The Book of Barely Imagined Beings - Caspar Henderson

Species by species, Henderson examines what makes animate life on earth so extraordinary. Avoiding the contextual vacuum of a TV nature documentary, he describes the panoply of the world over which Homo sapiens has exerted its dominion. He moves from the flickering eye of man, constantly moving in minute oscillations or saccades, so that we are never actually looking at anything for more than a microsecond, to the vast eye of a colossal squid, the largest of any animal, equipped to capture the smallest vestiges of light that might penetrate the benthic depths of the ocean. The sea is a fertile locus for such philosophical-zoological explorations: it seems to embody the great unknowns in our own landlocked existence. Henderson quotes the anthropologist Loren Eiseley who, writing in the 1950s, thought that 'the profound shock of the leap from animal to human status is echoing still in the depths of our subconscious minds'.

Perhaps the single most affecting scene in this book comes as the author discusses a photograph of Joseph Merrick, the 'Elephant Man', pointing out the single 'normal' area of his face, his temple and his cheek, from which his eye looks back at us: 'He is calm and aware: a dignified human masked by stupendous deformity.' Henderson's own eye is unerring, while his writing is often witty and always revealing. Marshalling an extraordinary body of knowledge, from scientific papers to archaic manuscripts, through 'deep time' to the origins of life itself, he presents a synoptic, nuanced view of nature.

I picked up the hedgehog out of empathy, and sympathy. Is that what makes me different from all the other species with which I share this planet? I don't know, and nor does Caspar Henderson, but his engrossing, fact-filled yet poetic book is an excellent attempt to understand the nature of the gulf between us.

- Review of the new book The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson