BOOKS & ARTS
A lesson in natural
selection
Claire Kohda Hazelton
Unsheltered
by Barbara Kingsolver
Faber, £20, pp. 463
In a living room in Vineland, New Jersey,
in the 1870s, a botanist and entomologist
named Mary Treat studied the activities of
carnivorous plants and reported her findings
to her colleague, Charles Darwin (Treat is
extensively referenced in Darwin’s Insectiv-
orous Plants). Treat also corresponded with
others — Charles Riley, Asa Gray — about
these plants, the tower-building tarantulas
she kept in her house, about ant colonies
and swamp ferns, and wrote articles and
books on her observations. ‘Treat’s work
deserves to be better known,’ writes Bar-
bara Kingsolver, in her acknowledgments
for Unsheltered — and, perhaps, here, we
find the motivation for this deeply search-
ing, curious and passionate novel, in which
Treat appears as the neighbour of one of its
fictional protagonists.
Two narratives, set 150 years apart, seem,
at first, disparate except for their setting. In
the late 1800s, Thatcher Greenwood, a sci-
ence teacher at a high school in Vineland,
argues with his creationist boss about teach-
ing Darwinism, seeking solace, refuge and
intellectual kinship in his neighbour, Treat.
And, in 2016, Willa struggles to hold her
family together, after her daughter returns
unexpectedly from living in Cuba, her son
— a new father — loses his wife to suicide,
and Willa receives news that hers and her
husband’s house in Vineland is on unstable
foundations.
Kingsolver ties these two lives together.
Treat — a character who seems to exist out-
side of time, more connected to the natural
world than most of its human inhabitants —
is one of the threads. Treat’s studies in nature
become microcosms of society, mirrors in
which the narratives of each characters’ lives
are reflected. Her observations of spiders —
‘certainly they notice [relocation], but even-
tually they go on about their business’; they
rebuild their houses when they are destroyed
— carry weight when Willa’s son, Zeke, and
his newborn have to move back home; when
ceilings collapse in the house; when the then-
threat of a Trump presidency becomes more
realistic.
In the tower-like webs of spiders, King-
solver has us recognise the precariousness of
any shelter, metaphorical or not: our homes,
bodies, jobs, theories, beliefs, relationships.
Some shelters are better destroyed and
rebuilt, too: in the light of new findings by
Darwin in the 19th century, creationism;
today, the feeling that resources are not
finite, that children will forever have more
than their parents. ‘Without shelter, we stand
in daylight,’ Treat says. And, like an echo
through time, Willa’s daughter, Tig, says:
‘You’re going to end up in rubble. But it’s
okay because without all that crap overhead,
you’re standing in the daylight.’ The two nar-
ratives run eerily parallel to each other. At
one point, Treat seems to speak directly to
the reader: ‘We are all of the same world.’
This is a novel about truth — prioritis-
ing progress over comfort and safety — and,
also, about survival. It is far-reaching, ambi-
tious and successful in its ambitions; it is a
lesson in natural selection. History is shaped,
Kingsolver seems to say, by what people,
theories, buildings and legacies survive, and,
here, she plays her part in the endurance of
Treat’s legacy.The luck of the devil
Nigel Jones
Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth
by Adam Zamoyski
William Collins, £30, pp. 727The Invisible Emperor:
Napoleon on Elba
by Mark Braude
Profile, £20, pp. 360Who says that the ‘great man’ theory of his-
tory is dead? Following hard on the heels of
Andrew Roberts’s magnificent biography of
Churchill comes this equally well-written life
of another superman who bestrode his era
and all Europe like a colossus.
Although Adam Zamoyski is at pains
to insist that his subject was an ordinary
mortal like any other, the simple facts of
Bonaparte’s career somewhat belie any
attempt to cut the little fellow down to
size. How could this second surviving son
of an impoverished minor nobleman from
an obscure island come, within a few years,
to dominate the entire continent, dictate
terms to emperors, kings and popes, and
set his own siblings on the thrones of the
countries he had conquered?
Zamoyski’s answer is that Napoleon had
the quality that he demanded of his own gen-
erals: luck. His spectacular success came from
a combination of his own ability and ambi-
tion interacting with the special circumstanc-
es surrounding his rise to power. The chaos
of post-revolutionary France allowed other
humbly born men matching his military tal-
ents to become the marshals who marched
beside him to innumerable victories.
He could not have achieved his triumphs
without the aid of those who took simi-
lar advantage of smiling fortune: his broth-
er Lucien, a politician who engineered the
coup that made him First Consul; Murat,
the flamboyant cavalryman who secured
the guns with which Napoleon dispersed arioting Paris mob with the famous ‘whiff of
grapeshot’; and Berthier, his brilliant chief-
of-staff, who translated Napoleon’s often
incoherent orders into battle-winning action.
The refreshing distinction of Zamoyski as
a biographer is that he humanises Bonapar-
te — in contrast to others who either hero-
worship ‘Napoleon the Great’ (the title of
Roberts’s recent adoring life of the emper-
or) or damn the Corsican usurper as a war-mongering mountebank who devastated
Europe and slaughtered millions for the sake
of his ego. In portraying the person behind
the many myths that have accrued around
his name, Zamoyski acts as a skilful picture-
restorer, scraping away layers of lies, exagger-
ations and misconceptions to reveal the man
in his true, unvarnished colours.
Thus, Zamoyski presents Napoleon the
romantic, heavily influenced by contempo-
rary sentimental fiction: Napoleon the great
lover with his many mistresses — but slav-
ishly attached to the faithless Josephine;
Napoleon the practical and constructive
statesman, whose code still forms the bed-
rock of French law; Napoleon the revolu-
tionary, who replaced autocracy with liberal
ideals on the points of his army’s bayonets;
Napoleon the great commander, whose
favourite tactic of dividing his enemies and
defeating them piecemeal won time and
again; Napoleon the Italian mafia don, only
really trusting his own family; and NapoleonNapoleon was a great lover with
many mistresses, but was slavishly
attached to the faithless Josephine