Natalie Angier is a biologist with a poet’s gifts. Her previous book, The Beauty of the Beastly, redeemed the despised denizens of the animal underworld, the cockroach, the dung beetle, with wonderfully vivid presentations of their functions and evolutions.
In Woman: An Intimate Geography, she charts the marvels and miseries of half of our own species: the vastly more interesting half, in biological but also in poetical terms. The penis, for instance, wouldn’t give her much to play with, metaphorically: “a hose is a hose is a hose.” But the vagina:
“You can make it practically anything you want, need, or dread: an opening, an absence of form … a pause between the declarative sentence of the outside world and the mutterings of the viscera … a balloon, a turtleneck sweater, a model for the universe itself, which … is expanding in all directions even as we sit here and weep.”
As this extract suggests, her writing is itself an admirably flexible and expressive instrument, and she has great fun playing it. She describes her book as a “Fantasia”, and in places the prose resembles a Disneyesque frolic.
Woman may not be a radically original work either of biology or of sexual politics: though it draws on a number of fascinating “personal histories”, the bulk of it is a synthesis of what has been said or researched by others, from Hippocrates to the likes of Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University, all decorously credited. But it is hugely instructive and deliciously readable.
The 19 chapters compose a loose narrative, from the egg in the female foetus, hymned as “the true sun, the light of life”, through to the thorny question of the biological usefulness of post-menopausal women. Considering the latter, Angier seems reluctantly compelled towards a sorry conclusion: the female chimpanzee breeds until she dies, around her 40th year, and nature surely intended the same for woman, before civilisation pointlessly protracted her lifespan.
But the scenario is transformed at the last minute by the greatest of all the unlikely heroines in these pages, a few dozen old ladies in Tanzania, grandmothers of the Hadza tribe, whose foraging for fruits and tubers is the chief source of nutrition for Hadza babies. In Angier’s delighted summation, this remote scraping and gathering confers residual purpose on the post-reproductive years of women everywhere.
Not all the “geography” surveyed is equally fruitful in the things that feed Angier’s writing. She likes to anthropomorphise: “Eggs must plan the party. Sperm only need to show up – wearing top hat and tails, of course.”
But when she comes to hormones, their lack of physical identity, and our imperfect knowledge of their operations subdue her metaphorical method. It’s hard to impart much character to serotonin. Oestrogen is grease and won’t solidify into a lively imaginative figure.
The clitoris, on the other hand, elicits a rapturous essay, entitled “The Well-Tempered Clavier” (“Can you expect women to play the fugue if their organ has no pipes?”). This has its boggling statistics (there are 8 000 nerve fibres hereabouts – but how were they counted?) and some choice historical titbits. It builds towards a glowing conceit, on the three architectural sections of the clitoris:
“Glans, shaft, crura: a tripartite Greek column whose order changes depending on mood, from the stately Doric of a working day through the volute, unwinding Ionic and cresting in the extravagant, midsummer foliage of Corinthian, when leaves and flowers are as fat as fists and life is drunk on its gorgeous, fleeting infinity – calming to a commonsensical and irrefutable conclusion: `The clitoris is designed to encourage its bearer to take control of her sexuality.'”
The political Angier, “the female chauvinist sow” as she calls that part of herself, comes to the fore in the later chapters of the book. There is nothing that will strike men as unreasonable or hostile; indeed, the most prominent ad hominem attack is directed at Camille Paglia.
Yet she spends many pages in (for her) slightly ill-tempered engagement with the hoary formula that men are polygamous, women monogamous, as if it enjoyed more popular credit than is surely the case. When she hesitates, in resolution, to claim for her “gals” the right to the very patterns of infidelity we deplore in President Bill Clinton, the reader may imagine her husband looming over her shoulder.
And her own experiences naturally provide a part of her experience. Strictly where relevant, she shows us her types of orgasm, her fibroids (benign purple tumours that grow in the uterus), a diseased thyroid that left her looking “like a tree-frog”, her struggle to conceive, and the birth three years ago (when she was 38) of her daughter: at which the science and poetry of Woman pass happily into particular life.
Indeed, she chooses to end this long, great- spirited and important book with a trope of outrageous silliness, a vision of her daughter as feminist mariner that leaves male cheerleaders baffled on the beach:
“… maybe she will trade up her mother’s tatty bark canoe for a ship of gold and joy, with a mutinous crew of mad-haired Valkyries, cloven mermaids and chafing nymphs. My daughter will sing herself hoarse as she rows firmly through squalls and calm waters, now in tune with her mates, now roaring against them. She hasn’t yet found the fabled free shore, but no matter. She is always at home in the sea.”
Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier is published by Viking