Who knew the body was this marvellous?

Well, you probably did, but Bill Bryson’s compendium of fun facts wins you over in the end, says Steven Poole

E464pp, Doubleday, £25, ebook £11.99

veryone lives inside a future human carcass, but few of us understand much about how it works. Enter the lovably genial Bill Bryson, who applies the method used in his bestselling 2003 popular-science book, A Short History of Nearly Everything: he travels around asking doctors and medical researchers how the meat and chemicals of homo sapiens all hang together, and relays his findings with a smooth and raconteurish authority. The result is a comforting compendium of fascinating facts, a little like a grown-up version of some Usborne

Amazing Book of the Body.

Did you know, for example, that in a day of breathing you will probably inhale “at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived”? Or that chemotherapy drugs for cancer are derived from the mustard gas used in the First World War? Or that science has determined that, while scratching an itch on your back delivers the most long-lasting relief, scratching your ankle is the most pleasurable place?

Well, perhaps you did; but Bryson assumes quite an impressive level of readerly ignorance. “It may be slightly surprising to think it,” he writes early on, “but our skin is our largest organ.” This has long been a cliché in the genre of “surprising physiological fact”. The repeated claim that the reader won’t know something the author himself only recently learned becomes wearing. The diaphragm, we are told, is “one of the least appreciated muscles in the body”, though it certainly isn’t by singers, saxophonists, or Pilates teachers. It is not clear at all, indeed, by what system he ranks bodily parts with his favoured superlatives. “The heart is the most misperceived of our organs,” he announces, but is it really? Readers may rest assured that the clitoris does indeed make an appearance later.

The ideal reader of Bryson’s book is overweight, encased in a “warm wobble of flesh”, and really ought to do a bit more exercise. “You should get up and move around a little,” he advises the reader directly, which seems a little hectoring and ungrateful, considering his audience is very likely to be seated while enjoying the book. Since the text appears aimed at a mainly American audience, mind you, its assumption of readerly obesity and sloth is probably a good bet. The fey, giggling tone of the incessant references to adiposity reaches a nadir when he is explaining that women have more body fat than men. As well as ensuring reserves for breastfeeding, this, Bryson writes ickily, “makes the woman more agreeably soft and shapely to suitors”.

Perhaps, after all, the book was written in some haste. “The eye is

THE BODY: A GUIDE FOR OCCUPANTS

a thing of wonder, needless to say,” Bryson says needlessly, although – happily – everything turns out to be “a thing of wonder” if you are sufficiently determined to wonder at it. Hearing, too, is “another seriously underrated miracle” (by whom?); the faculty of speech is “one of the great wonders”; and thinking is a “miraculous talent” (even if, one might add, not much exercised).

Very many things, you will be informed, are “curious”, including teeth and infectious disease, and your feet are also “pretty marvellous”. It is pretty, indeed, to be invited to marvel at one’s feet, though all this is just rhetorical padding. We are even told, as though it were an established truth, that “sleeping is the most mysterious thing we do”, even though it has strong competition from, say, buying selfie sticks or liking Ed Sheeran. The reader eventually aches to hear of some facet of the human body that is thoroughly boring and predictable.

The sources Bryson cites tend to be other popular compendia of facts about the body, magazine articles, or interviews with scientists, rather than scientific papers themselves, and the challenge for a generalist in synthesising so much information is knowing when he is being fed a pet line rather than reporting on a robust consensus. About genetics, for example, Bryson states confidently: “DNA exists for just one purpose – to create more

DNA.” This is a simplification of the “selfish gene” notion of

Richard Dawkins, which is far from widely accepted.

And sometimes Bryson seems simply to be confused. “When you place a set of £600 headphones over your ears and marvel at the rich, exquisite sound,” he writes, “bear in mind that all that expensive technology is doing is conveying to you a reasonable approximation of the auditory experience that your ears give you for nothing.” This doesn’t make sense at all, since headphones are not feeding signals directly into your brain: you still need your ears, working in the normal way, to hear them. What the technology is actually doing is approximating the richness of sound out in the world, which is indeed a great feat of human ingenuity.

The book really comes alive, though, when Bryson allows medical specialists to speak about their work with geeky exuberance, as when a surgeon extols the engineering qualities of cartilage: “It is many times smoother than glass: it has a friction coefficient five times less than ice… It doesn’t crack under pressure as ice would. And you grow it yourself. It’s a living thing. None of this has been equalled in engineering or science.” Now, that is pretty amazing.

It is a feat, too, of narrative skill to bake so many facts into an entertaining and nutritious book, as Bryson sketches the history of lobotomies, phrenology and heart transplants, or scoots through some simple evolutionary theory. (Sometimes it crosses the line into simplistic: “Throwing [spears, etc] required us to change our bodies in three crucial ways,” Bryson writes, as

Cartilage ‘is many times smoother than glass, unequalled in science or engineering’

though early humans dreamed of being able to throw stuff and were able to direct evolution to help.)

