319 pages
Published 2022
Read from May 14 to May 15
Rating: 4 out of 5
We're in the midst of a small boom of pop paleontology. Major documentaries are coming out; more nonfiction books on prehistory have been coming out in recent years than I've seen since the 1990s. While, regrettably, this nonfiction wave has yet to be matched with a corresponding surge of dinosaur novels, I've been depleting my meager checking account in my delight at the new nonfiction offerings; perhaps it's better for my bills if there aren't novels to match.
I couldn't ask for a better premise than Otherlands'. Halliday spends each chapter depicting, as experientially as our current science allows, the living, breathing ecosystem preserved at certain iconic palentological sites, counting backward from the Pleistocene all the way back to the under-appreciated weirdness of the Ediacaran. It reminds me to a large extent of Steven Mithen's After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5,000 BC, which made a huge impression on me as an archaeology student in my undergrad years. Halliday sticks closer to the known facts than Mithen, who edges into outright historical fiction at times. It's a tricky balance to sustain. I simultaneously wished for more speculative "stories" in each chapter and more rigorous and detailed descriptions of the actual fossils and formations at their heart. Overall, though, I find myself more than satisfied.
Halliday's prose hews close to the modern greats of British nature writing. In particular, at times I caught a distinct flavor of Robert Macfarlane in the best of Halliday's turns of phrase. Almost every chapter has at least one indelibly brilliant bit of poetry: "Nature forswears nostalgia." "A count of winters endured." "Countrysides made of skeletons."
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