The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Deep thoughts on dark places Never look a hobby horse in the mouth
The ocean floor is 10 times larger than the surface of the moon – and home to far stranger monsters Edward St Aubyn still has a flair for rounded characters – but in his new novel they turn into ventriloquists’ dolls
THE BRILLIANT ABYSS by Helen Scales
352pp, Bloomsbury, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £11.89 ÌÌÌÌÌ
If you gaze too long into an abyss, warned Nietzsche, the abyss will gaze back into you. And indeed it will, with a very weird face, or lack of one: perhaps a luminous ctenophore (or comb jelly), looking like an extraterrestrial spaceship with glowing tentacles extended, or a red vampire squid, webbed fingers ready to grasp, resembling nothing so much as the facehugger from Alien.
Nietzsche, after all, reckoned without the advances in technology that enable marine biologists such as Helen Scales to observe the vasty deep by means of camera-equipped remote-control submarines, from the relative safety of a boat high above. So recently has this become possible, indeed, that we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the ocean floor — which, moreover, covers an area 10 times bigger.
The depths are where, in cultural imagination, monsters lurk: from the Kraken to Godzilla. The “twilight zone” is where light from the surface begins to die out; the word “abyss” itself is Greek for “bottomless void” or “pit of hell”; and the scientific name for the very deepest parts of the ocean trenches, up to 11km (seven miles) down, is the “Hadal zone”, named after the god of the underworld.
Down there, no sunlight can penetrate, and it used to be thought that below only 500m no life could survive at all, that most of the ocean was “azoic”: bereft of animal life. Now it turns out that it is all biosphere, and indeed that life might even have begun in the deep, around hot hydrothermal vents, where seawater that has leaked down through the Earth’s crust and been heated to beyond boiling point by the Earth’s magma erupts back into the ocean. Microbes discovered down there can survive being baked in an oven at 121 degrees celsius, which is possibly bad news for slow-cooking fanatics.
It is, indeed, weirdness all the way down, and Scales’s bestiary is a wonderful introduction to its variety, from the relatively familiar sperm whale, which can hunt a kilometre deep, to the worms that feed on its bones once they have fallen to the ocean floor, known – of course – as “bone-eating zombie worms”. We are also introduced to ultra-black deep-sea fish, cyborg snails that make their shells from iron, carnivorous sponges, and Yeti crabs that have furry claws: “Tipped with a pair of goofy-looking, rounded pincers,” the author explains, “these pelts of blonde fur give the animal the look of a deepsea crab that might appear on The Muppet Show.” And that’s not to mention the three species of glowin-the-dark sharks discovered since this book was written.
Scales’s enthusiasm for her subject is matched by a gift for visual evocation, often disgusting. (“Picture,” she commands the reader, “a close relative of the woodlouse that hides under rocks or garden pots, but pale pink and the size of a rugby ball.” I’d rather not.) She is very good on the sublimely mountainous topography of the seabed, and the unimaginable forces that operate on its denizens. Once you are at a depth of 8km, she explains, where snailfish can live, the pressure exerted by all that seawater above is equivalent to “an elephant standing on every few square centimetres of your body”. Down there too we find scavenging crustaceans called amphipods: “They are supremely unfussy eaters and will devour anything that falls into a trench.” Like Michael Gove, they are hearty trenchermen indeed.
The book also has a crusading message, which is that we depend on the ocean more than we realise, and are harming ourselves the more we harm it. In Britain, of course, we depend on the Gulf Stream to transport heat from the Caribbean and keep our weather relatively mild, but there are signs that global warming is beginning to disrupt this circulation, and scientists estimate there is a one-insix chance of it shutting down in the next century. The ocean itself acts as a huge heatsink, without which the planet would be already unlivably scorching.
Like the threatened rainforests of the Amazon, too, the ocean is a vast store of biodiversity, which our self-interest ought to ensure we manage well. Powerful anticancer drugs have been derived from sea sponges, and many more promising “bioactive molecules” have been identified in oceandwellers, some of which might also help us fight the pressing problem of antibiotic resistance. (These are known, inevitably, as “marine natural products”, because the system of commerce invented by land-based mammals can only value something to the extent that it is a potential commodity in a market.)
For these and other reasons Scales is critical of deep-sea trawling, which can wreck coral reefs and devastate fish populations, and of the dumping of plastics and other detritus at sea. Most of all she argues vehemently against deepsea mining, a proposed way to address the shortages of cobalt and other so-called “rare earth” minerals that are used in technology such as smartphones, lithium batteries and wind turbines, and which currently are mainly mined in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Scraping the bottom of the sea for them instead, she warns, would court disaster.
