose rave review helped launch A Land, sensed something of what he was dealing with. "There is," he noted with awe, "a weird beauty in this prophetic book …it is written with a passion of love and hate."

Hawkes had, from an "absurdly tender age", wanted to become an archaeologist. Born in Cambridge in 1910, her childhood home was located on the site of both a Roman road and an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. She grew up in an "extraordinarily reserved" family, who were "as silent as trees" emotionally, but intellectually astonishing (her father was a Nobel prize-winning biochemist, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins). At nine, she wrote an essay declaring that she would be an archaeologist. At 18 she went to Cambridge to read archaeology, graduated three years later with a first-class degree, and travelled to Palestine – then under the British mandate – to excavate a Paleolithic-era cave-dwelling on Mount Carmel.

In person, Hawkes was a distinctive mixture of austerity and ardour. JB Priestley, who became her second husband, described her as "ice without and fire within". "Mostly, people apprehended the ice," remembered her son, Nicolas. She spoke slowly and deliberately: "daunting" was a word often used of her by those who did not know her well. But she was also impulsive and transgressive. Aged 16, she founded a Trespassers Society, dedicated to the disregard on foot of private property. She was bisexual through much of the 1930s, wrote a controversial memoir about her love-life in the 70s, was friends with Henry Moore and Paul Nash, and visited Robert Graves in Mallorca, where they sat in swimsuits on the beach to discuss Graves's theory of the White Goddess mother-myth.

Hawkes was someone for whom the feeling human body was the first principle of the thinking human mind, and it is with a feeling human body that the first chapter of A Land begins: "When I have been working late on a summer night, I like to go out and lie on the patch of grass in our back garden … this hard ground presses my flesh against my bones and makes me agreeably conscious of my body."

From that patch of grass – on Primrose Hill in north London – Hawkes sends her mind out journeying. Her mind moves downwards, as if the soil were continuous with her skin, down through the humus and topsoil, into the bedrock of London clay. Her mind moves upwards, as if the air were continuous with her skin, up through the "fine silhouettes of the leaves immediately overhead", up past the chimney pots and at last to "stray among the stars". And her mind also moves sideways, out across "the huge city", out along "the railways, roads and canals rayed out towards all the extremities of Britain". It is a brilliantly managed scene, simultaneously expanding present space and deepening past time, and returning her to the book's true origin: "I must begin with a white-hot young Earth dropping into its place like a fly into an unseen four-dimensional cobweb."

The history of the planet "has to be told in words", Hawkes notes early on, and "the senses must be fed". Sensorily supercharged, A Land often finds itself on the edge of melodrama or whimsy. She was aware that she narrowly escaped disaster in terms of her style, but felt that the risks had been necessary. She tasked herself with administering "a continual whipping of the vitality" in order to prevent words "from turning into some dead march of the intellect" – and she lays on the lash with panache.

In her prose, the past and present are pushed into vibrant contact: the old red sandstone of Herefordshire has "the glow of desert suns" invested in its grain; the island of Ailsa Craig, formerly the plug of a volcano, is now a gannetry in which "pale-eyed birds press their warm feathers against the once boiling granite". Her book is filled with strange rhymes, recapitulations and elective affinities: she explains how "Jurassic water snails" helped "medieval Christians to praise their God", how ammonites influenced the plate-armour of 15th-century knights, and – who would have thought it? – why the hypertrophied nose antler of an early species of deer supplies a precise analogy for mid 20th-century western European consciousness. Hawkes possessed the synecdochic imagination of the gifted archaeologist, able to reconstruct whole beings from relic parts, and the near-mystical vision of the crime-scene investigator, able to attribute complex cause to simple sign.

Perhaps the oddest contradiction of A Land is between its island patriotism and its planetary holism. For the book was in one sense the triumphant story of Hawkes's country. It was published in the damp summer of the Festival of Britain, that great postwar carnival of backslapping and chin-upping. The festival was designed as a rebuke to ruin – "a tonic for the nation", in the phrase of its co-founder Herbert Morrison – and the regenerative tone of the festival (to which Hawkes was a key adviser) rings out often in A Land: the "people of this island should put their hearts, their hands, and all the spare energy which science has given them into the restoration of their country." The tour d'horizon that ends the book – flying the reader over the South Downs, across the East Anglian wheat-bowl and up through West Riding to the "mountain regions" – ends, inevitably, at the chalk cliffs of the Channel coast: Britain's Cretaceous bastion, its white shield raised against invaders.

So the land of Hawkes's title is in part the same land that Arthur is fighting for in TH White's The Book of Merlyn (itself an allegory for the war-time defence of England): "the land under him", which he loves "with a fierce longing". It is also a similar land to the one that Priestley invoked in his famous wartime wireless broadcasts: the "sense of community" and the "feeling of deep continuity" that he experienced out in the hills and fields, alongside "ploughman and parson, shepherd and clerk".

Yet Hawkes also urges her readers to imagine themselves in ways that make nonsense of the notion of individual beings, let alone of nations. She uses maps to illustrate the epic migrations and divisions of the world's land-masses over billennia, and proposes herself less a Briton than a citizen of Gondwanaland. She offers an account of selfhood in which, molecularly and emotionally, "every being is united both inwardly and outwardly with the beginning of life in time and with the simplest forms of contemporary life". In Hawkes's vision the "individual" (from the Latin individuus, meaning indivisible) is not unique but rather soluble or dispersed. A Land devotes itself to proving that "inside this delicate membrane of my skin, this outline of an individual, I carry the whole history of life." Hawkes is merely an outcrop or feature of the land, and her book no more or less remarkable than – as she modestly puts it – "the imprint … left by a herring in Cretaceous slime".