Bryson is respectably careful, too, to point out how much we still don’t know about ourselves: for instance, why allergies exist, why we have such big sinuses, why we get hiccups or yawn. One thing we do know is that a new age of pandemic infectious disease is coming because of our incontinent use of antibiotics. As Bryson points out, nearly three quarters of the antibiotics given to people in the US each year “are for conditions that cannot be cured with antibiotics”, while 80 per cent of all antibiotics in the US are actually given to farm animals. It is fitting, then, if not quite a happy ending, that his last chapter is about death.

Where Bryson really shines in this book is in his imaginative glosses on the facts he has collected, and his best chapter is the one about what is definitely the least well-understood human organ. “The brain exists in silence and darkness, like a dungeoned prisoner,” he points out. “It has no pain receptors, literally no feelings. It has never felt warm sunshine or a soft breeze. To your brain, the world is just a stream of electrical impulses, like taps of Morse code.”

And did you know that 10,000 years ago, the average human brain all over the world suddenly shrank by the size of a tennis ball? This baffling development is, Bryson comments, “as if we agreed to reduce our brains by treaty”. If something similar has happened again more recently, that would explain a lot.

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Like many novelists, Ann Patchett has one theme that she can’t seem to help returning to. Unlike some, though, she’s happy to admit it. “I keep writing the same thing over and over,” she once explained, “which is a group of strangers thrown together by circumstance.”

For much of her career, the circumstance tended to be a dramatic one. In Bel Canto, which won the 2002 Women’s Prize for Fiction, a gang of terrorists break into an embassy party and hold hostages for months. In

2011’s State of Wonder, a scientist is trapped with an Amazonian tribe. But in her previous book, Commonwealth, she explored a more everyday way in which strangers are thrown together: when the children of divorced and remarried parents form what’s optimistically known as “a blended family”. Now, in The Dutch House, she returns to the same situation – although this time more as a launch pad for a wider consideration of how adults mythologise their early lives.

The Dutch House in question is an extravagant Pennsylvania mansion that the real-estate developer Cyril Conroy buys in the Forties without consulting his wife Elna, confident that she’ll like it as much as he does. Unfortunately, he’s wrong. The unworldly Elna hates it with such a passion that she leaves it, him and their two children and goes off to do charity work in India, cutting all ties with the family.

Her son Danny, who narrates the novel in middle age, was three at the time, and so has no memories of his mother – but his distinctly saintly sister Maeve, seven years older, proves a good maternal substitute. Their distant father then starts a relationship with the materialistic Andrea, who has two younger children of her own and, although he doesn’t appear to love her much, he eventually decides

(or agrees) to marry her.

Patchett is sometimes criticised for having characters that are all essentially very nice. (“For me,” she’s acknowledged, “to write books about good, kind people seems completely natural.”) In Andrea’s case, however, she’s prepared to make an exception. Occasionally, we get glimpses of how the blended family isn’t easy for Andrea either – but her chief role is to be an old-school evil stepmother. While their father’s alive, she treats Danny and Maeve with a mixture of indifference and resentment. Once he dies, when Danny’s 15, she kicks them both out without a penny.

From then on, the Dutch House becomes what Danny calls “our lost and beloved country”. “Do you think it’s possible ever to see the past as it actually was?” he asks Maeve at one point – and, even if the answer is a firm “probably not”, that doesn’t stop them trying. Over the next few decades, they regularly park outside the old place, and try to piece together the story of their parents, and of themselves.

Meanwhile, Danny – without apparently noticing – neatly reproduces key aspects of his father’s life: moving into real estate; marrying a woman,

Celeste, mostly because she wants him to; and presenting her with a large family house that she didn’t know he was buying. Not that she ever becomes remotely as important to him as Maeve (whose maternal duties in time extend to disapproving of his choice of wife) – something that Celeste notes with understandable exasperation. “Jesus,” she responds after another lengthy account of his family background. “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark wood holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?”

But, as it turns out, Danny never really does – which is perhaps both the book’s strength and its weakness. Patchett certainly makes a convincing case for how desperately we can cling on to the past even when it wasn’t up to much, and how unhappy memories can be used to provide a welcome sense of self. But there’s also the slightly awkward feeling that Danny’s personal mythology means rather more to him than to the reader. On the one hand, I suppose, the fact that we can’t always see what all the fuss is about fits Patchett’s theme of an over-mythologised past. On the other, I’m fairly sure that we’re meant to be able to see what all the fuss is about.

The Dutch House offers plenty to enjoy: a simultaneous awareness of human fragility and human resilience, lots of perfectly realised scenes, some great phrasemaking. Nonetheless, the question remains as to whether the novel’s basic framework is ultimately strong enough to bear the weight of all it needs to support. Maybe recognising the problem, towards the end Patchett throws in any number of undisclosable twists. Yet, rather than shoring up the novel, these seem suspiciously like evidence that she couldn’t quite find a satisfactory way to end Danny’s never-ending story.

10,000 years ago, the average human brain shrank by the size of a tennis ball

‘Jesus,’ she responds to yet another family story. ‘Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?’

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‘I WRITE ABOUT GOOD, KIND PEOPLE’ Novelist Ann Patchett