The Signature of All Things

I finished it at last, 500 pages of closely argued novel, The Signature of All Things By Elizabeth Gilbert, an intricate book with unexpected twists and turns, yet a simple story of a woman who devoted her life to the study of mosses. It starts with Joseph Banks, the wealthy eighteenth century botanist and polymath, who sailed around the worlds with Captain Cook collecting specimens, intrigued by the vast diversity of life, and ends with Darwin, Wallace and the Theory of Evolutions. Yea, riveting you might say, but the story is so well constructed that you get hooked. Gilbert says that her narrative style is based on Dickens, the technique of telling a story about the past through the eyes of a contemporary narrator. So you get the story of an ambitious simple Englishman, driven by the will of becoming very wealthy, a match for the wealthy aristocrats who looked down on him,  and her daughter, whose life is circumscribed initially by her father's vast estate, an excess of education, but a lack of social contact with people of her own age. She finds fulfilment in the study of botany, and in particular, the strange growth and development of mosses. She is the ultimate practical, empirical, rational human being, yet she falls in love with an artistic soul, who wants to be an angel and live in the world of the spirit. The story is about the conflicting, or perhaps complimentary worlds, the spiritual and the rational. Contemporaneously with Darwin, based on her research of mosses, the subject of the novel arrives at a theory of competitive adaptation, the survival of the strongest and the fittest. Yet she doesn't publish her findings, because she is concerned about a hole in her thesis, a conclusion that does not explain altruism, doing good, even if it does not further the competition for survival. She finds the same difficulty in Darwin's theory of evolution, and finds a kindred spirit in Wallace,who arrived at conclusions similar to Darwin's at the same time, but turned to spiritualism to find the answer to the conundrum of altruism.

The Signature of All Things is a challenging, stimulating book that I really got caught up in. It is seldom that I am gripped like this by a work of fiction.