Behold… The Sea!

This article was commissioned for the 2022 BBC Proms Guide

Richard Hamblyn

On a summer afternoon in 1789, a bare-legged George III stepped nervously into the sea at Weymouth to the strains of the national anthem performed by a small chamber orchestra huddled in a nearby bathing machine. The modern seaside holiday had arrived. Considering the degree to which British culture has been shaped by the sea throughout its history, it’s surprising that it took so long, but then the sea has been a place of work far longer than a site of leisure, an unforgiving taskscape marked by its own musical legacies of shanties and shipwreck ballads. By the time Claude Debussy rented a room at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, in the summer of 1905, however, the southern English coastline had been comprehensively tamed. ‘The sea unfurls itself with an utterly British correctness . . . what a place for working in!’, he wrote, going on to complain that there were ‘too many draughts and too much music, both of which I try to avoid.’

Debussy had moved from Paris to Eastbourne partly to escape the scandal of his impending divorce, and partly to devote himself to the symphonic sketches that would become one of his best-known works: La mer. Proximity to the sea seemed to sharpen his focus, for during the earlier stages of composition Debussy had resisted visiting the coast, preferring to draw on half-remembered seaside visions from childhood trips to Brittany. ‘The sea fascinates me to the point of paralysing my creative faculties’, he said, claiming that he had never been able to write a note in the presence of the sea itself. But it was in Eastbourne that he eventually settled on the final arrangement of La mer, naming its three movements De l’aube à midi sur la mer (‘From dawn to midday on the sea’); Jeux de vagues (‘Play of the waves’); and Dialogue du vent et de la mer (‘Dialogue of the wind and the sea’). The programme notes for the premiere, given later that year in Paris, likened La mer to a painting, observing that the orchestral effects of the piece were achieved through ‘a palette of sounds and brushstrokes designed to convey in gradations of rare and brilliant colours the play of light and shade and the chiaroscuro of the ever-changing seascape.’

The comparison between music and painting was apposite, the heyday of early 20th-century sea music having arisen partly in response to the universal popularity of the painted (and photographed) seascape. In a chapter entitled ‘The Truth of Water’ in his influential study, Modern Painters (1843), the art critic John Ruskin had argued that the sea poses a particular challenge to artistic representation, its restless turbulence being too often conveyed as mere formless disorder. ‘The sea must be legitimately drawn’, he chided; ‘it cannot be given as utterly disorganised and confused’, and he urged artists of all kinds to pay close attention to what he called the sea’s essential ‘fury and formalism’. His advice may have been aimed primarily at visual artists, but it is in that very combination of ‘fury’ and ‘formalism’ that composers possess the advantage of representing, however obliquely, the sea’s perpetual transformations of mood and movement.

Many of the concert repertoire’s best-loved sea-pieces appeared over the course of a single musically intense decade, encompassing, alongside La mer itself (1905), Elgar’s Sea Pictures (1899), Stanford’s Songs of the Sea (1904), Delius’s Sea Drift (1906), Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers (1906), Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony (1910), and Frank Bridge’s The Sea (1911), the latter written in an Eastbourne hotel in avowed emulation of Debussy. Bridge’s nautical tone poem would the first piece of modern music encountered by a ten-year-old Benjamin Britten, whose later ‘Sea Interludes’ from Peter Grimes (1945) owed much to his teacher’s example.

But there was a dark side to that maritime decade, for the years leading up to the First World War had seen the European powers begin to build up their fleets, while Britain’s once-fêted naval supremacy – ‘Britannia rules the waves!’ – continued its post-Napoleonic decline, leading to widespread fears of invasion. Those fears were memorably articulated in Erskine Childers’s bestselling novel, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), while Stanford’s patriotic Songs of the Fleet (1910) expressed them in musical form. From the British perspective, the surrounding sea, once the great conduit of Empire, was turning into a defensive moat, alive with atavistic fantasies of siege and invasion, whether by foreign powers or, more recently, by boatloads of desperate migrants. For the Swiss-born Carl Jung, who accompanied Sigmund Freud on his first Atlantic crossing in the summer of 1909, the sea supplied a ready symbol of the deep unconscious, a source of fearful fascination as well as an elemental threshold that can never be lightly crossed. ‘The sea is like music’, he declared in his journal; ‘it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over’. Like the seven voyages of Sinbad, as narrated in the One Thousand and One Nights, every journey over the sea is a journey into the unknown.

For Sinbad, who survives multiple shipwrecks, storms and kidnappings, the sea was the site of violent transformation, as can be heard in the dramatic finale of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888), in which Sinbad’s ship is driven onto the waiting rocks by furious storm-waves. The composer drew from personal experience as much as from folklore, his self-described poetic love of the sea having prompted him to join the Imperial Russian Navy at the age of twelve. For years he combined his love of music with his life at sea, composing whenever off-watch, sourcing manuscript paper during spells of shore leave, even installing an upright piano in his cramped midshipman’s cabin. Though Rimsky-Korsakov had retired from the navy by the time he came to write Scheherazade, salt water runs through all four movements, the orchestral crashing of the waves alternating with delicate passages for solo instruments, the orchestration growing fuller and richer each time the ‘waves’ reappear, swelling like the sea itself as it rushes towards the land.

Of course there is more to sea-themed music than onomatopoeia. Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers had its origin in stories of ‘false lights’ wrecking along the Cornish coast, the three-act opera telling a murderous (if fictitious) tale of plunder and heroism, while Vaughan-Williams’s Sea Symphony was rooted more in folksong and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (from which the choral texts were drawn) than in any programmatic attempt to render the sounds of the sea. But later composers, such as Grace Williams, who had been one of Vaughan-Williams’s pupils at the Royal College of Music, discovered a renewed enthusiasm for the sonically descriptive seascape. Her Sea Sketches (1944), a suite of five movements for string orchestra, explored her near-somatic relationship with the sea – ‘what I really want, and have always wanted, is to live near the sea: if only I could have a month at sea I’d be a new woman’, she wrote – and much of her music, notably the five Sea Sketches, sought to channel the sounds and rhythms of the sea in its various moods, from the forceful rolling of the tide in ‘Breakers’, to the mournful reverberation of a fog-horn in ‘Channel Sirens’, sounded, via the cellos’ bass notes, through the spectral sea mists evoked on the violas’ upper strings.

What these sketches convey so clearly is the sea’s inexhaustible energy. When an incoming wave breaks on the shore it appears as though the water has come to the end of a long journey, when in fact the water itself has hardly moved. Wind-driven sea waves transmit kinetic energy, not water, and the turbulence in the swash zone is the result of that energy encountering an obstruction – usually the shelving sea floor – against which it noisily dissipates; though in the case of Doreen Carwithen’s Bishop Rock Overture (1952), that obstacle is the Bishop Rock lighthouse, the westernmost point of England, on the edge of the Scilly Isles, some thirty miles off Land’s End. The piece begins with the swirling, dashing sound of powerful waves hitting the lighthouse, horns and trombones blaring, before the sea slowly calms to a steady, reflective quiescence.            

As do all the dazzling sea pieces that feature in this year’s Proms season, Bishop Rock pays testament to a deep-seated creative and emotional response to what Debussy called ‘this great blue sphinx’: the unfathomable sea, at once timeless and nostalgic, where all that is familiar ends and the vast unknown begins.

Flights of Fancy

This review of Tom Harper’s film, The Aeronauts, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 8 November 2019.

“Show me a balloon and I’ll show you a story,” wrote Richard Holmes at the outset of Falling Upwards (2013), his popular history of air ballooning on which Tom Harper’s Amazon-backed The Aeronauts is (very) loosely based. The film tells the story of Victorian meteorologist James Glaisher’s record-breaking balloon ascent of 5 September 1862, in which he and his co-pilot, Henry Coxwell, soared into the stratosphere, seven miles up, nearly losing their lives in the process. As Glaisher later recalled, he had found himself “seized with asphyxia, and believed I should experience nothing more, as death would come unless we speedily descended.” But the hydrogen balloon’s gas valve had frozen shut, and so the vessel (named The Mammoth) kept rising ever deeper into the death zone. With Glaisher slumped unconscious in the basket, Coxwell clambered into the rigging to pull the valve-line with his teeth, since he could no longer move his frost-bitten fingers, and his heroic actions saved the two men’s lives.

