Steve Jones, Darwin's Island

This book proved to be an ideal follow-up to reading Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. It covers the research Darwin carried out after he returned after five years on the expedition: he never left the UK again. Jones seems to have read all of Darwin’s many other books, including, it would appear, his several books on barnacles. To have an expert on present-day genetics taking Darwin’s work seriously and describing its relevance – what’s not to like? 

It was an interesting idea to base this book, not about the Origin or Voyage of the Beagle, but on the Darwin books that most people haven’t read: the books Darwin wrote about biology from his back garden, no fewer than eleven titles (and some of them in multiple volumes). Darwin could never be accused o not being sufficiently productive.   

It turns out I am reading the fourth book in a series by Jones. The first was Almost Like a Whale (1999), a modern retelling of The Origin of Species, followed by Y: The Descent of Men (2002), based on Descent of Man (1871). The third volume was Coral: A Pessimist In Paradise (2008), describing Darwin's work on coral reefs. 

As you can see from the titles of Jones’ other books, descriptive titles are not his speciality. What does this book cover? The serendipitous chapter titles mean we have to guess what each chapter is about. For the assistance of future readers, here is my look-up table for the chapter headings – giving a further indication of Darwin’s vast range of interests:

Chapter One	The Queen’s Orang-Utan	The Descent of Man
Two	The Green Tyrannosaurs	Insectivorous Plants
Three	Shock and Awe	The Expression of the Emotions in Man and other Animals
Four	The Triumph of the Well-bred	Orchids and The Effects of Cross and Self- fertilisation the Vegetable Kingdom The Different Forms of Flowers
Five	The Domestic Ape	The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
Six	The Thinking Plant	The Movement  … of Climbing Plants (1875), The Power of Movement in Plants (1880) [covering hops and other climbing plants]
Seven	A Perfect Fowl	Books on Barnacles (four volumes)
Eight	Where the Bee sniffs	Orchids (1862)
Nine	The Worms Crawl In	The Formation of Vegetable Mould

Clearly Jones has fluency as a writer. I got the impression this book could have been twice as long without the author drawing breath. Many of the insights were startling and fascinating. Yet, although the book was a terrifically entertaining read, it had limitations. Firstly, the book contained no references. Secondly, and linked to the first, it makes some assertions that even to my less-scientific mind look very questionable. And without references, I am forced to challenge what Mr Jones states. In fact, some of the things he says are so alarming that I would not reprint the book as it stands. 

These assertions typically appear when Jones brings his argument up to the present day.  For example, describing present-day Kent, formerly a centre of oyster and salmon fishing: 

Bucolic pursuits have been replaced by that invaluable product, “services”, which account for three-quarters of the country’s contribution to the nation’s wealth … The flow of people, power and cash has carved up the county’s landscape with motorways, rail links and webs of power lines.” [p299] 

Where did all this come from? What does it have to do with evolution? Is Jones a closet rural-England protector? Why complain about services, when they represent such a large proportion of the UK’s wealth? 

At several points in the book, the author’s casual tone makes it not quite clear what he is intending – and I don’t like some of the implications. For example, on page 137: 

For both plants and animals, sex usually involves another party. Almost always, he or she must choose … from a pool of potential mates. This calls for hard decisions. Some are obvious: whites tend to marry whites, and blacks, black…All this means that for any man or woman the number of possible partners is far smaller than it might be. 

Is Jones saying (I hope not) that for whites to marry blacks is not possible? I don’t think he means that, but that is what his phrasing implies. Other infelicitous phrasing includes:

The belief that the children of cousins are bound to be unfit … still fuels a jaundiced view of the joys of sex within the household. [p119] 

I find this kind of misplaced humour very uncomfortable. Is he suggesting as a good Darwinian that incest is not advisable on biological grounds? Or is he dismissing the incest taboo as a kind of harmless social prejudice?

It is where Jones brings the argument up to the present day that I feel most uncomfortable. 

Minor issues

Firstly, inevitably, the book is already out of date. Although Jones writes perceptively about the obesity crisis in the West, in other areas he seems to be curiously unaware. 

For the most part, Jones writes fluently, but I noticed what looked like a reach for the thesaurus, for example referring to Darwin as a savant: “The savant’s attraction to earthworms ‘[p264]. 

So, in conclusion, a great read, particularly the chapters on earthworms and on insectivorous plants, but at its weakest when the argument is extended to present-day humanity.  

