Adventures of a Young Naturalist by David Attenborough

This is a collection of three books David Attenborough wrote describing his expeditions to Guyana, Indonesia in search of the Komodo Dragon and Paraguay in search of armadillos. They date back to the 1950s so the practice of collecting animals from the wild to put into zoos was quite acceptable then. He makes a point of noting this in his introduction, saying that the practice is no longer acceptable. It’s a fairly old fashioned read, but very interesting. I was surprised, because I’d never really thought about it I guess, about the amount of time wasted getting visas, gathering provisions and waiting for the weather to improve enough to go out. The connections between places were almost non-existent and David and his photographer partner on the expeditions, Charles, take the most incredible risks in the pursuit of their quarry. They sail in leaky boats to god knows where, fly around in small planes held together by string and chewing gum, and head off into the unknown with no food supplies. Extemporisation is the name of the game. I doubt whether they’d be allowed by their employers to travel in this way these days. I liked reading about the animals but these books are more about the journeys, the customs of the local people (before the days of mass tourism) and the characters that these adventurers meet. David Attenborough’s voice permeates the whole thing of course, and I have such a fondness for him that it was like spending an afternoon with an old mate.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

You wonder whether there can be yet another perspective on either of the world wars but yes, Anthony Doerr has done it. This book involves one of those backwards/forwards structures, where you move between the experiences of the two main protagonists and one more minor character, and backwards and forwards in time as well. Yet it’s not confusing. It tells the story of WWII from the point of view of a young and sensitive German boy, Werner, who is picked out of an orphanage because of his genius for radio technology and sent off to a Hitler Youth school to prepare for war. It follows him to St Malo and charts his failure to stand up against what he knows is inhumane in the face of the fanatics behind the Nazi war machine until his redemption, which you know has to be coming, in the end. It must have been something countless Germans had to deal with as the war progressed. And it’s a question I’ve long been interested in – what would I do in the face of relentless propaganda and the danger of resisting authority. Would I buckle or be brave? The other protagonist is a blind French girl Marie Laure, daughter of a museum locksmith, who flees Paris with her father carrying one of the museum’s greatest treasures, a blue diamond. The diamond and the quest of the third protagonist, a Nazi sergeant major, to obtain it provide another form of conflict and suspense in the book, though I think the internal conflict suffered by Werner is far more interesting. The language in this book is exquisite. Doerr not only tells a good story but he also expresses it in the most beautiful figurative language, so lovely that I found myself stopping to read passages over again.