Glaisher and Coxwell’s death-defying ascent is one of the best-known episodes of Victorian science, so the extent to which Harper and his scriptwriter, Jack Thorne, have altered the facts for the film is surprising. Firstly, Coxwell is out of the picture, replaced by a fictional aeronaut named Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones), who is hired at a society party by Eddie Redmayne’s diffident Glaisher to pilot him on his meteorological adventure. Secondly, Glaisher is portrayed as an unworldly young novice (“you are airborne for the first time in your life”, observes Wren), when in fact he had made several long ascents with Coxwell in advance of their record-breaking flight, and at 53 years old was an experienced scientific balloonist. Cinema audiences are well aware that the film-maker’s tagline, “inspired by true events”, is a knowing disclaimer against inaccuracy, but The Aeronauts – beautifully filmed though it is – is more wrecking ball than air balloon, and risks doing a disservice to the very subject it sets out to celebrate.

This is not a matter of pedantry. The fact that the famous ascent was launched from Wolverhampton, rather than the film’s lushly imagined mid-Victorian London, is neither here nor there, as is the fact that the middle-aged Glaisher was a respected member of the scientific community, not the derided outsider portrayed in the film (“ah, here comes our weather sleuth”). Indeed, Glaisher had been hired by the British Association for the Advancement of Science to make a series of well-funded aerial voyages, but it clearly makes for better drama to see him triumphing against the odds, with a standing ovation from his former detractors a fixture of the lone genius genre. This kind of fabrication is to be expected, and as long as it serves coherent dramatic ends, it seems petty to object. Even the preposterous space-walk that Wren is shown to make, climbing up the outside of the ice-bound balloon at 36,000 feet, jamming her boot into the gas valve at the summit before falling into unconsciousness at the end of a rope, can be enjoyed on its own terms, as a tribute to the excesses of the Victorian sensation novel.

The issue here is not inaccuracy, but erasure. Not of Henry Coxwell, whose reputation is secure, but of real 19th-century female aeronauts, such as Sophie Blanchard or Margaret Graham, whose overlooked achievements will be further overshadowed by the glare of a fictional caricature. Blanchard (who, along with Coxwell, is thanked in the film’s end credits) fell to her death from a burning balloon in 1819, ten years after her husband Pierre died in similar circumstances, while Margaret Graham, balloonist and entertainer, whose spectacular evening launches drew enormous crowds, also escaped from a balloon fire during a flight over London in 1850. “Amelia Wren” appears to be a composite of these and other female pioneers, but in spite of Felicity Jones’s energetic and engaging performance, the character remains as underdeveloped as Redmayne’s oddly inert Glaisher, who at least has his instruments and notebooks, along with half-a-dozen carrier pigeons, to occupy him during the ascent.            

What saves the film is its dazzling visual impact, in which the world above the clouds is realised with hallucinatory clarity. A scene in which the balloon’s shadow appears on the clouds below, ringed with prismatic colours (an effect known to meteorologists as a “glory”), is magnificently shot, as is the moment when a swarm of yellow butterflies surrounds the craft, disproving an age-old belief that insects cannot fly higher than birds. It doesn’t matter that this happened not to Glaisher, but to his French counterpart Camille Flammarion some years later, since the episode superbly invokes the vertiginous strangeness of the atmospheric ocean above. “Look up, the sky lies open,” as Wren says to Glaisher in the film’s final sequence, and it’s that sense of aerial sublimity, the anti-gravitational miracle of escaping upwards into space, that The Aeronauts conveys so well, due largely to Harper’s director of photography, George Steel, who spent much of the principal filming airborne with the actors in a purpose-built replica of The Mammoth. “We floated around some of the most incredible skyscapes anyone is ever going to see on film,” as Steel has commented, and as a tribute to aerial exploration The Aeronauts makes for exhilarating viewing, even for those with a fear of heights, while the story it tells remains a frustrating travesty, from which any respect for history seems to have been thrown overboard like a sandbag from a runaway balloon.

Richard Hamblyn

And Now the Weather

This review of Andrew Blum’s The Weather Machine appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 13 September 2019.

“The ability to forecast the weather is one of humanity’s greatest adaptations to life on earth”, claims Andrew Blum at the outset of this compelling survey of meteorological acceleration from 19th-century hand-drawn charts to the trillions of calculations per second performed by today’s supercomputers. Weather forecasting “is a wonder we treat as a banality”, yet it remains an uncertain enterprise, just as it was for its Victorian pioneers, and one of the striking lessons of Blum’s account is how, despite the technologies of prediction having changed beyond recognition, public scepticism towards the forecast remains curiously undiminished. “We have constructed a tool that we haven’t yet learned to trust,” he observes of the satellite-driven weather machine that supplies our world with the endless stream of real-time data by which we plan our lives.

Readers of Blum’s previous book, Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet (2012) will be familiar with his preoccupation with the materiality of hidden technologies, from internet servers to weather satellites, and it’s fair to say that this book’s main concern is not with weather, but with infrastructure. Blum is engagingly in awe of complicated machinery, and a trip to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena affords an opportunity for some close-up admiration of a moisture-measuring satellite, “delicate and robust, like a racing bike”, its antenna reflector “extended above the main part of the spacecraft like the halo of an angel costume.”

As the view from space confirms, weather is a global system, and Blum’s account of the alphabet soup of acronym-laden satellites (LEOs, GEOs, CALIPSO, CloudSat) beaming millions of observations back to earth every hour contrasts with the once impossible desire of early meteorologists for information that could outpace the weather, for “once the news could travel faster than the winds, then the winds need no longer come as a surprise.” Meteorology has always been a science of the future tense, but as the Norwegian physicist Vilhelm Bjerknes lamented in 1913, “what satisfaction is there in being able to calculate tomorrow’s weather if it takes us a year to do it?”

Blum’s success in translating the history of weather data into a satisfying narrative is due largely to his unerring eye for detail. One of the most striking anecdotes in the book concerns the only known Nazi incursion onto North American soil. By 1943, the sea blockade of Britain had intensified Germany’s need for weather observations from both sides of the Atlantic. In September that year a U-boat made its way to a remote cove in northern Labrador, where a team of German submariners hauled ashore the components of a newly designed automated weather observatory codenamed Kröte: “the toad”. Once installed on a nearby hillslope, the words “Canadian Meteor Service” were painted on the equipment, and the site littered with American cigarette packets. The decoy transmitter sent encrypted weather readings to Germany for less than a month before its batteries ran out, but the deception took nearly 40 years to be discovered. As Blum observes, “it’s a wild story – an act of meteorological desperation and technological bravado begging for Hollywood,” but it also marked a turning point in the history of weather observation. During the century before “Weather Station Kurt” (as the clandestine observatory became known), the telegraph had enabled weather information to be despatched at lightning speed, but someone needed to be there to send it. Germany’s secret “toad” was the prototype of a new kind of weather station, capable of working on its own in remote locations.

Two decades later, rocket technology had developed sufficiently to send the first automated weather station into space: TIROS 1, an 18-sided drum the size of a kitchen table was blasted into orbit in April 1960 on a descendent of the V-2 rocket, uniting two German wartime technologies for peaceable meteorological purposes. The following year, TIROS III spotted the nascent Hurricane Carla from 800 km above, prompting the evacuation of 350,000 people across the Gulf of Mexico: the first lives saved by a satellite.               And the weather machine continues to evolve, with global tech companies now competing with state-funded weather services to supply real-time updates to smartphone forecasting apps. But who now owns the data? As Blum points out, government weather bureaus around the world share a 150-year history of circulating hard-won information for free, and represent one of the last bastions of international cooperation. But if observations become the property of private networks, “aggregated by the Googles, IBMs or Amazons of the world”, cross-border openness risks being supplanted by giant corporations that act like nations themselves. As we enter an era of increasingly unstable and unpredictable weather, both literally and metaphorically, the winds of technology may also be turning against us.

Richard Hamblyn

Unsettled Patterns

This review of David Haig’s play, Pressure, at the Ambassadors Theatre, London, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 July 2018.

