Under a Metal Sky, Philip Marsden, Granta, £20

Man stripping the earth’s natural resources is a story as old as time. In Metamorphoses, Book I, Ovid condemns the work of miners: ‘They dug up riches, those incentives to vice, which the earth had hidden and had removed to the Stygian shades. Then destructive iron came forth, and gold, more destructive than iron; then war came forth.’ Dig into the flesh of the planet and suffer the consequences.

There is ample bloodshed and injury in Philip Marsden’s expansive new book, Under a Metal Sky, but the central message is that the wonder of the world resides in rocks.

Going on miniature rock-hunting expeditions as a child, ammonites and fossils fired his imagination: ‘I was the “geologist”. Aunts and uncles gave me books on geology for Christmas and birthdays… I liked hunting for them, and I liked finding them.’ It feels like this book has always been in Marsden, buried but shining brightly, waiting to be extracted.

Now published, and dazzlingly so in terms of research and ambition, Under a Metal Sky serves as many things. Through 11 chapters, each named after a single material, such as peat, bronze and radium – elements and alloys as strange as they are familiar – there are explorations into ecology, physical journeys and darker mental sojourns into our troubled relationship with the natural world, as well as unexpected perspectives on European history.

For the past three decades Marsden has lived in the geological hotspot of Cornwall, and the opening chapter on tin, takes us there: ‘Of the 450 minerals known to exist on the planet, 14 per cent can be found in Cornwall. Some exist only in Cornwall.’

Cornish tin helped drive the revolutionary centuries of Europe’s Bronze Age and ingots of Cornish tin, dating from three and a half thousand years ago, have been found in the eastern Mediterranean. A 13th-century charter stated, in law, the privileges of Cornish tinners: most taxes did not apply to them, neither did military service, and they had their own legal system, courts, even their own gaol.

Cornish miners spent their lives working underground, at constant risk of accidents, and amid the poor damp air many died. It is shocking, though not surprising, to learn that ‘when there were figures for such things, over half of the tinners died with silicosis [lung disease]’.

Mining stopped in Cornwall about 20 years ago but it still lives on in the shared Cornish consciousness. Some miners miss it, despite the dangers, much like soldiers returning from war. Marsden believes that tin touches something deep in the core of our being, just as much as the more obvious allure of gold and silver.

The silver chapter explores the 16th-century silver boom in central Europe and, pleasingly, digs into lesser-known aspects of the life of the polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who, born in Frankfurt in 1749, was a man utterly obsessed with rocks. ‘Wherever he travelled, his baggage grew weighty with stones.’ By the time of his death in 1832, he had one of the largest private rock collections in Europe.

Marsden follows in Goethe’s footsteps, visiting the silver mines of the Harz Mountains in Germany, which sparked in young Goethe a fascination for geology and alchemy. Alchemy is a sub-plot of Under a Metal Sky, because it was the precursor to scientific enquiry (the ‘bachelor uncle of true science’) and a practice more widespread than any religion:

There was alchemy in early China, Ayurvedic India, ancient Egypt and Abbasid Baghdad. It was harnessed by kings and emperors, who employed teams of highly trained workers to try and distil the inner workings of the cosmos.

Goethe might have been keen on engineering projects, but in his version of Faust he presents to us a character who is undone by them. ‘Faust is all of us, yearning constantly for more. He has drained the swamp, freed up good land, but still he is not satisfied: “The worst torment / To have so much, yet still to want!”’ There is always a price to pay.

More precious than silver is gold, and this draws Marsden to Svaneti, in northern Georgia, east of the old classical world and known as the land of Colchis, where sheepskins were used to filter grains of gold from the rivers. It was to these lands that Jason came to claim the Golden Fleece.

Readers familiar with Marsden’s work will feel a geographical familiarity here. In The Crossing Place he wrote about Armenia and its scattered diaspora, while The Spirit-Wrestlers focused on radical Russian sectarians. Both books irrecoverably hooked me, and countless others, on his writing.

In Svaneti, a land literally golden-hued in summer with honeysuckle azaleas, and with priceless golden crosses still locked away in remote ancient churches, Marsden is enraptured by the mountains, as all who go, and all who live there, are. And he discovers something unexpected about the romantic-sounding word Colchis; that it comes from the endangered Svan language and that it means… excrement. ‘I don’t know why. Maybe the smell of the river,’ he is informed. But then earlier on in the book we learn that to the Incas, gold was the sweat of the sun god, and to the Aztecs his excrement – so perhaps this is not as outrageous as it first seems.

The Svan are a people that haven’t much cared for outside rulers throughout history, and it was only in the 1930s that a road was built connecting Svaneti to the rest of the world. Marsden is told how Chinese miners came to try and exploit the local gold in the rivers, but the whole of Svaneti rose against them: ‘Blocked the roads. People lay down in front of their vehicles. They left. They never even got one gram.’

Less glittery, soil is where the book concludes, and it is a subject which Marsden says surprised and enthralled him. ‘When you begin to look into the soil, it pulls you into a space you didn’t even know existed. It’s like geological time – or astronomy – but in reverse.’ I was instantly reminded, reading this section, of the happy mind-boggling messages of biologist Merlin Sheldrake on the science of mycology, reminding us how of much of the world remains undiscovered by ‘us big-booted creatures on the surface’, as Marsden puts it. ‘Here, in a single palmful of soil, you are surrounded by ten billion bacteria and eight miles of mycelial fibres…’

A lifelong curiosity for these earthly wonders has been poured, like molten liquid silver, into this glittering book and, as the last page is turned, the reader cannot help but agree that rocks and minerals have the ability to open up the entire world, if we are willing to pay attention.