Haldane pointed out that while a pad of cotton wool clamped to the mouth might help a little with smoke inhalation, it wouldn’t offer the slightest protection against chlorine gas. Yet not long afterwards Haldane returned from France to discover the Times reporting that the War Office had appealed for donations of home-made gas-masks from cotton wool or ‘double stockinette’. Haldane, furious, was reassured that this was merely a propaganda exercise, and that the useless masks wouldn’t be dispatched to the Front. Yet, again, not long afterwards 90,000 of them found their way to France — and proved just as much help as Haldane predicted.
Meanwhile, Haldane and his team worked like mad at designing effective respirators, tearing up stockings and shawls and even the young Aldous Huxley’s scarf to make face-masks. The one they came up with went into mass production — but not before Haldane had to point out that the reason the women in the factory were getting their fingers burnt and their rubber gloves dissolved was that they were using caustic soda rather than, as prescribed, carbonate of soda. Doh!
Having said, then, that so much in Haldane’s story is interesting, it’s necessary to report that the telling of it is not always so. This book is, in patches, immensely frustrating and opaque. Goodman hasn’t the gift of remembering what the reader needs to know, or of bringing clarity to a scene. Characters are introduced without explanation of who they are (most will know at least vaguely who Joseph Lister was, but T.H. Green surely deserves a gloss); anecdotes are alluded to or truncated; some of Haldane’s experiments and discoveries are all but impossible (at least for a non-chemist) to understand. My marginal notes are along the lines of ‘What commission?’ ‘When?’ ‘Said by whom?’ ‘Reported where?’ ‘What the f*** are phenol and indoxyl?’
Perhaps a more thorough scholarly apparatus would have helped, not least because of Goodman’s determination to novelise his narrative. A little creative re-imagining is all very well (Ann Wroe’s recent biography of Shelley awards itself, with success, remarkable licence in that direction), but it can make the reader unsure what’s fancy and what’s fact. ‘His memories brought back vivid images of the scenes beneath his feet,’ Goodman will write, for example. Has he made this up, you wonder, or was it sourced from a diary or a letter?
And yet, and yet. I register frustration only because, in Haldane, Goodman has hit on a really fascinating subject. Like a literary Haldane, the reader suffers somewhat through the experience — but comes away having learnt something.
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