“What a beautiful day: flaming June!” observes a beaming General Eisenhower in the opening scene of David Haig’s Pressure, but will it still be flaming in four days’ time, when the biggest invasion in European history is scheduled to begin? That is the question that propels this impressive dramatisation of the build-up to the D-Day weather forecast – a four-day meteorological shouting match that determined the outcome of the war. 

The action is set in a ground floor room at Southwick House, Hampshire, the headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, where Eisenhower (played with intimidating physicality by Malcolm Sinclair) paces and glowers, chain-smoking Chesterfields as he worries about a break in the weather. The invasion of France had been scheduled for Monday June 5, 1944, a date chosen for its favourable combination of low tide and full moon over the English Channel, but the Allied landing craft could only operate in light winds and low swells, which is where the forecasters came in. The first days of June had been unusually sunny and calm, but would the heatwave hold until D-Day? Irving Krick (Philip Cairns), the US Air Force’s chief meteorologist, was blithely confident that it would, predicting “calm seas and clear skies on Monday – perfect conditions for the Normandy landings”, while the Met Office’s James Stagg (a Scot, played by Haig himself with a passable Midlothian accent) disagreed, worried about the long-range influence of a stalled area of high pressure over the Azores. “High pressure means good weather, right?” asks Eisenhower. “Usually. Not always,” answers Stagg, with a diffidence that infuriates the General, who demands an impossible degree of certainty that only Krick is willing to supply.

 Meteorology is a science of observation and of arguments about observation, and Haig excels at dramatising the clash of methodologies represented by the American and the Scot. Krick, for whom “the proof is in the past”, relied on historical weather maps for his forecasts, arguing that future weather is always likely to follow earlier patterns: a two-dimensional approach that he had deployed with great success before the war, advising Hollywood directors on the best days for outdoor shoots (most notably for the burning of Atlanta sequence in Selznick’s Gone with the Wind). Stagg’s synoptic approach, developed in the more volatile weather conditions of the British Isles, emphasised fluctuations in the upper atmosphere that could overturn settled weather patterns with little or no warning. “You have to think three-dimensionally,” he tells Krick, and he spends much of the play decoding the real-time weather charts that are delivered to the campaign room every few hours, strikingly projected onto the rear wall of Colin Richmond’s atmospheric set. The maps track the passing of time over that hot, sleepless weekend, at the end of which Stagg announces his gloomy conviction that “the weather on D-Day will be extremely poor,” with storm-force winds and driving rain over the Channel.  

 Krick disagrees – “I cannot stand your Scotch pessimism!” – but as the argument escalates, news arrives that Stagg’s pregnant wife, Elizabeth, has been rushed to hospital with high blood pressure, adding another layer to what was already an overburdened metaphor. In the play’s only misjudged moment, Elizabeth’s blood pressure is reported to be stable at the same time as Stagg’s predicted low-pressure storm (“L6”), makes its first rainy appearance at the window, prompting Eisenhower to postpone the invasion.

This is not the first time that Haig has taken the lead in one of his own plays – in My Boy Jack (1997) he played a grieving Rudyard Kipling, whose only son, John, had been killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915 – and, as with Kipling, he inhabits the role of Stagg with a rare depth of insight, conveying the mix of caution and brilliance that led him to intuit, on the basis of a single reading from a Mid-Atlantic weather-ship, the likelihood of a twenty-four-hour lull between the current storm (L6) and the next (L7), granting Eisenhower the briefest window of opportunity on Tuesday June 6th: D-Day Mark 2. But how likely was it? In the end, it comes down to trust: “I don’t wanna look at the chart – I want you to look me in the eye, and tell me the weather will be good on Tuesday morning,” the General tells his weathermen, and when they finally concur, the release of tension is palpable, not just on stage but throughout the auditorium, the audience having been held in suspense for a nailbiting two hours.

“You saved the day,” as Eisenhower’s secretary, Kay Summersby (Laura Rogers) tells Stagg, after they have both been quietly sacked by their commander, who is now on his way to France on the heels of the invasion. Stagg quietly returned to the Met Office, where he worked until the 1960s, his role in the war’s last great turning-point all but forgotten in his lifetime.

Richard Hamblyn

Theatre of the Natural World

This review of Mark Dion’s exhibition, ‘Theatre of the Natural World’, at the Whitechapel Gallery, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement for 23 March 2018:

“There is no more curious and uncanny topic than the biodiversity that surrounds us”, as Mark Dion observed of the subject that has preoccupied him over a long and productive career. Six of the American’s artist’s immersive installations, dating from the early 1990s to today, have been selected for this major retrospective, for which both floors of the Whitechapel Gallery have been meticulously set-designed as though for some experimental documentary about Victorian natural history.

The first thing to confront the visitor is a large mesh aviary, from which the soft meeps and chirrups of 11 pairs of zebra finches drift over the gallery space. The Library for the Birds of London (2018) is the latest in a series of book-strewn aviaries that Dion has created since 1993 (the first was in Antwerp), at the centre of which rises an apple tree, or rather, a full-size assemblage of an apple tree bolted together from sawn-up sections. The birds share their quasi-natural roosting space with a variety of objects hanging from the branches: binoculars, a pith helmet, a catapult, a butterfly net, framed photographs (David Attenborough and Alfred Hitchcock), pruning shears, shotgun cartridges and, of course, several hundred books, arranged in thematic groups, or piled in a heap around the base of the tree. There are books on environmentalism and bird behaviour, on woodland habitats and coastal walks; there are bird-themed novels (including Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch), a biography of Florence Nightingale, critical studies of Kant and Foucault. Visitors enter the aviary, four at a time, footsteps muffled by the sawdust-covered floor as the finches flit from branch to feeder, their indifference to the well-stocked nature library recalling Barnett Newman’s famous quip that “aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to the birds.” A forester’s axe leaning against the tree foreshadows the fall of this bookish Eden, though a nearby information panel explains that the birds are cared for in close consultation with the RSPCA, with trained staff members monitoring them at all times, and a local veterinarian on call.

This is not the first time that zebra finches have taken over a major London art space. In the spring of 2010, French sound artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot transformed the Barbican’s Curve gallery into a giant walk-in aviary, in which 40 finches flittered around a sonic landscape of plugged-in electric guitars and seed-filled cymbals. As the birds landed and perched on the instruments, occasionally wiping their beaks on the guitar strings, the space resounded with an amplified ornithological jam session. In contrast to Boursier-Mougenot’s birds, whose props were meticulously cleaned every evening, Dion’s finches are covering theirs in a steadily growing layer of guano. “Although we think a lot about nature”, as Dion observes, “nature doesn’t really think about us.”

Ranged around the aviary are four life-sized Hunting Blinds (2005-08), versions of game hunters’ camouflaged hides (known as ‘blinds’ in the United States), which Dion has transformed into distinct human habitats: The Glutton, a corrugated iron shed concealing a table laid for a game-heavy banquet; the elegant Dandy-Rococo, with its display of aristocratic paraphernalia; The Librarian, a watchtower arrayed with shelves of books and research materials; while the toppled wreckage of The Ruin offers the vision of a future in which hunting is a forgotten aberration, though whether this is due to human compassion or animal extinction isn’t clear.

On the upstairs level, the immersive Naturalist’s Study (2018) invites visitors to “make themselves comfortable and read the books on the table”, most of which are by or about Dion himself. The elaborate mise-en-scene, complete with vintage furniture and specially-made wallpaper (featuring a repeating pattern of extinct species) calls to mind the private cabinets of 19th-century naturalists, whose patrician ideas about the Great Chain of Being continue to shape our own contradictory attitudes to nature. The study is hung with numerous framed images – most notably, Dion’s eerie Dead Trees series, painstakingly drawn in tar on paper – and filled with idiosyncratic specimens, such as an ammonite fossil that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a carving of a snake, or a unicorn’s horn in a straw-lined box (actually a replica narwhal’s tusk), the “most priceless treasure” of an invented Renaissance courtier. For Dion, there is an evident continuity between extinction and myth, between creatures that once existed and those that never did except in the imagination.

