Otherlands: A World in the Making, by Thomas Halliday, 2022
Thomas Halliday is a palaeobiologist and evolutionary biologist. And no, until I read Otherlands I didn’t know what those things were either and while I am being frank I ought to also accept that my understanding of them remains fuzzy. Why? Because while ‘Otherlands’ is in many ways brilliant, it is also remarkably dense. Every paragraph contains a huge amount of detail – to such an extent that I found myself only able to read a few pages at a time. I suspect this very heavily promoted book will take its place alongside A Brief History of Time (for example) as one of those books that is bought by many, started by few, and finished by almost no-one. To be clear I did finish it, because I can be very stubborn at times, but I can’t deny it was a struggle.
Otherlands is structurally a straightforward book. For each period of geological time Halliday describes what the flora and fauna on earth would have been like. As a purely academic analysis this would have been very dry, but Halliday creatively imagines what the landscape and life on earth at each point in time would have been like. We see through his eyes and words the mountains rise, the earth surrounded in ice and glaciers waxing and waning. This is not however just a ‘big picture’ account of geological eras. Speeded up like the view from the Time Machine, the earth is convulsed by huge changes that rewrite the shape and form of life each time. Mass extinctions lead to opportunities for new life forms, and eventually for the advanced apes that were our ancestors.
The scholarship behind almost every sentence is breath-taking. The biology of a micro-organism, that Halliday describes in a few lines, probably represents half a life-time of research. He takes us to times when the Antarctic was tropical, when the Mediterranean flooded, and when we said goodbye to the dinosaurs.
There are some weaknesses in the author’s decision to imaginatively recreated geological ages rather than taking a purely scientific approach. Here’s an example from chapter one on the Pleistocene:
“Dawn is near breaking in the Alaskan night, where a small herd of horses, four adults and three foals, huddle against the frigid north-easterly wind> By this time, the sun has been gone for well over ten hours, and the air is skin-tighteningly cold. Two of the mares are taking their turn on sentinel duty, keeping their vigil against the dark while the family rests or forages.”
Is this description suggested by a fossil group or is it simply an imaginative evocation of what is believed to be a typical scene (or perhaps a combination of the two)? We aren’t told, and the pedant in me chafes against this even though phrases such as “We can imagine…” would almost certainly have chafed as well. Much of Halliday’s accounts must surely be guesswork, but how much varies constantly. No clear lines are drawn between this imaginative element of the book and the detailed science, so the reader needs to do a lot of reading between the lines and of footnotes. At some points Halliday acknowledges the limits of knowledge about the past – for example with reference to one of the early placental mammals he says ““Their anatomy is too non-committal, too similar to and yet too distinct from too many living orders to be placed with confidence. […] They are an unspecialized, Platonic placental, a lump of living clay from which all others are stretched, pinched and pulled into shape” but at many other points the landscape and the detail of living creatures is reported in incredible detail as simple observable fact rather than educated guesswork.
If I were to be overly critical, I admit I found the prose style uneven. Halliday has won prizes for his writing and I am sure he will win many more, but for every illuminating metaphor bringing an ancient long-dead species back to life there is a grinding analysis of the life-cycle of worms or crustaceans where I learnt much more than I ever wanted to know. Which I suppose is my problem, my lack of engagement with the text and the subject matter. Perhaps it’s also because Halliday seems to find all ancient life fascinating, not just the big beasts and the creatures of the recent extinctions such as mammoths and the other mega-fauna.
It’s impossible not to feel awed, even overwhelmed by the vast scale of time encapsulated by this book. Life has inhabited earth for billions of years, even if for most of that time it was single cell organisms lurking near heat sources waiting for evolution to be discovered. At times I could feel my brain expanding as I read. I learnt that you can calculate an approximation of the average rainfall in any part of the world by the number of drip-points – tips at the end of a leaf – each plant has. I learnt that our genetic code still contains in a degraded form the instructions to create the enzymes used for breaking down the hard exo-skeletons of insects, a left-over from the days where our ancient ancestors ate insects as a primary part of their diet. And I learned that red deer have an extremely high resistance to cancers as a by-product of their evolutionary ability to regrow their antlers quickly. In chapter 15, Consumers, there is vivid description of the evolution of eyesight which I would recommend to anyone struggling with the concept that eyes could evolve from species which previously did not have sight. The book is full to the brim of similar accounts of the wonders of evolution and the natural world.
If ever a book could make you feel small and insignificant, a cocktail of chemicals briefly inhabiting a minuscule amount of space and time in an infinitely variable universe, this is the one.
Postscript: As an experiment I asked ChatGPT to write a review of this book. I am pleased to say it was dross – generic nonsense that was barely relevant to the book’s subject matter and containing comments that could apply to virtually any non-fiction. So it looks like AI won’t be making book bloggers redundant any time soon!
The Reading Bug 