Natural Pursuits / Features / Untitled Books

I want to know stuff that is complex, intricate, connected, the sorts of things that become more mysterious and beautiful the more you know about them.

Natural Pursuits

SARA MAITLAND takes us on a tour of the natural world on her bookshelf, from Robert Macfarlane's book on mountains, Paul Davies' exploration of the universe and Ken and Rod Preston-Mafham's ode to the 'pyschology of invertebrates'.

This book has made me look better, look and see at a thrilling tiny scale – even here in my silent and solitary home there are scenes of turmoil, treachery, passion and tenderness.

Some times when I look at my own bibliography I cannot help but wonder if I am suffering from a mild case of multiple personality disorder - not just fiction and non-fiction, but feminism and theology, fantasy and politics, angels and gay rights, even a history of gardening. And when I look at my own bookcase the polymathy is confirmed - lots of mythology, folk lore and fairy stories from many cultures; lots of contemporary literary novels, but also a rich range of classics - especially Jane Austen and George Eliot (who do not have much in common anyway); a good deal of contemporary science - both practical (Astronomy with a Small Telescope by James Muirden; guides to birds, trees, wild flowers, fungi) and more abstract cosmology, mathematics, evolution; a superficially random collection of, mainly Christian, theology. Plus, of course, like all omnivorous readers a large collection of volumes that belong in no obvious category and I am baffled about why I ever acquired them.

I suspect both as reader and as writer I am driven by a childlike curiosity - I want to know stuff, almost any stuff, but particularly stuff that is complex, intricate, connected, the sorts of things that become more mysterious and beautiful the more you know about them. As a reader I love fiction but as a writer even my fiction is more directly inspired by non-fiction, especially when it is as well written as poetry and as revelatory as a great novel. I want my new book, A Book of Silence, to be a book like this - personal and passionate and full of things that might appeal to readers who want to know stuff too. There are lots of these books once you start looking for them - or once they start looking for you. Here are just four that have inspired and moved me.

Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane is a history not simply of mountaineering, but of why people have come to want to climb mountains even though it so frequently proves a lethal addiction. Why did Mallory, a friend of the Bloomsbury group and Robert Graves' best man, leave wife and small children to die on Everest? Three hundred years ago mountains were considered gross, uncivilised and a waste of space; now their hold on our imaginations is deep, thrilling and dangerous. Here Macfarlane pursues his own personal relationship to and experiences on mountains; the long cultural history of the West's ideas about mountains; and a rich lovely exploration of memory, landscape and imagination. Here I both learned stuff and felt it too. Macfarlane's account of the growth of ideas about the "sublime" - that strange mixture of peril and beauty which so deeply informs our contemporary sensibility for good and bad - has been absorbed almost by osmosis into A Book of Silence so I am grateful as well as everything else; but above all it s a book full of stuff.

Paul Davies' The Mind of God is about a very different sort of stuff. Davies is a cosmological physicist with "research interests in gravitation and cosmology," and he seems inspired with a wild enthusiasm not to "explain" but to reveal. He is one of the least reductionist of the popular cosmological scientists and to treat religious sensibility with the same tender passion (although he is not a "believer" in any sense) as he treats gravity, black holes and the origins of the universe. He is as curious about meaning as he is about facts - and he is an immensely engaging, witty, thoughtful writer: he apparently writes because he wants everyone to understand how brilliant the whole thing is. The Mind of God (the title is taken from the last sentence of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time) is not a "God: for or against" argument at all - it is an investigation of why mathematics works. How does it describe, predict, provide a language for natural phenomena? What might this ultimately mean? The book is playful in the most serious sense, informative in the most profound sense and taught me joyfully lots and lots of stuff.

The Encylopedia of Land Invertebrate Behaviour by Rod and Ken Preston-Mafham is a rather different kettle of fish. In one sense the title says it all. Land invertebrates include worms, snails, slugs, insects, spiders and other small life forms ("invertebrate" just means they don't have spines.) But this is not a book of taxonomy or biology in the usual sense of the word - it is a book about cunning, caring, sex, and violence. It is organised not by species but by what would be "psychology" if that word could be considered appropriate to invertebrates, with chapters on sex, reproduction, parental care, feeding and self-defence. It has the most beautiful, and the strangest, photographs - and it tells you things you do not even know you want to know. Not all of it is very pleasant and much of it is very strange indeed, but as well as telling me so many fascinating facts, this book has made me look better, look and see at a thrilling tiny scale - even here in my silent and solitary home there are scenes of turmoil, treachery, passion and tenderness. The world is very strange and very complex and I am inspired by such goings-on.

And finally I cannot too warmly praise, too deeply express my gratitude to Annie Dillard for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which rightly won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and has been in print ever since. The book comes out of the American nature writing of Thoreau (Walden Pond) and describes a year of living and looking in Tinker Creek, Virginia and meditating on what she sees. She sees and thinks the bravest things and writes about beauty with a kind of savage lyricism and of the horror without sentimentality or voyeurism. Although always grounded in the very specific place that she happens to be, the book ranges wide and free. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek described as "a psalm of terror and celebration." Dillard is also a poet and she makes me want to write better myself because she writes so well.

All these books (and lots and lots more - Oliver Rackham's Woodlands Adam Nichol's Sea Room, I could go on all day) move the tradition of nature writing to new places. They meet me in my own silent wanderings on my moor and give me a sense of the substance and richness and realism of the world I travel through. Taste and see.

Thursday, 6 November, 2008