This cryptozoological impulse finds its clearest expression in Dion’s exhibition labels, where lists of mixed media form a taxonomic wunderkammer in themselves: “Furniture, heads mounted on shields, guinea pigs with four hind legs, redundant labels, orphaned mounts, defunct teaching models, botanical freaks, Egyptian fakes and other materials,” reads the label for the Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy (2005), a life-sized simulacrum of an eccentric 1920s curator’s office. The locked Bureau (frustratingly, you can only peer in through the window) was assembled by Dion while artist-in-residence at the University of Manchester. Delving into obscure corners of the Manchester Museum archives, he and the curators unearthed a wealth of long-forgotten objects (rat-gnawed buttons, wax fruit, a box marked “Mermaids”) to furnish an outlandish micro-museum based, in part, on a short-lived information bureau that the early Surrealists opened in Paris in 1924. In Dion’s cluttered version, an open filing cabinet drawer reveals folders labelled, variously, “Embalmed Ones”, “Stray Dogs”, and “Suckling Pigs”, in reference to the celebrated opening paragraph of Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966), which quotes, from a story by Borges, “a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’.” For Dion, who has spent his career questioning the authority of museums and the knowledges that underpin them, all taxonomies are flawed systems, products of subjective attempts to impose objective order on the elemental chaos of nature.

Dion’s preoccupation with taxonomy and its values is addressed most overtly in his Tate Thames Dig (1999), first exhibited in the newly opened Tate Modern in May 2000. Dion and a multi-generational team of volunteers, drawn from local community groups, spent a fortnight mudlarking the Thames foreshore along two stretches of beach, at Millbank (Tate Britain) and Bankside (Tate Modern). The finds from the two sites were meticulously cleaned and classified in archaeologists’ tents on the lawn of Tate Britain, with every object, no matter how abject, given equal taxonomic status. Arranged in a custom-built mahogany cabinet, the finds are administered under an array of impromptu classificatory systems based on size, colour, or function. Drawers can be slid open to reveal curiously hypnotic displays of plastic bottle-tops, buttons, wire, pottery, credit cards, abandoned shoes, with the twin-sided cabinet revealing telling differences between the two locations: the malodorous silt of Millbank, site of a notorious 19th-century prison, gave up knives and bullets alongside the ubiquitous bottle caps, while the beach at Southwark’s Bankside yielded the clay pipes and oyster shells of the 17th-century pleasure-seekers who frequented its theatres and bearpits. This archive-cum-time-capsule is the show’s most popular and successful exhibit, not only because it speaks so directly of a lived material past, but also because it subverts the “look but don’t touch” atmosphere of most of the other installations. Dion has stated that there is “a Bouvard and Pécuchet element in my work”, an insightful reference to Flaubert’s unfinished novel in which a pair of Parisian copy-clerks set out to comprehend the whole of human knowledge. Like Dion’s hypothetical museum curators, they are doomed to genteel failure, their search for enlightenment leading them ever further into the dark, as enacted by this exhibition’s final assemblage, The Wonder Workshop (2015), a blacked-out room filled with eerily glowing luminescent objects sculpted from antiquarian illustrations of natural and ethnographic curiosities. It’s an unsettling vision on which to end, this dimly lit Plato’s cave of half-imagined animals and artefacts, whose dreamlike suspension between myth and reality nevertheless illustrates Dion’s contention, pursued over an impressive 30-year career, that “the objective of the best art and science is not to strip nature of wonder, but to enhance it.”

Richard Hamblyn

Wilderness With a Cast of Thousands

This review of five books on Antarctica appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 2013.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the dream of discovering a lost southern continent, more bountiful than the Americas, had died an icy death. James Cook, who spent much of the 1770s zig-zagging the Southern Ocean in search of the fabled Terra Australis Incognita, concluded that no-one could make it further south than the Resolution’s hard-won 71°10’S, and that whatever “inexpressibly horrid” land might lie beyond the pack ice “would not be worth the discovery.”

Though Cook’s prediction proved incorrect, those who did venture beyond the sea ice were inclined to agree with his assessment. “Great God! this is an awful place”, observed Captain Scott of the Geographic South Pole, which he reached – too late – in January 1912, while his ship-mate Apsley Cherry-Garrard described polar exploration as the best means humanity had yet devised of having a wretched time.

But, as these five books plainly attest, the century since the death of Scott has seen such views of Antarctica transformed, from a howling wilderness to an ice-bound utopia, a kind of transnational Eden devoted to the pleasures of research. “A science playground”, as Gabrielle Walker describes it in the introduction to her “intimate portrait” of the frozen continent, “a place where modern humans can write themselves afresh.” For Gavin Francis, it was the “cold purity” that impressed him most, “the simplicity of that world of ice and light”, while for David Day, the place supplies an object lesson in international agreement, the Antarctic Treaty of 1961 having so far guaranteed peace on the continent, while serving “as an example of cooperation” that the rest of the world might heed.

Day’s Antarctica is an impressive piece of work, an impartial and deeply researched account of the politics of polar annexation. It is, of course, an ongoing story, of which the British government’s recent decision to name a sizeable section of British Antarctic Territory “Queen Elizabeth Land” is only the latest installment. The Argentine response, condemning Britain’s “anachronistic imperialist ambitions” is typical of the bad-tempered rhetoric that has dominated the question of Antarctic possession for much of the past two centuries, many examples of which enliven the pages of Day’s book. I was particularly struck by the angry exchanges between the explorer Douglas Mawson and his ship’s captain, John King Davis, over what the latter called “that bloody rubbishing business of raising the flag ashore.” (Though sometimes Mawson didn’t even go ashore: he once claimed British sovereignty over a 1,000-kilometre-wide section of the continent by planting a flag on the summit of an offshore island that overlooked the newly annexed land.) It was the Antarctic Treaty that brought such antics to an end, but as Day points out, the signatory nations continue to wrangle over their Antarctic possessions, bolstering their claims through the preservation of historic monuments such as Scott’s and Shackleton’s century-old huts: emotive relics from the age of exploration that also serve as strategic reminders that “we” were here first. In this context, it is interesting to note that Day is the only one of the five authors who has never set foot on the continent. “Like Cook”, he writes, “I have been slowly circling the Antarctic.” It seems a curious omission, given how accessible the place has become; every (southern) summer sees more than 30,000 visitors arrive, swelling the resident population of some five thousand scientists and support staff, though in winter that number drops to just over a thousand, many of whom apparently regard themselves as the luckiest people on earth.

One of those lucky ones was Gavin Francis, who spent a year working as the base-camp doctor at a remote British research station on Antarctica’s Caird Coast. Empire Antarctica is his record of that year, an intense and lyrical portrait of the slowly changing polar seasons, at the heart of which lies the cold monotony of the lightless southern winter. At first, as the sun gradually dipped below the horizon, Francis felt he was adjusting well to the coming of the polar night. But by the end of the second month, he writes, the frozen darkness had lost any beauty it once held: “it became a pause, a limbo, a drawn breath between history and the future”. His colleagues on the isolated station grew listless and forgetful, while tempers frayed due as much to the lack of privacy as the lack of natural light. Some even developed the notorious “Antarctic stare”, brought on by months of isolation, as though zombified by the pitiless dark. And then, one morning, the light of the returning sun offered its first chromatic inklings:

The sun was rising in my blood. I felt the promise of its return. One day while out skiing I saw the whole horizon spread with carmine and crimson; a widening garden of roses sprang up between the ice and the stars. Then a mirage started to flicker in the frozen air. The line of the horizon was obliterated, and the roses were replaced by a forest fire of black and scarlet flame. The prismatic air shifted the light depending on the height of the observer: if I crouched down the whole blaze moved to the east, if I stood up it rolled to the west. I stood silent witness to a beauty that was suddenly precious.

This shines with a clarity and lyricism descended from Thoreau; but confessional rhapsody is a risky venture, and there are moments in the book when Francis’s emotions overwhelm the telling of the story. At one point, for instance, during an account of an afternoon spent huddling with the penguins on the Brunt Ice Shelf, he rehearses the Transcendentalist idea that birds live more joyfully than humans, existing, he writes, “in a series of almost discontinuous eternities.” This is an interesting, if anthropomorphic, idea that neatly counters Cherry-Garrard’s better known (and equally anthropomorphic) contention that “nobody on earth has a worse time than an emperor penguin”. It would have been good, perhaps, to end the passage there, but instead Francis goes on to tell us that in “sharing their winter incubation, becoming one with their huddle, I felt as if I was taking part in that great joy”, a sentiment that seems both intrusive and spurious, given that he has no way of knowing what emotions, if any, a wintering penguin might feel. Indeed, the male emperors’ annual feat of endurance – a winter-long fast, spent silently incubating an egg that must never touch the ice – is mysterious to us precisely because it is unfathomable.

