posted on 04 May 2016

The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators

Over the weekend, hunting for something to reread and generally trying to tidy up teetering piles of books around the house, I stumbled on a book I first read in 1999, when I bought it entirely on a whim. At the time I was hugely impressed with it and it seemed overdue for rereading. I sat down and barely stirred for the time it took me to read it again from cover to cover. It was Gordon Grice’s The Red Hourglass.

Now, this is nature writing of a very different kind to Wildwood, which I wrote about here some time back. Grice has much more in common with the new wave of US nature essayist/poets, such as Annie Dillard, Diane Ackerman and Barry Lopez, but to my mind what marks him out as a complete original are two things: his awful, compelling focus on predation, and his ability to mix in swift vignettes of New Journalism-style reportage. (For example, the chapter on canids begins by describing a trailer park which is being menaced by a huge feral dog pack. The friend Grice is visiting there keeps their numbers down with a hunting bow. The opening – barely a page – is as immediate and visual as a film sequence.)

Grice says of himself, “I try to write beautifully about the darkest aspects of nature – predation, death and other delights…” and in The Red Hourglass he covers black widows, tarantula hawk moths, mantids, wild canids, hogs, rattlesnakes and recluse spiders, meditating on what sometimes seems a hellish vision of predators and their infinitely ingenious ways of delivering death. His work, he says, “is not for the squeamish or sentimental.” How true. But it is glorious popular science/nature writing.

Some will say that what Grice writes is a kind of naturalist-sensationalism, and perhaps they would have a point. But what makes him worth reading is the quality of his prose. It is stunning. For example, musing on the powerful ‘intelligence’ which seems to drive the functioning of black widow spiders – especially their intricate but apparently messy web-building – he says:

“The widow constructs by instinct. A ganglion smaller than a pinhead – it’s too primitive to be called a brain – contains the blueprints, precognitive memories the widow folds out of itself into actuality. I have never dissected with enough precision or delicacy to get a good specimen of the black widow’s tiny ganglion, but I did glimpse one once. A widow was struggling to wrap a mantid when the insect’s forelegs, like scalpels mounted on lightning, sliced away the spider’s carapace and left exposed among the ooze of torn venom sacs a clear droplet of bloody primitive brain.”

Can you resist that? I know I can’t. His prose has the weird, hyper-real extravagance of life viewed through a microscope, bloody tragedy after bloody tragedy unfolding beneath his gleefully appalled gaze. One reviewer described Grice as combining the mind of novelist with the flinty curiosity of a Victorian naturalist, and it is certainly true that there is something of the obsessive amateur about him. But as a guide to the steely, ruthless logic of evolution and what the mechanics of predation say to us about our own human (and sometimes inhuman) condition, he is unbeatable.

And there’s humour too, crafty flashes of gothic Americana. A friend gives him a dog’s skull. “It was nailed to a tree on my granddaddy’s farm. I suspect Satanists. Anyway, I thought you might want it. Nobody else would.” Of course Grice wanted it. It fitted perfectly in his tarantulas’ terrarium.

I think anyone with a strong stomach and an appreciation for terrific, vibrant prose would enjoy The Red Hourglass, even if, like me, you read parts of it with your hands metaphorically over your eyes.

Teenagers will love it too – and it might be just the job if you are trying to interest a reluctant reader. This isn’t just nature red in tooth and claw. It is nature viewed through a magnifying glass as it passes in and out of the eye sockets of a flensed skull. Hugely instructive and appallingly enjoyable.

My copy was published by Penguin but seems to be out of print. There are plenty of secondhand copies around, however, from Delacorte Publications in hardback and Delta in paperback.

Alun Severn

May 2016