Technological advances might reduce our dependence on these particular minerals for our green gadgetry, though Scales doesn’t mention the Boy’s Own sci-fi alternative, which is to mine asteroids instead. That is within the realms of the thinkable and arguably no more technologically challenging. There already exist asteroid-mining companies, incorporated in Silicon Valley and in the UK (our own grandly named Asteroid Mining Corporation), though they have yet to mine any actual asteroids. In any case, Scales’s plea to leave the deep alone – apart, of course, from the friendly bathyspheres of marine biologists and the humane explorations of pharmaceutical researchers – is a persuasive and edifying one. Who can be absolutely sure that no monsters slumber down there after all?
DOUBLE BLIND by Edward St Aubyn 256pp, Harvill Secker,
T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.99
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The “novel of ideas” has always been regarded with suspicion in Britain. The consensus seems to be that ideas function in a novel like a succession of speed bumps, interrupting and impeding the smooth progression of plot and character. That’s certainly the case with Edward St Aubyn’s ideas-crammed new novel, which takes readers on a narrative journey so spasmodic that many will emerge with intellectual whiplash. Over and over again, the story is left beeping its horn in frustration while flocks of scientific and philosophical disquisitions gambol in its path, seemingly unshepherded.
One can see why St Aubyn has decided to write a book of this kind. To start with, his celebrated Patrick Melrose novels – there are five, from Never Mind (1992) to At Last (2012) – show such complete mastery of the standard story-and-character-driven novel that he may have felt compelled to challenge himself with something even harder to do well. On the other hand, the Melrose books drew so heavily on his own life, dramatising his experiences of incestuous abuse and heroin addiction, that he may be trying to escape accusations of navel-gazing by applying the intensity of scrutiny he has bestowed on his own history to the rest of the universe. Then, on a third hand – two aren’t enough for a complex fellow like St Aubyn – he is no stranger to self-indulgence. His Lost for Words (2014) was a satire on the literary world that should have been a skit for the Society of Authors’ Christmas party rather than a fulllength novel. Perhaps it’s simply the case that he’s now in the mood to have his say on ecology, genomics, neuroscience, bioethics et al.
In place of a central protagonist à la Melrose there is a gaggle of leading characters, each of whom seems to have been designed to give St Aubyn a legup on to his various hobby horses. Francis is the land manager of a Knepp-like rewilding project on a country estate; he falls in love with Olivia, a biologist, and instead of sweet nothings they exchange lectures. He is a proponent of Gaia theory (“a collective planetary intelligence… was beginning to have her revenge and would soon shrug off the human infestation”) and she is trying to overturn the prevalent genomic theories about heredity in schizophrenia.
Meanwhile, we also follow the fortunes of Olivia’s best friend Lucy as she embarks on a new job working for Hunter Sterling, a venture capitalist and connoisseur-junkie (as in the Melrose novels, the lovingly described drug-taking scenes are highlights) who is working on a virtual reality project that involves plugging yourself into a replication of the brain waves of a Catholic priest undergoing a mystical transcendent experience. There’s also a sinister cardinal straight out of Dan Brown, determined to ensure the Vatican is properly remunerated, although his real function seems to be to emphasise the parallels between religious dogmatism and that of rationalist scientists – spokespeople for, in Francis’s words, “reductionism’s attempt to subsume the irreducible”.
In place of a plot there is a succession of globetrotting set pieces, and although the characters variously have to deal with unexpected pregnancy, invitations to adultery and diagnosis of mortal illness, these storylines are not really developed – they are simply springboards for more philosophising. St Aubyn has lost none of his ability to create rounded characters – there is one who has schizophrenia, Sebastian, being treated by Olivia’s psychoanalyst father, who strikes me as one of the best portraits in the whole St Aubyn oeuvre – and the witty dialogue is well up to the standard of the Melrose books. To enjoy the novel, though, one has to accept that every few pages the characters will suddenly turn into ventriloquists’ dolls, delivering their creator’s essays in the form of internal monologues or one-sided conversations, before just as suddenly becoming themselves again.
This is nothing unusual where the novel of ideas is concerned, and St Aubyn has clearly decided that he is happy to tumble eyes wide open into the pitfalls of the genre, trusting that the essayistic parts of the book will be interesting enough, and the novelistic parts involving enough, to make up for their not really being complementary. Happily, for the most part, he is right on both counts, but it does make Double Blind feel less of a Gaia-style organic whole than a hodgepodge.
The frustrated story is left beeping its horn while flocks of ideas gambol in its path