Title : The Book of Barely Imagined Beings:
A 21st Century Bestiary
Author : Caspar Henderson
Pages : 448
Publisher : Granta Publications Ltd
ISBN-10 : 184708172X
Price : 25 (Pound)
From Axolotl to Zebrafish, meet a world of 'barely imagined beings': real creatures that are often stranger and more astonishing than anything dreamt in the pages of a medieval bestiary. Ranging from the depths of the ocean to the most arid corners of the earth, Caspar Henderson captures the beauty and bizarreness of the many living forms we thought we knew and some we could never have contemplated, and invites us to better imagine the world around us. An extraordinary, vivid combination of natural history and spiritual primer, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a mind-expanding, wonder-inducing read.
Caspar Henderson says 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. 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. He fuses zoology, literature, mythology, history, paleontology, anecdote and art through 27 brilliantly executed essays. Each concludes with a philosophical reflection. 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.
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. 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".
Caspar Henderson is a journalist and writer who has worked for the Financial Times, the Independent, and the New Scientist. From 2002 to 2005 he was a senior editor at OpenDemocracy. He received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors in 2009, and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award in 2010. He is currently writing a bestiary for the 21st Century called The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. He lives in Oxford, England. The book is with specially commissioned illustrations by Golbanou Moghaddas.
Review Courtesy: http://grantabooks.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk
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