Whilst he was planning to write about the river Rhine, Deen was warned by a passing paleogeographer not to fall into the common trap of thinking of a river in purely linear terms — a source, a bed, and a mouth — but to understand that every river is a drainage system defined chiefly by its catchment area, in which the course of the main bed at any given moment is purely incidental. In the case of the Rhine, that means looking at a big area of north-west Europe: all of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, large chunks of Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, and even parts of Austria. If you draw it on a map and you have the right kind of imagination, it looks a little bit like a skating bear. Apparently.

Been puts together a collage of interesting vignettes to give us an impression of what this means in physical, cultural, economic, political and spiritual terms — timelapse accounts of the geological formation of the area; journalistic impressions of its scope (the village at the easternmost point of the catchment area, Bischofsgrün, is famous for building a giant snowman each year to celebrate Carnival; at the westernmost point is Ors, where Wilfred Owen was killed a few days before the Armistice in 1918); imaginative reconstructions of incidents in Roman and Carolingian times; the river as a frontier and as a transport artery; the culture of river-bathing and the use of drowning as a means of execution; an eccentric Swiss family that lived on an isolated peninsula in the Upper Rhine Gorge; St Willibrord converting the Frisians; a couple of Swiss entrepreneurs who brought an Irish light-vessel to Basel to make into a concert venue; the Roman general Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo building a canal between the northern and southern mouths of the river. And so on. It sounds like a terrible mish-mash, but it actually works very well: Deen is a lively and versatile writer and he manages to create a unity between the very diverse subjects and moods of these stories. ( )