Ageless: The New Science Of Getting Older Without Getting Old
Andrew Steele Bloomsbury £20
In 2015, medical researchers at the Mayo Clinic in America discovered that a cocktail of two drugs administered to elderly subjects made them biologically younger. Subsequent work with ‘D+Q’ – dasatinib and quercetin – has shown that the cocktail improves heart function, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, lung disease and fatty liver disease.
It also strengthens the grip of recipients, allowing them to hang from a wire for longer. Yes, D+Q is great news for mice, but what about humans?
Well, Andrew Steele has written Ageless to show us humans that ‘ageing is not some rigid, immutable biological inevitability’. It can be slowed or halted by a variety of medical techniques, some still hypothetical, others nearly ready for deployment.
Galapagos tortoises exhibit ‘negligible senescence’, meaning that when Harriet (above) died in 2006 at the age of 175, she was as fit as she had been in Victorian times
‘The ideas for treating ageing processes aren’t pie-in-the-sky theoretical biology – they are being tested in labs and hospitals around the world today,’ he writes.
Steele is not a crank or a snake-oil salesman. He’s not a ‘wellness’ YouTuber. He doesn’t work for Goop. He’s a biologist and fellow of the Francis Crick Institute in London, Europe’s biggest biomedical research lab.
We can take what he says seriously.
He believes the ‘cure’ for ageing won’t be a single magic-bullet solution but ‘a succession of technologies that gradually improve life expectancy to the point that people will notice that they’ve stopped ageing’.
He acknowledges that even talking about ‘curing’ ageing sounds odd, and he’s not saying it will happen next week or next year, or perhaps even within the lifetime of anyone reading.
But he does make a good case that it will eventually happen, and his compelling book gives a high-level snapshot of current, cutting-edge research in biogerontology, the relatively young science of ageing.
It looks at how and why ageing happens and how it might be halted.
It’s a fascinating read with almost every page bursting with extraordinary facts. For example, when the tree in California thought to be Earth’s oldest multicellular life form germinated, the builders hadn’t yet broken ground on Stonehenge.
Galapagos tortoises exhibit ‘negligible senescence’, meaning that when Harriet, a tortoise collected by Charles Darwin, died in 2006 at the age of 175, she was as fit as she had been in Victorian times.
Historical records about castrated prisoners suggest that they were less prone to male-pattern baldness so, you know, swings and roundabouts.
There are several passages the squeamish might want to hurry past. When discussing teratomas, a particularly horrific type of tumour, Steele writes ‘I highly recommend seeking one out’, the better to understand their monstrousness.
I highly recommend you don’t. Also, some might think death preferable to one potential lifespan-extending technique: a ‘microbiome transplant’ involving the ingestion or insertion of somebody else’s ‘faecal matter’.
There is only one section that is slightly less than gripping, towards the end when Steele passes on his best tips to ensure you live long enough to benefit from the medical breakthroughs coming down the line.
Given what’s gone before, you might expect some exciting new discoveries but it’s nothing that you didn’t already know. Knock the fags on the head, cut down on the booze, eat plenty of fruit and veg, look after your teeth and so on.
Oh, and get vaccinated too.
Ironically, Ageless is itself ageing quickly. The rate at which the science is advancing is so dizzying that, several times, Steele points out that what he has just written will already be out of date when his book is published.
So read it now before it – or you – gets any older.
Seed To Dust: A Gardener’s Story
Marc Hamer Harvill Secker £14.99
Rating: 
Marc Hamer has spent two decades tending the 12-acre garden of 80-year-old Miss Cashmere. He doesn’t do it for money, although he is paid a modest amount to watch over this lush, beautiful patch of Welsh countryside.
Mostly he works for love, love of the plants, birds and animals that share this shaded haven. Love, too, for Miss Cashmere, even though Hamer rarely talks to her and has never been invited into the big house.
He loves her because he senses the garden means as much to her as it does to him. It is, in an unspoken way, their garden.
