Angier, if you haven't come across her Canon yet, is like this.
The New York Times science journalist Natalie Angier has written an introduction to science. All of it. At once.
No one would consider writing a complete account of the humanities - least of all one that excluded all cultural or historical context. What would be the point? The sciences cope with such distillation a little better because they assume the existence of a shared universe, held together by laws impervious to history.
Angier's journey makes sense. Moving in scalar fashion through this world in the manner of Charles and Ray Eames's 1977 animation Powers of Ten, we ascend from quantum physics to molecular chemistry, to the self-organising systems of biology and ecology, to the interplay of life and non-life that lends the geology of this planet (at least) its dynamism, to arrive, finally, at the big cosmological questions - and back in the lap of physics.
The progression is natural. Angier, quietly professional, doesn't make a fuss about it. To begin with, it seems as though she might avoid that beautiful, familiar pattern and assemble a different sort of canon. Her early chapters (they knock the socks off the later ones) are about what science is like, the mental postures you adopt in order to think scientifically. Not all these postures are pretty.
Angier acutely anatomises the "attack dog stance" that greets new findings. She explains the process of "scientific hazing" that is at once vitally necessary, a gift for Hollywood screenwriters (who are obsessed with outsiders), and a possible contributor to science's not insignificant suicide rate.
Then, just as her book is taking wing, she proceeds to a discussion of the different scientific disciplines - and something goes seriously wrong.
There is a chapter on physics; two on biology; one on geology; and so on. There is little cross-fertilisation. At the same time - and in spite of attempts to root the account in real conversations in real workplaces - all these physicists and biologists and geologists appear to be doing roughly the same job in the same way.
The problem is not that the sciences, reduced to their basics, lose their specificity. On the contrary, each science grew out of a fairly mercenary kernel of odd, often distinctly unscientific practices. That such cantankerous institutions ever managed talk to one another at all is eloquent evidence that a single, objective reality exists.
The problem is rather that Angier can never decide whether she is writing about the practice of science, or about the world as science pictures it. Time and again she dithers, and runs out of space.
To those in the know, Angier's massive, necessary omissions will appear either heinous or gutsy, according to taste. One thing Angier cannot afford to do, however, is waste paper. The chapter on evolutionary biology opens with an 11-page apologia, informative in its way but apparently addressed to the few creationists left. Why?
Evolutionary theory is not the lone voice of truth crying in the wilderness: it is a set of multiple interlocking truths, universally interrogated, acknowledged and applied in industry. The argument is won. Angier's rehash (she defends the fossil record - huzzah!) leaves no room for evolution itself: a rich subject with a fascinating history is reduced to a banner proclaiming that Darwin was right. No Galton. No Oxford School. No cladistics. No Simon Conway Morris.
To be fair, this is not a book for people who necessarily credit the reality of fossils. In fact it is specifically addressed to people who haven't heard of them. Angier's intended audience is not merely the scientifically ignorant, but - this is very different - the scientifically incurious. This is a laudable aim. But to attempt to engage them through a book - a medium that is by its very nature closed to the closed-minded - shows a lack of foresight.
Reading The Canon is like listening to a talented teacher chivvying a hostile fifth form. Angier's charm, her wordplay, her erudition, her delicious prose, her barmy wit, her not-so-off-the-cuff analogies, are all tailored to drag her class as far as the lunch bell without any of them stabbing pencils into their eyes. But there is no class. There is no captive audience.
