Gail Bell: The Poison Principle

By ELSPETH SANDYS

After the anthrax attacks in the United States, The Poison Principle does not make for comfortable reading. Even without that particular threat, and its close cousin, full-scale biological warfare, holding our imaginations to ransom, I doubt the book could be read with any degree of comfort.

What it does, skilfully and effectively, is make the reader aware of the proximity of poison, and poisoners, at all times and in all places.

Every one of us, Gail Bell asserts, is a potential poisoner.

All that's required are the means and the motives.

Where does that leave us in our pursuit of them - the senders of letters laced with anthrax, or weapons containing enough deadly bacteria to poison a whole population?

This book troubled me. I kept thinking of the late British morals campaigner Mary Whitehouse who, as part of her campaign against pornography, watched hundreds of hours of pornographic movies, and read thousands of words of pornographic writing. How could she avoid being contaminated by the thing she professed to hate?

Bell has spent more than a decade researching this book. A chemist who has handled many poisons, she is well qualified to write about the scientific and the romantic histories of poison. (A sizeable portion of the book is devoted to the romance of poison - lovers' suicides, mysteries surrounding the deaths of famous people, crimes of passion involving spouses or lovers.)

Bell has a personal reason for her obsessive interest in the subject and it is this that gives the book its edge. Her grandfather, William Macbeth, a herbalist and self-styled doctor of naturopathy, was believed by his family (including Bell's father) to have deliberately poisoned two of his sons. He was never charged, and both accusation and summary judgment stayed strictly within the family.

It was the mixing of this legacy with the author's growing interest in poisons that led to the book: a potent mix of family secrets, specialised knowledge, and a detective's intuition that something about the family story didn't ring true.

What saves the book from excessive morbidity (the deaths from poison of among others, Socrates, Cleopatra , Vincent van Gogh, and Emma Bovary are described in gruesome detail) is the mystery surrounding the deaths of the author's two young uncles.

Without giving away the denouement I will say that it's worth persevering with yet another description of the effects of poison on the human body to get to the highly satisfying resolution.

Not a book for the weak-stomached or the overly tender-hearted, but if the uses and mis-uses of poison hold a fascination for you, Bell's foray into the darker realms of science is well-written, thoroughly researched, and almost as readable as a thriller.

Picador

$27.95

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.