The difficulties faced by identical twins

Despite being a twin myself, I wasn’t necessarily disposed to love William Viney’s Twinkind, a book for which the phrase ‘lavishly illustrated’ might have been invented. Much writing on twins intended for the general reader (including recent fiction such as Brit Bennett’s bestselling The Vanishing Half) has been produced by non-twins, or writers who have twins in their family. The emphasis is often on how twins appear to the singleton majority, lazily depicting them either as freaks of nature or prodigies of psychic connection. Indeed, Twinkind’s visual component seems to be asking the reader to look at twins from the outside, while its title appears to encourage us to see twins as a species apart. It was refreshing, then, to find that Viney is an identical twin, and approaches twins from the experience of actually being one.

Split into three sections, ‘Myth and Legend’, ‘Science and Progress’ and ‘Spectacle and Prophecy’, the monograph is interspersed with a comprehensive and well curated selection of twin-related art and artefacts, from Yoruban wooden masks to Hollywood movie posters. These are never intrusive, and instead form a subtle and sometimes comic commentary on Viney’s frequent insights into the cultural history of the subject. Admitting that ‘writing about twins means reconciling my own limited experience of being a twin with the vast diversity of twin experience in written and visual records’, he nevertheless has much to say on living in the world as a genetic copy of another human being: ‘Being a twin is a baffling and powerful combination of effort and ease… twins are always learning about what your curiosity looks like.’ What Viney sets out to do is explore exactly how this abiding curiosity arose.

Starting at the beginning of recorded history, he observes: ‘In many creation stories twins are deities… makers of life and the cosmos… They are mythology’s great catalysts.