Book cover of Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures, by Melvin Sheldrake
Entangled Life by Melvin Sheldrake
Author: Melvin Sheldrake. Review by Judith Mason
In this book Merlin Sheldrake shows a fine writing style, making a complex area not only understandable, but life-changingly fascinating. Entangled Life – to whose, or maybe to which, life does he refer? You may not find many answers, but will almost certainly arrive at some intriguing questions. The book reaches to the very heart of our global need for discussions around sustainability.
Sheldrake’s subject is fungi – not a subject I would rush to find out about, had I not heard him read from Entangled Life on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pm13) just before Christmas. Sheldrake is like an artist painting in the most exquisite colours, though he is not re-inventing something – he is gently unearthing, and allowing us to catch glimpses of what has always been there, had we had the imagination to look. The author’s modesty is shown in his opening dedication: ‘With gratitude to the fungi from which I have learned.’ My gratitude to him is immense.
With over thirty pages of notes, forty pages of biography, and a substantial index, reading this might seem like a daunting task. This is not the case. I have just two quibbles: the index doesn’t always have the word to take me back to the exact page I’m trying to find; and Sheldrake’s use of the phrase ‘the Wood Wide Web’. Though the second is useful, it is already a cliché that doesn’t fit well with the freshness of the rest of his writing.
Merlin Sheldrake’s initial doctoral research takes him to Panama, and to an island where many other scientists are immersed in their own different disciplines. While they are above ground searching for animals, studying plants, or up in the canopy measuring air quality, he is burrowing into the root systems of trees to follow their mycorrhizal companions.
Magic, politics (in very small doses), truffle hunting, industrial enterprises, research into the effect of mind altering substances, poetry, philosophy, palaeontology and parenting all play their part in this rich mix. Don’t look for dogma here. Living adventurously, speaking truth however unwelcome, sustainability, renewal and optimism are all themes in this book. And, I suspect, overcoming fear – an example for each of us?
One of his many quotes is from the Canadian poet, Robert Bringhurst: ‘What shall I do with the night and the day, with this life and this death? Every step, every breath rolls like an egg towards the edge of this question.’
