Anatomy: This book is certainly ambitious in its scope. It promises nothing less than an explanation of how our bodies came to have the physical form they do and how this form subsequently came to be invested with different cultural meanings in different times and places, writes Aengus Collins
When considered in the abstract, there is a pleasing completeness to this project. As Sims notes on his first page: "Each of us has one body, and each of us comes from a culture that tells us what to do with it."
It makes intuitive sense to consider these two facets of the human condition, the natural and the cultural, in tandem.
But however enticing it might sound in the abstract, setting out to grapple with much of human biology and large chunks of human culture in a single volume is an undertaking so monumental as to border on foolishness. It would take a mind of phenomenal discipline to retain a sense of control and direction when faced with the almost endless material that qualifies for possible inclusion in such a book.
On the evidence here, Michael Sims is not possessed of such a mind.
Adam's Navel is neatly structured. An introductory chapter on skin sets up 12 further chapters, each of which deals with a different part of the body. But even in this initial organisational framework, the book is compromised by the impossible scope of its subject-matter. In a concession to manageability, Sims restricts himself to dealing with visible, external body parts: hair, face, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, arms, hands, breasts, navel, genitals and legs.
This is a problem. Visibility is a curious and arbitrary criterion for Sims to use to filter his material. Exclusion of the internal organs produces a deeply unrepresentative cultural picture of the body. A chapter each is devoted to the nose and arms, for instance, but both heart and blood are left untouched (not to mention stomach, lungs, spleen and others).
A further consequence of Sims's slightly blinkered focus is his blindness to the bigger picture. In focusing on body parts, he never steps back to consider the body as a whole. There is no discussion of culturally loaded attributes such as beauty, height, weight or health. Nor does he address the way humans have often looked to the body as an archetype for our societal organisation - the "body politic" is only once alluded to.
Certainly, there are interesting facts and anecdotes along the way, as Sims works his way from head to toe. I remain surprised by the knowledge that 16 per cent of our weight is accounted for by skin, and that the left/right bias of our "handedness" is exhibited by plants as well as animals (dextrose is so named for its rightward bias). The story of Louis Armstrong's bleeding lips is strangely moving, and I am glad to have learned of Wilder Penfield's maps of the body, which represent each area according to the amount of the cerebral cortex devoted to it. There is no doubt that both the human body and its place in culture are fascinating subjects. There are many little gems of knowledge to be unearthed and those in need of dinner-party conversation pieces will find much to occupy them here.
But faced with a mountain of material, Sims never finds a way to manage it effectively. There is no central focus and no underlying argument to separate the relevant from the merely interesting. As a result, the book seems to be driven forward simply by whatever collection of sources the author has managed to assemble on each of his chosen body parts. In the resulting confusion, there are many misjudgments of inclusion and exclusion.
Long lists of cultural examples and quotations are given without context or analysis. For no worthwhile reason, three pages are devoted to a face-like pattern discernible in a 1970s NASA photograph of Mars. Similarly, the fact that many protest gatherings involve the act of walking is deemed sufficient to warrant their inclusion in the chapter on our legs. By contrast, the chapter on the mouth refers to Joyce, Nabokov and Shakespeare, but omits Beckett, whose Not I must be one of the most clearly mouth-centred pieces of literature ever written.
You can tell a lot about a book from the way it finishes. Adam's Navel simply stops after its discussion of the legs. There is no concluding chapter because no conclusions have been reached. Arguments have conclusions, analyses have conclusions, but lists just end - and this book never manages to amount to much more than a slightly haphazard list of facts about, and cultural references to, 12 of our body parts.
Aengus Collins is a writer and critic
Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Body. By Michael Sims, Allen Lane, 348pp, £12.99