In 2007, anti-war protesters in the US reported unnatural, ungainly dragonflies hovering over demonstrations with seeming fascination. The government would neither confirm nor deny that it had developed insectile spycams, as the watchers suspected. This was not so outlandish the CIA long ago experimented with an Insectothopter. But whether or not the little observers were spooks as well as bugs, the shiver they produced is testimony to the unease the bug still provokes: it arose not just because people were watched, but in a large part because they were watched by an insect.
But insects inspire more than just unease. Bugs have had many meanings in European folklore. Certainly they are creepy, because crawly; but where foxes tend to be mostly cunning, cats sly and dogs loyal, bugs are more varied. They might be worms as portents of death, admirable and industrious ants and their feckless grasshopper foils, or butterflies like "stray but familiar thoughts" (Miriam Rothschild). Even the maggot semiotically moonlights, being an invoker not only of disgust but of an unshakeable drive, including to the stunning heights of poetry (hence the opening of a 1685 collection: "The Maggot Bites, I must begin").
In Bugs Britannica, a companion to the impressive cultural guides Flora Britannica and Birds Britannica, the word "bug" is misleading : all British invertebrate life is examined here, including octopus, jelly- and shellfish, and even some halfway-house specimens with spinal cords which the authors endearingly confess make them "nearly-vertebrates". The book is organised by taxonomy, starting with single-cell organisms, working through worms and crustaceans, arachnids and insects, all the way to those troublesomely interstitial chordata. This makes for a pleasing cognitive dissonance, cultural ruminations organised by a Linnaean schema one associates with scientific textbooks.
The book doesn't restrict itself to folklore about each of its entries. Indeed, one of its most engaging aspects is that it's impossible to state precisely what the approach is. "This is not a book of entomology," its authors say, "or an identification guide." It "is concerned with the cultural story of the British and their wildlife". Fairy-tales jostle with literary reference and snips of poems, with representations in stained-glass and modern art, playground chants, slanderous entomophobic rumours. There's a good deal of straightforward information: what flatworms and moths and aphids look like, their habits and histories, and many pages of photographs and illustrations. Where a creature has inspired no particularly important fancies, it may nonetheless merit a short entry on the mythic resonance of its name and/or an enthusiastic description. This, added to the various crowd-sourced anecdotes that pepper the text and the gusto of the prose centipedes, for example, are distinguished by their "extravagant legginess" makes for irresistible dipping and rambling. It is easy to lose hours in this book.
And then there are the names: where its cultural presence permits, each animal or animalcule is followed by a list of folk nomenclature. Lists are so effortlessly captivating that one almost resents their casual magic, by which any collection of three or more nouns becomes a poem. But no cynicism or suspicion can withstand the paragraph of monikers of the woodlouse: the bibble-bug, the carpenter, the chuggy-pig, the pissibed . . .
That in many places one misses a favoured reference or discussion is, for a necessarily occasional book like this, not so much a criticism as part of the kind of inevitable and pleasurable bickering that is the very point. Does the section on the snail (for example) really have no mention of Patricia Highsmith's pet specimens in her handbag, or her magnificent malacological horror story "The Quest for Blank Claveringi"? But this is a quibble about predilection, not quality: it's a conversation.
Not so cheerful are two other kinds of criticism, which undermine the book's achievements and pleasures. One is the number of en passant errors and omissions. Some, admittedly, may bother mainly geeks (there is no "bad alien" in Terminator 2 to compare to the amoeba the T-1000 is an Earth-made machine). Others, however, are more generally frustrating. In discussing the crab in Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, the authors mention the work of "his illustrator": that this was Kipling himself is surely very much to the point. Wetness-dwelling amoeba do not, even with poetic licence for the choice of verb, "breathe air". "Yet it moves" eppur si muove were not Galileo's "dying words": he lived nine years after he (reputedly) uttered them sotto voce during his 1633 recantation. The fabulous colossal octopus picture reproduced is not by Georges de Buffon, but by arguably the most famous cephalopod artist of all time (whose name is even visible on the illustration), Pierre Denys de Monfort, from a later addendum volume to De Buffon's Natural History. Such little glitches easily creep in to any draft, but that they have not fallen to a red pen undermines the authority that such an idiosyncratic book relies on.
Another problem is more nebulous. To justify their existence, large, lush, illustrated hardbacks like this have to be objects of desire. (This necessity will only get more pronounced as the ebook revolution continues.) In the case of Bugs Britannica, there is something not quite adequately swish about the production. The design is pedestrian. The paper-stock is not wonderful: the pile of heavy pages feel slightly buckled. The pictures seem not quite as sharp, nor detailed, nor vivid as one would want.
These intuitions are highlighted by comparing the book to similar visual dipping volumes such as Claire Nouvian's The Deep, or Cassell Illustrated's Inside the Body. Those are objects of great physical beauty: Bugs Britannica, while by no means an ugly or even unattractive book, is not a gorgeous one. And as it still comes in at 35 quid, it's not even that much of an economy. The work is likeable and very engaging, but with these flaws that are frustrating in seeming avoidable it may not be indispensable.
China Miéville's Kraken is published by Macmillan.
