Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition | Merlin Sheldrake | Book Review | Bodley Head & Vintage

 

[Review originally published on Bookmunch: View Post]

By his own admission, from a young age, Merlin Sheldrake’s superheroes ‘weren’t Marvel characters, they were lichens and fungi’ and from the incredible knowledge, research and insight that is reflected in Entangled Life, it is clear he isn’t just being dramatic.

The book was first published in 2020 in a traditional hardback format, and Sheldrake dazzled readers around the world. He revealed in fascinating detail the world of fungi, who wear so many hats that it would be almost impossible to name them all. They form the core of the ‘wood wide web’; they influence the weather; they can alter our minds; they even played a role in the decline of the Roman Empire we apparently like to think so much about. But it is the ever-present mycelium – the network of fungal threads underground – that steals the show, with just one teaspoonful of healthy soil potentially housing anywhere between 100 metres and 10 kilometres of these threads invisible to the naked eye. Sheldrake refers to mycelium, in turn, as ‘a body without a body plan’; ‘polyphony in bodily form’; ‘one of the first living networks’; and ‘a sticky living seam that holds soil together’.

Mushrooms and mycelium

There is a quality of joy in Sheldrake’s writing, turning phrases that sound like song, as when ‘trilobites ploughed silty seabeds using spade-like snouts.’ He is incredibly knowledgeable yet writes modestly, employing a casual throwing-in of almost inconceivable facts, such as ‘Globally, the total length of mycorrhizal hyphae [fungal branches, in crude terms] in the top ten centimetres of soil is around half the width of our galaxy’. Now read that again.

For those here to confirm their conspiracy theories after watching The Last of Us, stay tuned: various types of ‘zombie fungi’ do indeed exist, with some versions living within the bodies of insects, able to alter their hosts’ behaviour for their own benefit. ‘Once infected by the fungus,’ writes Sheldrake,

‘ants are stripped of their instinctive fear of heights . . . In due course the fungus forces the ant to clamp its jaws around the plant in a “death grip”. Mycelium grows from the ant’s feet and stitches them to the plant’s surface. The fungus then digests the ant’s body and sprouts a stalk out of its head . . .’

The text-only version of Entangled Life reads like a shock of pure electricity, giving insight into this most mysterious of organisms (and one must note the stunning cover design of the original hardback). Now, the illustrated edition, finished to an extremely high standard by Bodley Head, arrives to shelves just in time for Christmas and, although I’m not normally one to fall for sprayed edges or ‘special’ editions, I instantly fell in love with this. One hundred images add a whole new layer of enjoyment to this mind-blowing book, bringing all that rich detail to life in vivid colour. Fungi, lichens and mycelium glow on the pages, and their look is as surprising as their various abilities.

Sarcodes sanguinea

While one can see why the abridgement was necessary, it must be noted that this, in turn, is a somewhat different book from the original work. The images line up nicely with the content, but often we will have a line of thought per page, which makes the text lose some of its captivating narrative that wound its way through the unabridged version. This edition caters more to the casual reader: it is put-downable and pick-uppable at leisure, but is nevertheless a unique coffee table book (offensive as that label may be to this impressive work) that is actually worth reading. It is great to see a brilliant piece of non-fiction get this kind of royal treatment in a book world often biased towards fiction.