But Francis is not the only one to have succumbed to the cult of the penguin. Gabrielle Walker recalls that she began her time on the ice determined to resist these “clichés of Antarctica”, distrusting the way their cuteness is used to reduce the continent’s alien vastness to a manageable human scale. She would write about them only “because there was interesting science to tell. That was all.” Her vow did not last long, however, and the day an Adélie penguin played statues with her – “each time I turned it was motionless. Each time I walked, it walked with me” – was the day she finally lost her battle with the anthropomorphic impulse. Needless to say, an Adélie penguin features prominently on the cover of her book.

Penguins, though, are not the continent’s only walking clichés. Most of the resident scientists and staff that Walker encountered during her five Antarctic trips seemed to fall into a handful of predictable types: usually hairy (one has “an untamed shock of white hair”, while another has “a shock of tight black curls that fall frequently across his face”); often taciturn (“I had been warned that he wasn’t so good with people”); and always obsessed (“he spends as much time as possible out here in his field camp, among his penguins”). Their work, however, is invariably fascinating, and Walker’s book is at its best when exploring the intricacies of Antarctic science. At one remote station on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet she visits a simple snow chamber dug into the ice, through which sunlight is filtered into the purest colours possible on earth, as much art installation as scientific instrument. At the bottom of the chamber she finds an intense violet glow, shimmering at the furthest limit of the visible spectrum, “the end of the rainbow, the last colour that human eyes can see” before light slips past us into invisible ultraviolet. At the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, meanwhile, she visits the site of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a vast instrumental array designed to detect the particle debris left over from some of the universe’s most spectacular events (exploding stars, colliding black holes, gamma-ray bursts): an instrument so expensive that it merited its own line in the American Congressional budget. Buried more than a kilometre deep, where the ice is at its purest and most transparent, IceCube’s strings of detectors have effectively transformed the entire continent into a kind of prospector’s sieve, angled to capture those elusive neutrinos as they rocket their way through the icy depths with tell-tale bursts of blue light.

IceCube is an enormous structure, and one of the more disquieting revelations of Walker’s book is the scale of human industry on the continent. There are now hundreds of buildings and motorised vehicles, distributed mainly around the coast, with McMurdo Station – “Mactown”, Antarctica’s unofficial capital – resembling a 19th-century mining town, a sprawling, unsightly mess “with no ice and little romance.” The continent is becoming a managed environment, not just in the stations, with their cashpoints and bowling alleys (the one at Mactown uses stuffed penguins for skittles), but out on the ice, too, where every Weddell seal wears a prominent coloured tag, and every adult penguin is well used to the sight of people. And though science, not colonization, remains the official justification for the establishment of Antarctic settlements, colonization has indisputably begun: on the Argentinian base, at the tip of the Peninsula, a school has opened to educate some of the dozen or so children – “citizens of Antarctica” – who have been born on the continent since the 1970s, in defiance of the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, under which children and dogs are banned. It sounds, writes Walker, “like a wonderful childhood”, but unless (or until) the Treaty is overturned, such unofficial settlements are unlikely to thrive.

But if the scale of current activity on the ice comes as a surprise, so does its historical reach. This is the subject of John Harrison’s Forgotten Footprints, an account of the first adventurers to make landfall on Antarctica, many of whom had gone in search of the abundant seals and whales described in Cook’s reports. As Harrison points out, it hardly matters who was the first to set foot on the continent, though he devotes a fair few pages to supporting the priority claim of a forgotten English merchantman named William Smith. In February 1819, having been blown off-course while rounding Cape Horn, Smith made landfall on what are now the South Shetland Islands; the following year, he was commissioned by the Royal Navy to survey the new islands, in the course of which he discovered the Antarctic Peninsula.

Well, maybe; there have been plenty of other claimants, notably American sealers, though as Harrison notes, annual fur seal harvests remained steady until Smith’s reports were published, after which the catches increased so sharply that within two years the Antarctic fur seal had been hunted almost to extinction. In 1821, the Russian explorer Gottlieb von Bellingshausen arrived at Deception Island to find eighteen ships already moored amid scenes of wholesale slaughter. Though seal and whale numbers have now recovered, evidence of the industrial carnage is preserved at the “historic site” of Whalers Bay, where, as Harrison’s photographs show, the shoreline is littered with the ruins of vast barrels abandoned in the 1930s when the price of whale oil slumped, while off-shore lies the century-old skeleton of a Norwegian factory ship: a reminder of the long and crowded history of Antarctic exploitation that preceded the heroic age of the explorers, whose “race to the Pole” forms the centrepiece of Chris Turney’s 1912.

Turney’s book is named for Antarctica’s annus mirabilis, when no fewer than five state-funded expeditions were active on the ice. Scott and Amundsen’s tandem mission is now a familiar story, but Turney is good at retrieving the kinds of telling details that make it read afresh, such as the fact that Amundsen’s logistics were so well managed that he and his men actually put on weight during their return from the Pole, in contrast to the slow starvation of their doomed British rivals. But the most surprising revelations concern the Japanese team, led by Nobu Shirase, a Buddhist priest turned polar explorer, whose disorganized mission stands in comic contrast to the achievements of Amundsen and Scott. At one point Shirase’s ship nearly ran into Amundsen’s, the Japanese having mistaken the startled Norwegians for pirates. The only words in common that the two teams possessed turned out to be “nice day” and “plenty ice”. As Turney observes, it’s an extraordinary thought that two expeditions should meet by accident “at the bottom of the world”, even though Antarctica was awash with explorers. By this stage Shirase had abandoned his plans for a rival dash to the pole, and while Amundsen’s team headed south to victory, Shirase’s ventured instead into an unexplored sector, claiming it for Japan with a bamboo flagpole and shouts of banzai (“ten thousand years of life”). They nearly didn’t make it out, however, as the offshore sea ice was beginning to break up, putting their ship in danger from drifting floes. After several attempts, Shirase and his men were finally hauled aboard, but they had to leave their dogs behind on an uninhabited ice-shelf. The animals’ howls of distress at the sight of the departing ship proved a traumatic end to the expedition, and Shirase apparently remembered the dogs in his twice-daily prayers for the rest of his long life.

“Antarctica has little time for humans”, as Gabrielle Walker observes, yet each of these books has a cast of thousands, who between them have ventured over all but a fraction of this once forbidding continent. Even the South Pole remains the focus of an extraordinary amount of human activity, with “dormitories, offices, trucks, pool tables, shower blocks, saunas and science”. Antarctica, it seems, is no longer the world’s last wilderness, but what is clear from these five highly readable books is that its enveloping, elemental whiteness continues to cast a spell on those who, in Shackleton’s words, “burn with a strange passion for the South.”

Richard Hamblyn

Greenland

This piece, co-authored with Professor Mark Maslin, co-director of the UCL Environment Institute, appeared in the Times Eureka supplement in March 2011

There’s a puzzling soliloquy in the first act of Richard Bean’s The Heretic – currently playing at the Royal Court Theatre – in which the head of a climate research unit at an unspecified British university declares that climate scientists are “the kings of the castle”, and that environmental science is now the cool degree on campus.

If only. Like other instrumental sciences, climatology is largely about measurements and arguments about measurements, and for every field-trip to a photogenic glacier there’s a ton of contentious data to compute. But the global urgency accorded to climate change has given it a distinct cultural allure to which the arts have become increasingly attracted. In the last six months alone there have been three major theatrical productions in which the principal character is a climatologist: Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London, the multi-authored Greenland (currently on at the National Theatre) and Bean’s The Heretic (Royal Court). And then there’s Ian McEwan’s Solar, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital novels, and the television drama Burn Up, each of which pits a heroic climate scientist against the forces of planetary destruction. It may be strangely flattering but it’s not exactly plausible, though it probably stems from a fundamental mismatch of scale: climate change is an all-encompassing planetary phenomenon involving every major earth system from the oceans to the atmosphere; it is also a global political challenge affecting every nation on earth. The arts, however, are resolutely human-scale, with a single character or motif standing in for an array of competing ideas.

The problem with all this “scientist-as-hero” is that it misrepresents the collaborative nature of science. All three climate plays portray their protagonists as troubled loners, rooting out the evidence needed to single-handedly save the planet. Greenland’s climate modeller, Dr Ray Boykin, is so terrified by his own data that he tries to keep it secret, until a glamorous adviser from the Department of Energy seduces it out of him: science literally getting into bed with politics! It is one of many laugh-out-loud moments in a play which, despite some faults, is an impressive attempt to convey the scientific and ethical complexities of its subject. Much of its technical content is quoted from credible sources (in fact Boykin’s “scary” model derives from a recent Hadley Centre paper), while the multimedia design allows for a range of supporting material such as graphs and charts to be shown alongside the dialogue. The central scene, set at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, is a brilliantly nuanced examination of the summit’s collective policy failure, and is worth the price of admission alone.

So why have the critics been so harsh? “Two punishing hours of strident polemic” (Telegraph); “not so much a play as a statement put out by a committee” (Observer); “horribly similar to surfing the web” (Sunday Times). A recurring complaint, even in the more sympathetic reviews, is that with four playwrights involved (Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne), you can’t tell who has written what. From a science perspective, this is a surprising objection: most scientific books and articles are multi-authored, collaborative enterprises in which no individual “voice” can be detected. In the arts, by contrast, where individual creativity is valued very highly, such collaborations, while not unknown, remain relatively rare. But this situation seems to be changing, and Greenland, with its heterogeneous authorship, its wealth of documentary material gathered through exhaustive interviews with scientists and policy-makers, and its supporting programme of platform talks and discussions, is testament to an emerging, evidence-based model of making collaborative, documentary art.

And it seems there will be a lot more of it in the future, due in large measure to the ongoing work of initiatives such as TippingPoint, Cape Farewell, and Julie’s Bicycle, which have spent the last few years bringing climate scientists and artists together in creative colloquy, and in some cases commissioning new pieces of work. In fact on Tuesday this week TippingPoint, with generous support from Major Road and Without Walls, announced seven new climate change commissions, ranging from intimate spoken word pieces to huge outdoor installations. Look out for As the World Tipped, an extraordinary piece of aerial theatre set around the disastrous Copenhagen Summit; The Funeral for Lost Species by Feral Theatre, an immersive blend of visual art, performance and participatory workshops; and My Last Car by 509 Arts, a multi-authored celebration of the end of the automobile era. Whether or not these artworks prove successful – and there is an army of critics out there waiting to judge them – it is clear that climate change, with its manifold challenges, has become one of the shapers of contemporary culture. The science may be “settled”, as Al Gore contentiously claimed, but the art is only just getting into its stride.

Mark Maslin and Richard Hamblyn

Climate Change Plays

This review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 25 February 2011

Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner & Jack Thorne, Greenland, Lyttleton Theatre

Richard Bean, The Heretic, Royal Court Theatre

The trouble with global warming is that you can’t see it happening. You can see its effects on the ground, of course, but not the thing itself. Greenhouse gases remain stubbornly invisible, so their accumulation in the atmosphere must be visualized by other means, plotted onto those fearsome looking graphs that tell us we’re all going to fry. Who can forget the famous scene in An Inconvenient Truth (2006) where Al Gore is hoisted by hydraulic lift some ten metres up the y-axis of an elongated graph showing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, projected to the year 2100. After 2050, when a concentration of around 550 parts per million had been reached, the temperature line went vertical, soaring beyond the furthest reach of the fireman’s lift, in a dramatic literalization of the statistical concept of a measurement going off the scale. That episode has become an indelible part of the climate change story, an iconic image of runaway warming – or runaway alarmism, depending on your viewpoint – and it haunts this pair of thematically linked plays in revealingly different ways.

The National Theatre’s multi-authored Greenland begins in a stylised supermarket through which teenage eco-activist Lisa (Isabella Laughland) hurtles in a suspended shopping trolley, denouncing the fact that so much of what we eat is wrapped in plastic and flown half-way round the world. “How many planes just to bring us our shopping?”, she asks, as a vast projection appears on a screen behind her: it’s that graph again, complete with its accusing vertical, up which Lisa suddenly ascends in her fly-wired trolley in an affectionate parody of Gore’s great elevation. As her parents watch nervously from below, Lisa announces her decision to become a full-time climate warrior: “Mum, the ice is melting and I’m really, really scared.” Over at the Royal Court, meanwhile, climatologist Kevin Maloney (James Fleet) complains that the infamous y-axis is in fact upside down: “If you get up really close to the telly, and freeze frame it, you can see. You work your guts out, a lifetime, then some smarmy tit comes along, gets his y-axis upside down and picks up a Nobel Peace Prize.”

As these two snapshots suggest, Greenland and The Heretic cover much the same ground, but their outlooks are worlds apart. Greenland is a passionate, data-driven analysis of our wavering response to environmental catastrophe, while The Heretic is a cynical campus comedy that views the pieties surrounding climate change (“the artist formerly known as global warming”) as ripe for a knockabout farce. Neither makes for particularly comfortable viewing.

Like last year’s Earthquakes in London, in which the looming climate crisis was examined from multiple points of view (and the Cottesloe transformed into a psychedelic cabaret bar), Greenland is a fast-moving collage of intersecting storylines that merge into one another at breakneck speed. Without Bunny Christie’s ingenious design and Aline David’s mesmerising choreography, the whole thing would be unwatchable, but once you’ve got used to the fragmented structure, the play – or rather plays – take on an extraordinary collective energy, as the action moves between climate camps and COP15 (the disastrous Copenhagen Summit of December 2009), via a series of restaurants and hotel bedrooms, all of which requires the fifteen-strong cast to switch between multiple roles with seamless rapidity.

Inevitably, some of the storylines are more rewarding than others: the relationship between Peter McDonald’s troubled climate modeller, Ray, and Lyndsey Marshal’s steely-eyed politician (“Phoebe Hammond, Department of Energy; I hope you’re not wasting my time”) is wonderfully well observed, while the arguments between a lesbian couple over how to lead a greener lifestyle are wearisomely banal. Lisa’s commitment to climate activism is also endearing and annoying by turns, though it occasions some good lines, such as her question during a heated discussion at a climate camp meeting: “Excuse me, are you an activist or an anarchist? It’s just that the anarchists are on at 2.” But the best scenes of all are those set at Copenhagen, where the self-serving politics of climate compromise are dissected with anger and panache. We follow a pair of civil servants from the Mali delegation (“there are fifty of us – more than Belgium!”) as they arrive at the summit full of expectation, only to be worn down by ten sleepless days and nights of “negotiation by exhaustion”, at the end of which Obama flies in to negotiate in private with a handful of selected representatives. When the “Copenhagen Accord” was announced the following day, the majority of delegates had no idea what was in it. Phoebe Hammond, attending the summit with her boss Ed Miliband (the then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change), is in bed with Ray the climate scientist (and his laptop) when the surprise announcement is made, and in one of the evening’s more effective sequences, they watch crestfallen as the scale of the summit’s failure sinks in. Meanwhile, Ray’s latest climate model spools out behind them on a giant screen, its implications clear for all to see: that the Copenhagen agreement has grotesquely underestimated the scale of future warming to which our atmosphere is irreversibly committed. “By the time your daughter is 35 the tarmac on her road will be melting twice a year, and she will probably have to teach her children how to use a gun.” Phoebe, however, is already getting dressed, late for the accidental “brush-by” with Obama that she has been frantically arranging for her boss. “Do you fancy him?” asks Ray, as Miliband’s face fills the screen, and Phoebe’s answer: “No. I tried” gets the biggest laugh of the night.

There are more and bigger laughs in Richard Bean’s The Heretic, though far less in the way of substance. Jaded earth scientist Dr Diane Cassell (Juliet Stevenson), who has spent her research career monitoring sea level rises in the Maldives, has made an unsettling discovery: sea levels there are not technically rising; which is to say, the sea is rising, but so are the islands. It seems these long-standing poster children for climate catastrophe are not about to drown. Having ignored her head of department’s warning not to publish her findings (he is worried they might jeopardize future funding), Cassell receives the first of a series of death threats from a radical environmental group called the Sacred Earth Militia. “All heretic’s must die”, it reads, complete with misplaced apostrophe. Could it be the work of her problematic student, the über-green Ben Shotter (a superbly shambolic Johnny Flynn), who refuses to board the university minibus on the grounds that it’s bad for the planet? Cassell, now transformed into a full-scale climate sceptic, is suspended from her post following a tumultuous appearance on Newsnight in which she declares to a video-projected Paxman that “there is no evidence that CO₂ is the cause of twentieth-century warming . . . the real global warming disaster is that a small cohort of hippies who went into climate science because they could get paid for spending all day on the beach smoking joints have suddenly become the most powerful people in the world.”

Satire doesn’t have to be realistic, of course, but it should at least try to be plausible, and the problem with The Heretic is that its sheer galloping implausibility distracts from the questions that it really wants to ask about the politicization of science. Cassell’s professional situation is simply not credible, and neither is that of her boss (and former lover) Kevin Maloney, who by the second half of the play is not only beginning to come round to her way of thinking, but is sitting in her kitchen helping Ben the bicycling student hack the emails of Kieron McKay, a leading climate scientist at the University of Hampshire who has refused a Freedom of Information request to release his historical data. Sound familiar? It’s Climategate, shifted from UEA, of course, but with the same basic features in place, including the disguising of an inconvenient cooling phase through the binning of awkward data. None of this is news to Dr Cassell – “I’m a sceptic because I have no choice, the science isn’t good enough” – but for Professor Maloney the stolen emails are a revelation, even though it turns out that he is similarly guilty, having been caught out making misleading claims about the melting rate of Himalayan glaciers. “This is one scientist bodging,” he says. “We’ve all done it. I know the planet’s warming from the ice cores I’ve drilled myself. I go to Greenland every year – you can stand on the glaciers and watch them melting.” Meanwhile, the Sacred Earth Militia have Cassell’s house surrounded, just as her anoxeric daughter goes into cardiac arrest, and the plot begins to terminally unravel.

The curious thing about both these productions is how historically specific they are. “Isn’t this all a bit 2009?” as one of the characters in Greenland asks, to which the answer is a categorical “yes”: Climategate and the Copenhagen Summit dominated the headlines during November and December that year, and for those two hectic months it was as if the politics of climate change had recalibrated the world, and that nothing would be the same again. These two plays were presumably commissioned in the midst of all that high-level drama; one year on, however, climate change has all but disappeared from the news schedules and (rather like Ed Miliband himself) it takes a bit of effort to recall how important it seemed at the time. It’s an interesting exercise to try to imagine what a climate change play set today might look like, though Greenland gets close in a brief flash-forward in which Ray the climate modeller meets up with Phoebe in the aftermath of the 2010 election. Ray wants to give up science – it’s too depressing and no-one listens anyway – but Phoebe remains determined to stay in policy-making, even as a blizzard of paper descends over the entire auditorium, the play whiting out in a storm of information, as the audience is blinded by data.

Richard Hamblyn

 

Planet in a Pebble

This review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 7 January 2011

Jan Zalasiewicz, The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History, 234pp., Oxford University Press, £16.99

Early in our planet’s history, around four and a half billion years ago, a Mars-sized neighbour named Theia crashed into us at forty thousand kilometres per hour. As the two planets atomised from the violent impact, most of Theia melted into the Earth, its iron core sinking into ours to form the medium-sized body we call home. As some of the outer materials of both planets hurtled away from the impact site, they, too, began to condense into a new, smaller body that would go on to orbit the re-formed Earth: our Moon. “It is a fine story”, as Jan Zalasiewicz observes, though it is only one of many fine stories that can be told through the apparently ordinary pebble from which this extraordinary book proceeds.

It is a brilliantly simple idea: pick a pebble at random from, say, a beach in Wales, and see what its constituent elements can tell us about the history of the Earth. A slate-grey pebble, criss-crossed with lines of whitish quartz, it is composed mostly of oxygen, silicon and aluminium, along with traces of nearly a hundred rarer elements, including strontium, vanadium and rubidium. What exactly are these elements, where did they come from, and how did they come to be compressed into the “enormous atomic vault” of our palm-sized pebble? To answer these questions, Zalasiewicz takes us on a dazzling voyage of telluric discovery, from exploding stars whose storms of neutrons seeded our planet with mineral grains, to dense layers of solid methane that lurk beneath the oceans to this day, and through which the proto-pebble would have migrated slowly during its billion-year journey underground.

Today, almost everything that happened to the pebble and its particles can be retrieved in the laboratory, and Zalasiewicz’s explanations of how geologists have learned to unravel such complex geochemical matrices are just as gripping as his detailed accounts of the pebble’s eventful history. Take zircon, for example, a high-density accessory mineral that often turns up in trace quantities in rocks such as granites and quartzes. Zircon crystals may not be much to look at, but they have a set of unique chemical properties that allow geologists to reconstruct the long-vanished landscapes in which they formed. Even better, zircons act as eerily accurate atomic clocks that can tell us when as well as where they first appeared, granting earth scientists access to a virtual “time machine”, as Zalasiewicz describes it, “one that can traverse an entire planet from its beginnings” nearly four and half billion years ago.

Because such dizzying depths of time are all but impossible to grasp (I, for one, have no real sense of what “four and a half billion years ago” actually means), they offer a challenge to anyone setting out to write a work of popular geology. Zalasiewicz’s solution is to divide these great swathes of time into distinct topographical regions through which our pebble blithely wanders like the hero of some picaresque novel. Thus, 300 million years ago, during the Carboniferous period, the surface of the Earth began to teem with life, with heavily armoured fish colonising the waters above the long-buried pebble. Later on, at the end of the Cretaceous, around 65 million years ago, the giant meteorite that is likely to have killed off the dinosaurs would have caused the entire Earth “to ring like a bell . . . the pebble-form, while still firmly part of its underground rock stratum would have trembled too as the impact waves passed through.”

Treating the pebble as a Zelig-like protagonist helps to build a surprising narrative tension, and towards the end of the book, as the pebble-stratum is about to break the surface and start its new existence as a weather-beaten slab of rock, the story begins to get into its stride as a geological page-turner. Waves crash against the shoreline, picking up the exposed sheet of slate and hurling it against the cliff face. “The now-nearly-pebble breaks off, as a sharp-edged shard of the slab. It has all the features of its own narrative, that we have followed until now,” writes Zalasiewicz. Once the sea takes over proceedings, the time-frame shortens dramatically, and after only a few years of incoming tides, with the tens of thousands of collisions they provoke, the pebble and its neighbours have lost their jagged edges, and now take their places in a shingle bank where the forces of erosion are already grinding them back to their constituent parts. Every tide reduces a pebble to a detectable degree, and on particularly exposed stretches of shoreline, an individual pebble can lose nearly half its mass over the course of a single season, while cosmic rays relentlessly bombard its surface, breaking down silicon and oxygen atoms into fragments of radioactive debris. “Night and day”, notes Zalasiewicz, “the pebble is disintegrating.” Not many books can make you care about a dull-looking fragment of rock, but one of the many achievements of this enjoyable excursion into the deep geological history of our planet is a momentary sadness at the thought that Zalasiewicz’s ancient protagonist – his “capsule of stories” – will soon have been worn away to nothing.

Richard Hamblyn

Life of the Volcano

This review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 1 October 2010

Volcano: Turner to Warhol, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until October 31

James Hamilton, Volcano: The Volcano in Western Art, 48pp., Compton Verney, £7.95.

Alwyn Scarth, Vesuvius: A Biography, 342pp. Princeton University Press, $29.95

Three months before this exhibition opened, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted, throwing millions of tonnes of volcanic particulates into the earth’s upper atmosphere. “A genius stroke of publicity”, as the show’s curator, James Hamilton, wryly described it, but the week-long eruption proved to be more than merely well-timed, for it served to change the focus of the entire exhibition, transforming it from a richly detailed survey of volcanism in art to a topical reflection on the ungovernability of nature.

The result is a gripping display that unfolds over three spacious suites of rooms at Compton Verney, the eighteenth-century country seat near Stratford-upon-Avon that has developed a reputation for hosting innovative arts events in the six years since it opened to the public as an exhibition space. And Volcano is certainly innovative, drawing its chronology not from historical or artistic periods, but from volcanological stages that plot the life cycle of an active volcano from dormancy to awakening, through violent eruption and aftermath, then back to quiescence once more. It is a clever curatorial conceit that allows an eclectic mix of eras and styles to hang together in every room, connected by the seismic narrative. Thus the first room is devoted to the classic, conic beauty of dormant stratovolcanoes such as Hekla in Iceland and Mount Fuji in Japan, as depicted in the celebrated woodcuts of the nineteenth-century Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige, while the second room is filled with premonitory puffs of smoke from Vesuvius in Italy and Cotopaxi in Ecuador, the latter represented by a trio of delicate oil sketches made in the early 1850s by the roving American landscape painter Frederick Edwin Church.

But sparks soon begin to fly, and by the time one has made it across the connecting gangway to the second suite of rooms, accompanied by the booming soundtrack of James P. Graham’s fourteen-minute film Iddu (“him” in Sicilian dialect), an immersive multi-screen rendition of a trip around the ever-erupting island of Stromboli, the show has gone fully pyrotechnic, with its pair of big guns, Turner and Warhol, firing sky-high lava fountains at each other from opposite ends of the room. Yet, as Hamilton points out in his accompanying catalogue, neither Turner nor Warhol actually saw an eruption: these images, of Souffrière and Vesuvius, are as much about the potency of paint as they are about the pent-up energies of the earth, Warhol’s runny acrylic producing “lava of its own in the unexpected paint spatters that fall down the canvas”.

For them, as for most of the other artists in this exhibition, a volcanic eruption was an imaginary apocalypse of light, heat and terror, a single blasting moment of sublimity that shakes the world to its core. “The blaz’d hill in lightnings shone”, as Turner described it in an overheated poem that he insisted on exhibiting alongside the painting in 1815; “down its sides of liquid flame / The devastating cataract came”. In reality, most eruptions make for disappointing viewing, consisting of dense, choking clouds of ash and smoke, with the occasional streak of orange lava to alleviate the gloom. As Norman Lewis noted, in his classic account of the last major eruption of Vesuvius in 1944, “I had been prepared for rivers of fire, but there was no fire and no burning anywhere – only the slow deliberate suffocation of the town under millions of tons of clinker . . . the whole process was strangely quiet”.

But even those artists who did witness eruptions at first hand – notably Pierre-Jacques Volaire and Pietro Fabris, both of whom were resident in Naples during Vesuvius’s late-eighteenth-century heyday – were happy to exaggerate the visual effects, Volaire’s impressive “Vesuvius Erupting at Night” (c.1778) peopled with a crowd of spectators who would have been incinerated on the spot had the eruption been anything like as fierce as he depicted it. Joseph Wright of Derby spent a month in Naples during one of Vesuvius’s quieter phases, but he compensated by filling more than thirty canvases with the incandescent fury of an all-out Plinian explosion. “’Tis the most wonderful sight in nature”, he claimed. Of the few who attempted a documentary treatment of the subject, only the Danish painter Johan Christian Dahl came close to verisimilitude in his “Eruption of Vesuvius” (1820), a dull, sooty tableau of smoke and flame that was commissioned by a “Mr Monticelli, professor of mineralogy in Naples”, who presumably instructed Dahl to paint exactly what he saw.

Cartoonists, of course, are under no such obligation, and one of the exhibition’s most enjoyable sections explores the regularity with which volcanic eruptions have been used for satirical ends, from James Gillray’s “The Eruption of the Mountain, or, The Horrors of the ‘Bocca del Inferno’” (1794) which elided geological and political upheaval, as the French Revolutionary Terror entered its bloodiest phase just as Vesuvius spectacularly blew its top, to Christian Adams’s “Election Smothers Britain” (2010), one of a number of newspaper cartoons that likened the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud to the imminent general election: “Eyjafjallajokameron”, as Peter Brookes neatly summed it up in his Times cartoon for April 22. Gillray also used the image of an erupting Vesuvius as an unsubtle dig at the elderly, impotent Sir William Hamilton, who remains better known for having been cuckolded by Horatio Nelson than for founding the science of volcanology during his thirty-six-year diplomatic posting to Naples. Hamilton climbed Vesuvius on at least sixty-eight occasions, and his detailed drawings and observations, which he sent to the Royal Society in London, led him to conclude that “volcanoes should be considered in a creative rather than a destructive light”, even though his hobby came close to killing him on a number of occasions.

In some ways Hamilton is the hero of this exhibition – his great folio plate-book Campi Phlegraei (1776) lies open in a glass case beneath a contemplative portrait of him by David Allen – just as he is the hero of Alwyn Scarth’s highly readable Vesuvius: A biography, two excellent chapters of which are devoted to Hamilton’s exploits on the turbulent mountain, where much of his time was spent ferrying nervous British aristocrats as close to the smoking crater as they dared. But the book’s best chapter is its last, in which Scarth assesses the likely impact of the next major eruption of Vesuvius. It makes for disquieting reading, given that the population of the region (some 600,000 people) has doubled since the last outburst of 1944, with thousands of modern-day lazzaroni living in illegally built high-rise housing that continues to creep up the volcano.

“Russian roulette”, as Scarth observes, “is not a game that volcanoes usually lose”, though, incredibly, almost no public attention is paid to civil defence procedures; in fact, many of Vesuvius’s inhabitants have apparently convinced themselves that their volcano is extinct, that it’s merely a mascot, a talisman, an “enormous lucky charm” that watches over the fertile landscape, rather than the ticking time-bomb of geophysical reality. So, in the words that appear scrawled beneath Willie Rodger’s crayon drawing in one of the last rooms of the exhibition, “When Will Vesuvius Blow Again?”. It’s a question that can be answered with surprising precision, according to Scarth, who estimates that the next big eruption will occur some time between 2023 and 2064, and that, given the scale of its expected violence, “over half a million people could be in grave danger of succumbing to a horrible death”.

Such anxiety about the violence of nature has staged a comeback in recent years, with hurricanes and tsunamis (along with terrorism and climate change) replacing the nuclear threat, so perhaps it’s no coincidence that some of the more recent images in the exhibition make visual reference to the clouds of war, with Keith Grant’s “Eruption Column at 20,000 feet, Heimæy, Iceland” (1976), depicting a vast mushroom cloud of churning ash that towers over the lava fields like the aftermath of the Trinity bomb test, while Ásgrímur Jónsson’s “Flight from a Volcanic Eruption” (1945) depicts a column of refugees trudging over the scorched earth as a firestorm rages behind them. These bleak Modernist images come as something of a revelation, most of them having never been seen outside Reykjavik before. Gudmundur Einarsson’s starkly Vorticist “Eruption of Grimsvotn” (1934), for example, is one of the show’s highlights, a tremendous billowing updraught of pure jagged energy, “conveying with sharp diagonals and searing colour the sudden, destructive and overwhelming scream of the mountain as its explodes into smoke and fragments”, as Hamilton vividly describes it in the catalogue.

Finnur Jónsson’s “Lakagígar Craters” (1940), by contrast, depicts a lifeless lunar landscape of fissures and vents that was once the scene of the biggest lava flow in human history, an eight-month effusive eruption that smothered nearly 600 square kilometres of the island, killing around a quarter of the population. It is a place that still haunts the Icelandic memory, though as this exhibition shows, there are plenty of others that do the same: Hekla, Surtsey, Grimsvotn, Heimaey, Eyjafjallajökull, each an illustration of the truism that civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice. It’s a lesson that becomes apparent in the final room of the exhibition, where images give way to the thing itself, in the form of a neat grey pile of gritty ash from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption: a million fragments in a glass vitrine, a glimpse of what the world is made of.

Richard Hamblyn