Seed To Dust is an intensely lyrical account of a single year spent cutting, burning, planning and planting. We start in the deep mid-winter, when everything is still frozen, and move through the seasons with Hamer as he tends the hydrangeas, plants the dahlias and prunes the old apple trees.
He watches the wildlife too – the jackdaws pecking at the frozen ground, the peppered moth perfectly disguised against the tree bark, and the carp in the pond to which he tosses crumbs from his packed lunch.
Each small section of the book – some only a few paragraphs long – gives rise to Hamer’s ponderings on the impermanence of the natural world, and the futility of trying to direct its outcomes.
He also sketches in his earlier life, as a runaway Northern boy, a tramp (his word) and manual labourer. Quickly the book progresses from an observational gardening journal to a manual for living, with a dollop of Zen Buddhism and Dylan Thomas thrown in for good measure.
Seed To Dust sits firmly inside the tradition known as ‘the new Nature writing’, which is actually rather old, having been a publishing staple for at least a decade now. The new nature writing requires a lush poetic style and close observation, in which the reader is asked to see the world, if not in a grain of sand, then at least in a curling autumn leaf.
The problem with this approach, at least as practised by Hamer, is that it can dissolve into platitude. Unblushingly he informs us that ‘Death is a once-in- a-lifetime event for an individual’ and ‘Perfection is never achieved’.
Mostly, though, he likes to talk about himself, telling us: ‘I am simply a potential ready to play: a child, a wind, an empty jug ready to be filled.’ Another time he claims: ‘Whether I like it or not, I am like the hare and the owl, the carp and the buzzard.’
So which is he, a jug or a buzzard? Sometimes, just when you think he’s about to explain, he writes a haiku instead.
Nature writers often over-polish their prose to jolt their readers into feeling the wonder of everyday things – tadpoles, or the sound of the rain on a spring morning. But the point should be to nudge us into new understandings, of how tadpoles grow or where the rain has come from, and then perhaps warn us that it is in danger of destruction by our own stupidity.
Marc Hamer doesn’t do this. Instead he gives the impression of being a writer who has done that dangerous thing, of falling in love with the sound of his own voice.
Kathryn Hughes
In The Land Of The Cyclops
Karl Ove Knausgård Harvill Secker £20
Rating:
The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård is best known in this country as the author of the monumental series of six autobiographical ‘novels’, My Struggle. Depending on your point of view, they amount to more than 3,500 pages of self-indulgent oversharing of the intimate details of one man’s fictionalised self, relayed in fastidious detail, or an epic exploration of that same man’s response to the vicissitudes of life, written with a raw and rare honesty.
Is it even a novel? Is he the king of confessional writing? Or the emperor without any clothes? Depends which side of his family you ask; the debate rumbles on.
This collection of 16 essays on literature, photography, painting and philosophy is a motley bag and displays both the acuity and the defects of his undoubted talent: intelligent and provocative but also uneven, prolix and narcissistic.
The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård (above) is best known in this country as the author of the monumental series of six autobiographical ‘novels’, My Struggle
At the centre of it all, of course, is Knausgård himself with his overarching vision for art as a disruptive force, rarely passing up the opportunity to put the personal centre stage, whatever the subject, refracting his reflections through the solipsistic lens of his own self-importance.
He is best when short, focused and absent from the drama. His essay on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (originally the preface to Adam Thorpe’s excellent recent translation) is perceptive and inspiring; likewise his thoughts on painter Anselm Kiefer and his review of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission.
In the pieces on photographers Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman and Stephen Gill and in his reflections on Ingmar Bergman’s notebooks, he comes closest to expressing the essence of his own creative endeavour.
Elsewhere – on Kierkegaard, fate, the Icelandic sagas – he is too wordy and too convoluted. His long paean to the modernist aesthetics of fellow countryman Knut Hamsun, though full of insight, largely overlooks that Nobel laureate’s fascist inclinations.
The title piece is merely a rant of literary self-justification. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Simon Humphreys