Science writing: the new literature?

Speaking Volumes

In 1999 "" that's about 2,400 years after Plato, Matt Ridley wrote: "We have no fossil record of the way life was four billion years ago. We have only this great book of life, the genome. The genes in the cells of your little finger are the direct descendants of the first replicator molecules; through an unbroken chain of tens of billions of copyings, they come to us today still bearing a digital message that has traces of those earliest struggles of life.

If the human genome can tell us things about what happened in the primeval soup, how much more can it tell us about what else happened during the succeeding four million millennia. It is a record of our history written in the code for a working machine."

Plato and Ridley have this in common, reaching across the gap of centuries: they both shared a sense of wonder at the universe they inhabited, and both experienced the same urge to render at least part of it comprehensible.

For Plato, an imaginative leap allowed him to look up at the dead blanket of the night at tiny pin-pricks of glowing light and see, instead of an abstraction called a 'star', living souls that knew what he struggled all his life to understand "" nothing less than 'the nature of the universe', the 'laws of destiny'.

Matt Ridley looked inward, and outward, instead. His vision is impeccably rational, backed by hard science, speculation never making the disastrous leap into fantasy "" and yet it still has room for the kind of awe the poets write about. I cannot read Genome "" and I have read it at least once for each year that has passed since its publication "" without pausing at this passage and thanking Ridley silently for allowing me to share in his sense of wonder as he turns the pages of "this great book of life".

And yet, reading Ridley, or Jared Diamond, or Richard Dawkins, or Vilyanur Ramachandran, or Oliver Sacks, or Dava Sobel or any of the hundreds of brilliant 'science' writers out there, leaves me with a sense of dissatisfaction. It's a nagging sense that they supply something in my life that I rarely find in fiction, or in the austere halls of Literature Proper, but that is essential to any reader's quest for entertainment, knowledge, delight, even wisdom.

Over the last few years, especially, when one hyped novelist succeeds another and only a few truly illuminate, when you find yourself stretching to praise Yet Another Indian Writer not for being a great talent, but merely for keeping up with the Joneses, 'science writing' has become more than a refuge.

The Edge Books page, which introduces the published work of their writers "" men and women who live by ideas and would die in defence of reason "" has replaced many of the older, sanctioned websites I used to visit.

It introduces me to more in the way of new and interesting talent than the New Yorker, the NYRB, Arts Journal and The Believer combined, with far less risk that I will meet with pretension or obscurity. And I find myself looking forward to the shortlist for the Aventis Prize for Science Writing with far greater enthusiasm than one ever feels for the far better known Booker or Pulitzer shortlists.

This would not be strange, perhaps, if I had a background in science. But I'm a pure (or depending on which of my former teachers you consult, highly impure) product of the Humanities school, bred and raised on a diet of philosophy, literature, history; more accustomed to reading fiction or the likes of Said and Foucault than Dawkins and company. This is not my beat, not my territory, not my area ""so why is this now the neighbourhood in which I feel most at home?

To answer that, I offer you the 2003 Aventis shortlist versus the 2002 Booker shortlist. The Booker 2002 showcased the kind of prose called 'exquisite', and yes, the books on offer were enjoyable.

Sarah Waters' Fingersmith explored Victorian England's madhouses and pornographers through a lesbian lens; Martel's Life of Pi had a Bengal tiger, a zebra and a hyena on a raft; Tim Winton's Dirt Music was a (tedious) exploration of the relationship between a poacher and an alcoholic, middle-aged woman; William Trevor dissected the start of the Irish problem through the eyes of Lucy Gault; and Carol Shields' Unless luminously examined mothers and daughters, and the art of reading. Not a bad year at all.

The Aventis was won by Chris McManus' Right Hand, Left Hand, an exploration of what happens in the brain when you use one or the other (try the questionnaires on www.righthandlefthand.com, by the way, they're great fun).

Other contenders included Mark Buchanan's Small World, about how networks, neural and otherwise, are shrinking the universe we know; Gerd Gigerenzer's Reckoning with Risk, which explores statistics by way of the O J trial and breast cancer; Robert Kirshner's The Extravagant Universe, which reshuffles our view of the cosmos itself; Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate which dismantles the main 'myths' of human psychology and Stephen Webb's Where is Everybody?, which takes on the question of why aliens aren't more ubiquitous if they've been around so long.

I expected to truly enjoy and take to heart at least two on the Booker shortlist, and I wasn't disappointed; I expect to be absorbed by all six of the books on the Aventis. Nor is this an unnatural reaction "" whether you slice and dice the lists in terms of clarity of writing, in terms of new ideas, in terms of the writer's ability to provoke interest, awe, even joy, the Aventis comes out way ahead.

Over the next month, except when we have news from the book world of such dimensions that it must take precedence, this column intends to explore the world of science writing today. I hope it'll be a fantastic voyage, and I hope you'll come along for the ride. Until then, I leave you with two quotes.

The first is from 'Kirshner': "We're so brief. The stars seem permanent, but that's only because we're just passing through." The second is from 'High Flight', a poem by John Gillespie Magee Jr: "I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace/ Where never lark, or even eagle flew/ And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod/ The high untrespassed sanctity of space/ Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."

nilroy@lycos.com