 

 

 

Sussex Landscape at Pallant House (March 2023)

 

Eric Ravilious, Chalk Paths, 1935

What a brilliant idea to assemble an exhibition of Sussex-related works of art, particularly in a Sussex gallery. There have been exhibitions of individual Sussex artists, but, the Pallant would have us believe, there doesn’t seem ever to have been a show about Sussex landscape art. 

For me, in practice, Sussex art means the Sussex landscape, and specifically, the South Downs, and the floodplains, both of which appear from this exhibition to have been celebrated for the most part from the end of the 19th century. There is no particular Sussex type of individual, no school of Sussex painters, as there was a Norwich school. You cannot imagine an exhibition of, say, Cambridgeshire landscape. While there are a few works in this show with a building or person as the main focus, the focus in this show is, quite rightly, on that amazing Downs scenery: the haunting lines of trackways, and the meandering rivers, and the cliffs. It’s all slightly unreal, to someone who does not live in Sussex; there are even, as you travel along railway line going back to London,  what appear to be castles in the landscape (Amberley), and meandering river channels along the flood plains. 

Now, while I love the Downs landscapes of Ravilious, I become perhaps greedy. I want to know more about it: why is this landscape so stark? It appears to show little sign of intensive agriculture, although the Downs landscape is apparently the result of intensive sheep grazing over centuries. Human created it may be, but it looks much more natural than the intensive cultivation of fields below the hills. Where buildings are shown, they are typically flint, as if a flint building somehow represents this natural landscape more than, say, brick or more elegantly cut stone. There is an essay on flint in the catalogue. 

Learning more about the Sussex landscape

There is one map of Sussex, a wartime piece by Women’s Institutes, which perhaps inadvertently reveals more about the landscape than the exhibition intends. The map celebrates the increase in agricultural land during World War II – without revealing that this resulted in the destruction of much of the grass landscape. Nothing else in the exhibition seems to celebrate agriculture. Sheep, where they appear, are simply background objects in the landscape. There is a pull towards tradition, which is revealed in the catalogue, for example quoting poor poems by Hilaire Belloc and Rudyard Kipling.

Constable, Cornfield near Brighton (engraving)

What seems to be remarkable is that capturing the specific quality of the Sussex landscape seems to have emerged so late. The curators provide the evidence, although they don’t seem to notice what they provide There is almost no indication of any specific attention paid to the Sussex landscape before about 1900. Although the exhibition includes token works by Turner, Blake and Constable, only Constable could be said to have responded specifically to the Sussex landscape. Turner at Petworth, and his view of the Chichester Canal, is not distinctively a Sussex view – Turner outrageously puts the sun in the wrong place in his depiction of Chichester Canal, and doesn’t appear to notice the South Downs. Apart from Constable, who created a few sketches on Brighton Downs, the first artist in this show to capture the bare outlines of the Downs seems to have been William Nicholson. 

William Nicholson, Cliffs at Rottingdean, 1910

Nonetheless, the show, attempting to be include as many Sussex artists as they can find, find space for painters such as Robert Bevan, a fine painter, certainly born in Sussex, but showing little evidence of the local landscape. Other outliers that have little connection with the theme are some of the surrealist works (Nash is the exception here, managing to create surrealist-tinged works with some awareness of the haunting quality of Sussex landscape). There is a nude photo by Bill Brandt, which has nothing to do with the theme. Many of the woodcuts seem to be more about woodcut-land than specifically about Sussex. Sadly, to my untrained eye, many woodcut landscapes end up looking like each other. 

Preserving the environment

The exhibition dutifully nods to the need to preserve the landscape, but the handful of contemporary works in the exhibition don’t really say a lot for protecting the landscape. Andy Goldsworthy includes a few flint pieces, with white stripes on them to denote chalk, and these rough stones do suggest the raw quality of the chalk and flint landscape – although they would be better without any intervention. Sadly, the piece of assembled discarded field fencing does not  suggest Sussex at all. 

What, then, are the highlights of this show? Too many to show here. For me, and probably for many others, it is the Ravilious Chalk Paths, 1935; the John Piper Beach and Star Fish, Robert Tavener’s Cuckmere Valley, 1966, and Jeremy Gardner’s Solar, Seven Sisters, 2019. But to sum up the exhibition in a single image, it has to be Edwin Smith’s photo of flint buildings and walls, 1961. 

