Entangled Life

How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

Merlin Sheldrake Bodley Head 2020 Hb, 368pp, £20, ISBN: 9781847925190 Merlin Sheldrake is a young writer, musician and scientist, and a passionate advocate for the transformative power of fungi. Entangled Life is one part popular science book, and another part his fungal manifesto, promoting a mycelial world view of fluid and evolving networks, where discrete and autonomous individuals don’t strictly exist.

We join him as he scours the world for rare moulds, brews arcane mediæval beverages and even eats a copy of his own book infected with mushrooms. Supporting characters, contemporary and historical, include the psychedelic mystic Terence McKenna and the English mycologist Beatrix Potter – better known for her children’s stories.

But the fungi themselves are always the star of the show – curing disease, warping our perceptions, operating as massive computer brains hidden deep in the soil beneath us (the “Wood Wide Web”) or surviving the extremes of space above.

Fungi, it seems, have played an integral part in human history, culture and maybe our very evolution. As Sheldrake argues, their unique capabilities may yet save us from ecological catastrophe.

The book is littered with incidental illustrations in mushroom ink. Sheldrake’s light and accessible prose is rigorously referenced throughout. Speculation is entertained, but carefully signposted and weighed against the evidence.

Sheldrake’s father Rupert, familiar to many forteans for his controversial research into psychic animals and mysterious fields, warrants only the briefest of mentions. Merlin does not carry his torch here. This is foremost a book for a mainstream science audience. Indeed, some forteans may wish to skip the slower chapters on carbon transfer and root development.

Once his stall is set out, there is a rather high degree of repetition, and some content may be overly familiar. The ant-infesting “zombie fungus” cordyceps, while remarkable, is a regular villain of nature documentaries and the inspiration for both The Girl With All the Gifts and The Last of Us.

Yet Sheldrake’s fungal perspective, of the interconnected “labyrinthine rotscape”, remains both fascinating and fundamentally fortean. We must always, Sheldrake implores us, “resist the temptation to remedy uncertainty with certainty”. Future works will likely bear more (fungal) fruit.

Ryan Shirlow

★★★