books

Some books you finish feeling cleverer. Entangled Life is stranger than that - you finish it feeling that the ground beneath your feet has been quietly reorganised while you were reading. Merlin Sheldrake's debut is nominally a book about fungi, but fungi turn out to be a way of asking almost every interesting question at once: what counts as an individual, where does one organism end and another begin, and how much of the living world have we simply been too human-shaped to notice?

Sheldrake is a Cambridge-trained biologist with the sensibility of a poet, and that combination is the book's real engine. He moves from the mycorrhizal networks threading through forest soil - the so-called wood wide web - to the lichens that have survived being fired into space, to the Ophiocordyceps fungi that commandeer the nervous systems of ants. He tags along with Italian truffle hunters and their dogs, volunteers for psilocybin research, and at one point brews cider from apples grown on a tree he has helped fertilise. The book is hands-on in a way popular science rarely manages, and it never feels like a tour. It feels like being taken into someone's genuine obsession.

The writing deserves its own paragraph. Sheldrake has a knack for sentences that stop you mid-page and send you hunting for a pen. He describes truffles as an evolutionary portrait-in-scent of animal fascination, and asks how fungi juggle their trade-offs while exploring a crowded rot-scape in search of food. The footnotes, which run to nearly a quarter of the book, are a kind of secondary text in their own right - sometimes deepening an argument, sometimes gently contradicting it. The effect is of a scientist thinking out loud in good faith, refusing to tidy away the mess.

It isn't a flawless book. There's a persistent warmth toward fungi that occasionally tips into advocacy: plant pathogens, agricultural blights, and the straightforwardly destructive fungi get comparatively little airtime, which leaves the portrait glowing a touch more than it perhaps should. The philosophical passages on fungal cognition and the dissolution of the self will thrill some readers and exhaust others who signed up for biology and find themselves adjacent to metaphysics. And the pedigree question hovers: Sheldrake is the son of the controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake, and a small strain of reader reaction treats the book's mystical register with suspicion because of it. Mostly, though, Sheldrake earns his speculative moments by staying tethered to the evidence.

What lingers is the recalibration. After Entangled Life, a walk in the woods is a different walk. The soil becomes a vast, humming infrastructure, every tree a collaborator in a trade network millions of years old, every patch of lichen a negotiated settlement between kingdoms. Sheldrake's argument, made quietly rather than thumpingly, is that fungi aren't a curious footnote to the story of life but closer to its grammar - and that once you see it, you can't unsee it. A book that complicates more than it explains, and is the better for it.