Edwin Smith, Peggy Angus' House, 1961

Islanders, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

 

The exhibition starts with a boat: a stunning bronze model from around 1000 BCE, found in Sardinia. Does the catalogue help? “The side columns and the central mast probably represent stylized versions of Nuragic towers … the boat is a powerful reminder that the characteristic Nuragic structures were not only visible throughout the island but also a powerful cultural symbol”. Here is a reference to the best-known prehistoric remains from Sardinia, the temple-like nuraghei, but the assumption seems to be that you knew what these were already. And if you look them up, the Nuraghi don’t look like this boat. The curator’s introduction states “[this boat] provides a unique example of the importance of the seafaring, trade and communication that the large islands of the Mediterranean developed in the Bronze Age and beyond, and the way these practices are symbolically reflected in the creation of material culture.” The boat certainly looks unique, but I don’t think the description captures the sheer magic of the object. And how is it unique? It’s not the only prehistoric representation of a boat. But it does have the features of a mythical creature, and that might be worth exploring. 

Sadly, the exhibition doesn’t go in that direction. The catalogue refers to a documentary, asking people on the Greek island  of Siphnos about what it means to be an islander (although there is nothing from Siphnos in this show).   

That seems to sum up the exhibition as a whole. Islanders was an enjoyable, well displayed, but one that raised more questions than answers. To be honest, my knowledge of which of the ancient civilizations of Sardinia, Crete and Cyprus came first is not very secure – and it’s no better after this exhibition. The display was thematic, and although many of the pieces were exquisite or tantalising, or both, the exhibition didn’t set out to place all these pieces in context. 

So, for example, in the exhibition itself there was a timeline – but only of fragments of pottery, not for the exhibition as a whole. There was nothing to tell you when each civilization started or ended. It was revealing, after leaving the exhibition, to visit the Fitzwilliam Cyprus gallery, just a few hundred metres from this exhibition, and from which several of the exhibition objects had been removed, to find that the captions in the museum’s permanent collection were more informative, with helpful panels outlining the major phases of Cypriot prehistory. It would have been very simple to replicate that information in the exhibition.

So many questions left unanswered! Why these three Mediterranean islands, Sardinia, Crete and Cyprus, and not others? Why not Sicily, in the middle of them? There was, most likely a project that led to this exhibition, but it wasn’t apparent to me from looking around the exhibition what the project involved. The Fitzwilliam website page for this exhibition stated: “Both the exhibition and research project, together with corresponding public engagement actions and outputs, aim to elucidate what defines island identities in the Mediterranean.” Well, there’s precious little sign of that in this exhibition. 

Is this show about artistic quality, or about the civilizations involved? If the show is archaeological, it could of course be a bit of both, but the purpose, at least, should be stated. The catalogue contains entries for less than a  third of the objects in the exhibition, as far as I can see. 

Is the show about the interaction of islands? I remember a wonderful book, Art of the Islands: Celtic, Pictish, Anglo–Saxon and Viking Visual Culture, c.450–1050, by Michelle Brown, which pulled together art of the period that is usually treated separately. So much of the art was in common between England, Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia, that it made sense to look at the art together. Was the same technique applied to this show, and, specifically, to Sardinia? I seem to remember a caption that stated although there were plenty of objects found in Sardinia that had clearly been traded from other islands in the Mediterranean, there was little evidence of genuine mingling of cultures. 

The exhibition was unequal in coverage. It looked to me as if the majority of objects were from Cyprus, which matched the substantial holdings in the Fitzwilliam of Cypriot art, with less from Sardinia, and I noticed very little art from Crete. Of the objects illustrated in the catalogue, 31 were found in Cyprus, 14 in Sardinia, and 11 in Crete. The larger pieces tended to be from Cyprus, so these objects were more noticeable. The exhibition was in no way a rounded coverage of any of these islands’ prehistory. 

When I turned to the catalogue, the essays included one about “compost … a tool and a philosophical instrument that functions like an open-format performative lens toward knowledge production that shakes up pre-established, anthropocentric hierarchies and undermines language as a preconceived form of signification and, therefore, power.” This text precedes a timeline, which I finally discovered buried in the catalogue after all the essays. However, this timeline equates common names such as “Bronze Age” as the same for each of the three islands, even though it states that the Bronze Age began in 3000 BCE for Crete, in 1800 BCE for Sardinia, and 2500 BCE for Cyprus. Not, in other words, very helpful. 

Finally, and unexplained, there were ravishing colour photos on the walls of the rooms showing Mediterranean views. They were enough to make you want to book your holiday immediately, but they appeared to have little connection with the exhibition. I thought these photos were just to set the scene (it wasn’t even clear what the photos were about  - one caption listing all the photos appears just before the exit), like the sea sounds you could hear as you entered the exhibition.   

So I am left with memories of several strange, evocative figures. What were they for? What did they represent? These are the things that will remain with me; not the compost.