The Universe: In our increasingly busy lives, many of us put off the cerebral stuff until later: "I'll get to classical music in my 40's, I'll get to nature and knowing about trees when I'm in my 50's." And then we see a Discovery Channel programme on volcanoes, or a National Geographic article on how the Earth evolved, and we think: "This is really important, but I'll get to it when I'm in my 60s and I have the time," writes Eamon Delaney.
A pity perhaps, for earlier generations might have done it the other way round; read the classics immediately, walk the woods tomorrow, naming all those moss-grown trunks, before descending into trivial board games in our dotty, gin-soaked 70s, or 80s, when none of it really matters anymore. And when one discovers, as W.B. Yeats wrote in one of his last letters (and surely a better epitaph than the one he gave himself): "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it", the Song of Sixpence has as much validity as the Songs of Solomon.
Bill Bryson tries to remedy this failing by finding out now. Partly, it was the ennui of looking that provoked him. Researching his chronicle of the Appalachian hill country, A Walk in the Woods, Bryson felt the tedium of seeing just trees, and more trees, and knowing little about them. Then, during travels for In a Sunburned Country, he had that existential wonder that many of us have when we look out of an aeroplane window and see the clouds (a window-seat moment often given to a character in a movie after they've come out of an affair or some life-changing event). Bryson remembers specifically looking down at the Pacific and just being struck by the thought that this is the only world he was ever going to know, "and I just felt kind of foolish that I understood so little about it". One certainty we all have as beings, he adds, in a rather secular assumption, is that "we'll never experience another world". Speak for yourself, heathen.
The result is an ambitious, sprawling but disciplined journey through the fundamentals of our world by the author of Notes from a Small Island and Neither Here Nor There. It is characteristically chatty and retains the successful formula of wonder-struck tourist from Bryson's earlier books, crackling along through its 500-odd pages and covering pretty much all aspects of the "story of life", from the origin of the universe to the birth of the human, by way of Darwinian biology, Newtonian physics, Einstein's relativity theories and the development of "superstring theory, which is not a new bikini style, but a system which enables physicists to pull together quantum laws and gravitational laws into one comparatively tidy package."
Interesting, observes Bryson, but sounding "suspiciously like the sort of thoughts that would make you edge away if conveyed to you by a stranger on a park bench".
Which is not something that can be said of Bryson himself, who instead has an almost too-cosy air of familiarity which can be slightly grating. "It's what makes you, you," he keeps repeating about our molecular make-up, veering into the sort of cloying banality that you would hear in a shampoo commercial (Is it because we're worth it?).
Bryson's main concern is to convey the wonder of nature, its size and scope, but after a while statistics underwhelm, and one wonders if it really matters how many trillion miles one planet is from another, or that the average thunderstorm has enough electricity to fuel the power system of the US. (Except perhaps as a proposal that the US President could harness such bad weather and save us from another Middle East war).
The strength of the book, however, is that in exploring such phenomena, Bryson introduces us to so many intriguing concepts and characters. He has a particular fondness for eccentric explorers and naturalists, and their lost theories and concepts, such as the "once-mighty land masses" of Gondwana and Laurasia, which now seem to have sadly gone the way of Utopia, limbo and modern Fine Gael.
There is a strong moral message here as well, which is the incredible damage done to the planet, not least by some of those same explorers who, in the late-19th century, seem to have had an incredible desire to wipe out much of the exotic life they encountered.
In the final chapter Bryson asks if humans are even capable of understanding, let alone managing, the world, and that if not, they should simply accept it in humble ignorance. "We live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute," he concludes, in his jaunty street-talk, "surrounded by stars whose distances from us we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws . . . we don't truly understand." Or, as the bold Yeats would have it, groping for his boardgames and his gin bottle: "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it." Better perhaps, to stick to the Song of Sixpence.
Eamon Delaney is an author and critic
A Short History of Nearly Everything. By Bill Bryson, Doubleday, pp 514. £20