Gavin Francis is enchanted by a digressive modern-day bestiary
As Leonardo da Vinci was approaching old age, he amused himself by composing and inventing a bestiary, one of those early works of natural history that trace their origins to Aristotle's Historia Animalium and an anonymous Alexandrian work produced about five hundred years later, the Physiologus. In the middle ages the genre flourished: illuminated manuscripts combined what was known about various creatures – both extant and fabulous – with moralising tales designed to edify the reader. Leonardo's bestiary enlisted the partridge as a lesson in truth: "Although partridges steal one another's eggs, the young always return to their true parents." The fox is recruited to illustrate deception: "When the fox sees a flock of birds, he plays dead with his mouth open. When the birds come to peck at his tongue, he snaps off their heads." The creator of the Vitruvian Man was one of the last great visionaries for whom the distinction between "art" and "science" was meaningless, and so he was capable of creating one of the last great bestiaries in the medieval tradition.
In The Book of Barely Imagined Beings Caspar Henderson tells us that "for much of human history attempts to understand and define ourselves have been closely linked to how we see and represent other animals." Bestiaries are not just classical or medieval works, but part of a tradition that stretches back to the cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet, art that is painstakingly accurate as well as possessed of great symbolic power. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings, he asked himself if it would be possible to create a modern bestiary that was populated not by fabled animals, but by real ones. In his introduction he observes that we have so little knowledge of most of them that, for the most part, we have "barely imagined them".
So begins Henderson's project: a spellbinding book that seeks to astonish us with the sheer intricacy, diversity and multiplicity of life forms that share our planet. In what he modestly calls a "stab" at a 21st-century bestiary, he fuses zoology, literature, mythology, history, paleontology, anecdote and art through 27 brilliantly executed essays – one creature for each letter of the alphabet (he enigmatically chooses two for X – the Xenoglaux and Xenophyophore). Each concludes with a philosophical reflection, often related to humanity's impact on our fellow creatures, that takes the place of the medieval bestiary's "moral". These are essays in the original, Montaignesque sense of the word, and range freely over whatever topic takes the author's fancy. So a discussion of turtles leads to an exploration of the place of Brahma in Hindu cosmology. A passage on the Cuban missile crisis leads into an account of Russian attempts to impregnate chimpanzees with human sperm. An encomium to octopuses leads into a reflection on the value of a happy childhood.
Occasionally Henderson offers signposts. The chapter "Nautilus" promises to explore three wonders associated with this subclass of cephalopods: their lifespan (leading into a discussion of ammonites, Italo Calvino and Tristram Shandy), their chambered shells (naval warfare, submarines and Jules Verne) and their eyesight (eagle acuity, pin-hole cameras, and daguerreotypes). But the reader is often treated to rocambolesque free-association, to rival that of Laurence Sterne or Robert Burton. Charles Darwin is one of Henderson's heroes, as are the 17th century physician and polymath Sir Thomas Browne and his late, great admirer WG Sebald. There is a sort of nature-writing that enchants by encouraging us to re-examine the familiar, superbly expressed by, for example, Annie Dillard. But while he acknowledges it, Henderson turns his back on this tradition, instead giving us a tour of bizarre species that most of us will never encounter. Two-thirds of the examples he has chosen come from the sea, reflecting the fact that two-thirds of our world is covered by water.
There are other similarities with the original bestiaries. Beautifully illustrated with photographs and diagrams, with each chapter decorated by artwork in the style of a medieval folio illumination, Henderson's book is packed with marginalia, printed in red ink and relating back to red lettering within the body of the text. The result is a sort of medieval hyperlink, where the eye is drawn out from the text to the margins to explore extraordinarily obscure quotations, facts or interpolations. Some examples: octopuses use copper instead of iron in their haemoglobin; the word for "tortoise" in Hungarian means "bowl-frog"; phytoplankton productivity is intimately related to the prevalence of whale shit; there are diatoms in the sea with names such as "the Fathead Congregant" and "the Crucial Pocket-Compass". Henderson is fond of musical metaphors ("The oak is like a massive, turbulent musical score, the nautilus shell is like a chord resolved"), and I could venture one of my own: that these marginalia are like arpeggios on the chords that move through the symphony of the book. None is essential, but each of them adds to the harmony of the whole. I marked up so many in my own copy that when I finished it, I began again reading only in the margins.
In 1959 CP Snow delivered his famous Rede lecture on "The Two Cultures", in which he lamented the gulf between intellectual elites fluent either in the sciences or in the humanities, but all too rarely in both. Fifty years on, the landscape seems as divided as it was in Snow's day. It's a gulf of which the likes of Leonardo could not have conceived, and one that Henderson – an English graduate turned science writer – seeks to bridge. We have a great deal that we can learn from one another. As a neuroscientist/physician turned author, this reviewer applauds his ambition, and hopes that his extraordinary book recruits many more from both sides to the cause.
• Gavin Francis is the author of Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins (Chatto).
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Guardian