Book Review: An Explorer's Notebook

An Explorer’s Notebook: Essays on Life, History, and Climate

By Tim Flannery

Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014 

“Book reviewing is a privilege,” Tim Flannery writes in one of the pieces reprinted in An Explorer’s Notebook, the latest book of his to appear in the U.S., “and to be able to pen a leisurely review of 4000 words which permits a broad exploration of a topic, is a rare privilege indeed. It forces one to master at a deep level what it being said by an author, and to try to penetrate how a book has been constructed.”

Privilege seems a bit servile, but it’s certainly an ongoing pleasure to review Flannery’s books, since he himself is one of the world’s foremost public scientists and explorers, a finder of species, a far-traveler, and in recent years one of our most vocal prophets of man-driven climate change. His stellar scientific career has progressed hand-in-hand with a stellar writing career; take away all the other things Flannery has done in his 19th-century-style crowded life and you still have one hell of a writer.

His book The Eternal Frontier is a masterpiece of popular science writing on the level of Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden or Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale. His Throwim Way Leg is a hugely entertaining naturalist travelogue. And his best-selling 2005 The Weather Makers sounded a clarion-note on the subject of climate change and global warming. And there’ve been other books, including reprint-volumes like this present release (the last such was the utterly delightful Among the Islands from 2011). Under the general assumption that more Flannery is a good thing, the appearance of An Explorer’s Notebook can only be applauded.The book includes a great many reprints of pieces the average reader won’t have seen, quick articles and reviews from Australian Natural History, Nature Australia, Sydney Morning Herald, and other Aussie-local publications (and occasions, like Flannery’s acceptance speech for being named Australian of the Year). It also includes some of those leisurely book reviews Flannery has written over the years.So it’s a hodge-podge of material, unified mainly by Flannery’s omnivorous scientific curiosity (the book’s many black-and-white photos of a younger Flannery shirtless and smiling among the aborigines of many outlying archipelagos add considerable charm to the package – this has been a noticeably well-lived life) and his infectious enthusiasm for the natural world, including the natural world’s immense variety of bat life:

Bulmer’s fruit bat is a large, blackish-coloured animal with a wingspan of over one metre. Its wings meet in the middle of the back, making the back appear naked and giving the bat extreme manoeuvrabilty in flight. It is the largest bat species to roost in caves, and because it must rely on sight in its dimly lit environment, it is one of the few bats that can hover. Indeed, it can even fly backwards!

There’s a tone of undisguised wonder running through virtually all the pieces in this latest collection, as in the superb essay “When a Scorpion Meets a Scorpion” from TheNew York Review of Books:

It’s difficult for humans beings to see scorpions at night, but it’s easy for scorpions to see each other. That’s because scorpions produce bright green fluorescent light, which may be clearly visible to them but only visible to the human eye with the help of ultraviolet lamps. Its superb adaptations have been honed by 400 million years of evolutionary experience during which countless billions of individual scorpions with blind spots, less sensitive pectines, or poor fluorescence have been weeded out, until finally we are left with the seemingly perfect, yet utterly alien, creatures here described.

One of the qualities that’s always brought Flannery’s prose to life is its breadth of curiosity. Regardless of how dated or off-topic some of these reprinted essays feel (they inadvertently draw attention to the fact that it’s been a few years since we had a new book from this author), they’re full of discovery-moments where the reader gets to follow Flannery’s mind wherever it goes, from how to field-prepare exotic rats for dinner in Papua New Guinea to how the bird-paintings of Audubon reflect the natural world – and how they don’t:

Perhaps the most famous of Audubon’s images depicts a family of mockingbirds harassing a rattlesnake that is attacking them at their nest. The reptile is open-mouthed as it lunges at a terrified victim, while a second member of the beleaguered family, desperate perhaps to rescue its fellow, pecks at the snake’s eye from behind. For all its apparent authenticity this illustration is an invention, for it was widely known even in Audubon’s time that rattlesnakes do not habitually climb trees, nor do they often eat mockingbirds. Yet so powerful is this frontier allegory that it begs the viewer to suspend their disbelief. And herein lies the wonder of The Birds of America, a work filled with images of nature so intimately observed that they continue to astonish, yet so rendered as to be considered by the literal-minded as palpable fiction.

There’s also plenty of Flannery’s rib-poking humor, as in this aside about one of his great intellectual heroes:

Darwin reveled in sex in all its manifestations from marital to masturbatory – and perhaps homosexuality as well (he certainly had many homosexual friends, whom he never condemned). Indeed, he believed that sex was health-giving – it cured hypochondria, for example. One wonders, incidentally, whether this had anything to do with the first Mrs Darwin being sickly, overly fond of the bottle and inclined to smoke opium.

(The idea that Charles Darwin might have had an even more essential reason for never condemning homosexuality is one far-flung destination too many for Flannery, as it’s been for every Darwinian before him.)

An Explorer’s Notebook approaches anachronism in its Victorian plenitude and energy; Flannery himself foresees a world denuded in our grandchildren’s lifetime of all natural variety that isn’t engineered, maintained, and directed by mankind, and it’s hard to imagine a Tim Flannery tramping through that controlled, crowded, and homogenized world ruled by the super-organism of humanity. But we can take these burly, long-walking books into that world, and it might be the better for it.