This is a book about rocks, fossils, plates, earthquakes, water and ashes. It’s about what these things tell us about the deep history of our planet, a story that asks, the author says, something about ourselves.
Calling this “history” does not do justice to Helen Gordon ‘s desire. What she did in deep Earth was shocked all the way back to the beginning as a barren marine planet, 4.4 billion years ago, with one foot firmly planted in the play desert and deserted that we have left today. Between (and putting out five extinct events), there has been life, much of it, mostly of vegetation. Did you know, 374 million years ago there was a tree, Xinicaulis lignescens, that had all the fiber just like a whole tree? His mature stock must have resembled the Eiffel Tower.
Gordon tells many good stories in his own words; she also hunts many of the great and good earth sciences. She is fascinated by obsessive people – people “who devote their lives to one particular subset of knowledge”. The book is a wonderful combination of journeys and speeches and trawling through geological literature. Still, I was worried about this idea. Did Gordon say that writers – our last amateurs – were normal, and that people who spent their lives focused on something particularly strange, well?
If so, fair. We mourn the decline of knowledge, but the opposite is equally worrying: we do not take enough amateurism. What can Gordon, Granta’s former editor, tell us about geology, palaeontology, physics and geography? Well, a lot, it turns out. While she captures the essential interview hours and not a few miles of air, it is her own voice that cuts through clearly as she tries to expand our empathy capabilities to ingestion of onions such as rocks and gases, radioactive decay and tectonic plate accidents.
I was not sure, when I first opened this book, that I wanted to establish a personal relationship with the planet; it was like a recipe for madness. And sure enough, there is a man here named Donald Dowdy who thinks that an image of a dove is hidden somewhere in the pattern of the LA highway system that is halting the forces of the San Andreas Fault. Without much scrutiny and concentration, discussion and, above all, honesty, the attempt at reasoning, “finding patterns, can take away the almost incomprehensible processes in deep time. into an understandable framework ”, leading us to superstition, conspiracy theory, and the study of house prices in Glastonbury.
For the most part, therefore, Gordon is focusing on sensible, convincing, scientific – even the boring. Maps, lists, charts, timelines: they all turn out to be vital bridges, with stunning views, with which we cross the imaginary bay separating us a little from the our very old, very long, weak planet. In the end, rational explanations are always foreigner and more satisfying than fanciful choices. Dazzled as I was by some popular science, I thought Dowdy could keep the pigeon.