Book Review: An Explorer's Notebook
/An Explorer’s Notebook: Essays on Life, History, and Climate
Bulmer’s fruit bat is a large, blackish-coloured animal with a wingspan of over one metre. Its wings meet in the middle of the back, making the back appear naked and giving the bat extreme manoeuvrabilty in flight. It is the largest bat species to roost in caves, and because it must rely on sight in its dimly lit environment, it is one of the few bats that can hover. Indeed, it can even fly backwards!
There’s a tone of undisguised wonder running through virtually all the pieces in this latest collection, as in the superb essay “When a Scorpion Meets a Scorpion” from The New York Review of Books:
It’s difficult for humans beings to see scorpions at night, but it’s easy for scorpions to see each other. That’s because scorpions produce bright green fluorescent light, which may be clearly visible to them but only visible to the human eye with the help of ultraviolet lamps. Its superb adaptations have been honed by 400 million years of evolutionary experience during which countless billions of individual scorpions with blind spots, less sensitive pectines, or poor fluorescence have been weeded out, until finally we are left with the seemingly perfect, yet utterly alien, creatures here described.
One of the qualities that’s always brought Flannery’s prose to life is its breadth of curiosity. Regardless of how dated or off-topic some of these reprinted essays feel (they inadvertently draw attention to the fact that it’s been a few years since we had a new book from this author), they’re full of discovery-moments where the reader gets to follow Flannery’s mind wherever it goes, from how to field-prepare exotic rats for dinner in Papua New Guinea to how the bird-paintings of Audubon reflect the natural world – and how they don’t:
Perhaps the most famous of Audubon’s images depicts a family of mockingbirds harassing a rattlesnake that is attacking them at their nest. The reptile is open-mouthed as it lunges at a terrified victim, while a second member of the beleaguered family, desperate perhaps to rescue its fellow, pecks at the snake’s eye from behind. For all its apparent authenticity this illustration is an invention, for it was widely known even in Audubon’s time that rattlesnakes do not habitually climb trees, nor do they often eat mockingbirds. Yet so powerful is this frontier allegory that it begs the viewer to suspend their disbelief. And herein lies the wonder of The Birds of America, a work filled with images of nature so intimately observed that they continue to astonish, yet so rendered as to be considered by the literal-minded as palpable fiction.
There’s also plenty of Flannery’s rib-poking humor, as in this aside about one of his great intellectual heroes:
Darwin reveled in sex in all its manifestations from marital to masturbatory – and perhaps homosexuality as well (he certainly had many homosexual friends, whom he never condemned). Indeed, he believed that sex was health-giving – it cured hypochondria, for example. One wonders, incidentally, whether this had anything to do with the first Mrs Darwin being sickly, overly fond of the bottle and inclined to smoke opium.
(The idea that Charles Darwin might have had an even more essential reason for never condemning homosexuality is one far-flung destination too many for Flannery, as it’s been for every Darwinian before him.)An Explorer’s Notebook approaches anachronism in its Victorian plenitude and energy; Flannery himself foresees a world denuded in our grandchildren’s lifetime of all natural variety that isn’t engineered, maintained, and directed by mankind, and it’s hard to imagine a Tim Flannery tramping through that controlled, crowded, and homogenized world ruled by the super-organism of humanity. But we can take these burly, long-walking books into that world, and it might be the better for it.
