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A Chemical Romance
Mar 2007
Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sachs - Picador, 2001
* * * *
This book is not exactly what it seems. It purports to be an autobiographical memoir of a twelve year old Jewish boy with a huge family growing up in a large London house just after the Second World War. In fact it is a depiction of an intellectual love affair. And the subject is not the one you would expect from the neurological case studies in Sachs’ books The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings. His first love, it turns out, was with the rather more sterile world of chemistry.
For such a young child to become obsessed with such a dry subject may seem odd, but then Sachs’ family was rather unusual. For a start it was unimaginably huge - his mother was one of eighteen children and he had three elder siblings and almost one hundred cousins. His parents were both doctors and scions of the North London Jewish community, which may explain why they paid less attention than would now be considered desirable to their youngest child. Their choice of boarding school when the war broke out is a case in point - the headmaster was a sadistic pervert who beat his charges regularly and left Oliver withdrawn and disturbed (his brother Michael subsequently became psychotic, which must have been an influence on Oliver’s choice of career). Granted, neither of the boys said anything, but one would have thought that their parents would have noticed that something was wrong. And no matter how much she wanted him to be become a surgeon, I’m not sure that it was wise for Oliver’s mother to have had him dissecting malformed foetuses at the tender age of eleven and the cadaver of a girl at fourteen.
Oliver’s response was to retreat into the comforting certainties of the chemical world, aided and abetted by his uncles who were all engineers and chemists. Chief amongst these was Uncle Tungsten (whose real name, prosaically, was Dave), the proprietor of a firm called Tungstalite which made incandescent light bulbs. Starting from a fascination with the properties of metals, the young Sachs progressed to a systemic examination of the entire periodic table using a combination of intellectual study and experimentation, which is faithfully recounted here (this book would make an excellent primer for GCSE chemistry).
The practical side, it has to be said, would horrify a member of the Health and Safety Executive and could be taken as another example of parental neglect. I wasn’t allowed to handle metallic sodium until I was an undergraduate and even then only in tiny amounts, but the pre-adolescent Sachs was merrily dropping three pound lumps of the stuff into Highgate Ponds with only his schoolboy friends in attendance. Even worse, his parents built him a fume cupboard in the family house and winked at his purchase of dangerous chemicals such as potassium cyanide. As he says himself, it was a matter of care - or luck - that he never poisoned or blew up the entire street (nowadays, of course, the security services would have arrested both him and his parents as potential suicide bombers).
Although Sachs’ descriptions of places and ideas are vivid and emotional, his attempts to leaven the science with depictions of friends and family members are less successful and may disappoint readers expecting the usual human interest of an autobiography. He gives a few good thumbnails but not enough detail for them to come across as real people. Reticence about family members is perhaps natural and desirable, but they seemed such curious characters that it would have been nice to have known more about them.
Eventually, as is so often the case with romances, Sachs’ passion for chemistry came to an end as a combination of adolescence and uninspired teaching robbed it of its delight and mystery. Still, the warmth of the writing indicates that he still has fond memories of his old flame and the wise uncle who first introduced them, and this book stands as a fitting tribute to both.
Uncle Tungsten - Oliver Sachs - Picador, 2001
* * * *
This book is not exactly what it seems. It purports to be an autobiographical memoir of a twelve year old Jewish boy with a huge family growing up in a large London house just after the Second World War. In fact it is a depiction of an intellectual love affair. And the subject is not the one you would expect from the neurological case studies in Sachs’ books The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings. His first love, it turns out, was with the rather more sterile world of chemistry.
For such a young child to become obsessed with such a dry subject may seem odd, but then Sachs’ family was rather unusual. For a start it was unimaginably huge - his mother was one of eighteen children and he had three elder siblings and almost one hundred cousins. His parents were both doctors and scions of the North London Jewish community, which may explain why they paid less attention than would now be considered desirable to their youngest child. Their choice of boarding school when the war broke out is a case in point - the headmaster was a sadistic pervert who beat his charges regularly and left Oliver withdrawn and disturbed (his brother Michael subsequently became psychotic, which must have been an influence on Oliver’s choice of career). Granted, neither of the boys said anything, but one would have thought that their parents would have noticed that something was wrong. And no matter how much she wanted him to be become a surgeon, I’m not sure that it was wise for Oliver’s mother to have had him dissecting malformed foetuses at the tender age of eleven and the cadaver of a girl at fourteen.
Oliver’s response was to retreat into the comforting certainties of the chemical world, aided and abetted by his uncles who were all engineers and chemists. Chief amongst these was Uncle Tungsten (whose real name, prosaically, was Dave), the proprietor of a firm called Tungstalite which made incandescent light bulbs. Starting from a fascination with the properties of metals, the young Sachs progressed to a systemic examination of the entire periodic table using a combination of intellectual study and experimentation, which is faithfully recounted here (this book would make an excellent primer for GCSE chemistry).
The practical side, it has to be said, would horrify a member of the Health and Safety Executive and could be taken as another example of parental neglect. I wasn’t allowed to handle metallic sodium until I was an undergraduate and even then only in tiny amounts, but the pre-adolescent Sachs was merrily dropping three pound lumps of the stuff into Highgate Ponds with only his schoolboy friends in attendance. Even worse, his parents built him a fume cupboard in the family house and winked at his purchase of dangerous chemicals such as potassium cyanide. As he says himself, it was a matter of care - or luck - that he never poisoned or blew up the entire street (nowadays, of course, the security services would have arrested both him and his parents as potential suicide bombers).
Although Sachs’ descriptions of places and ideas are vivid and emotional, his attempts to leaven the science with depictions of friends and family members are less successful and may disappoint readers expecting the usual human interest of an autobiography. He gives a few good thumbnails but not enough detail for them to come across as real people. Reticence about family members is perhaps natural and desirable, but they seemed such curious characters that it would have been nice to have known more about them.
Eventually, as is so often the case with romances, Sachs’ passion for chemistry came to an end as a combination of adolescence and uninspired teaching robbed it of its delight and mystery. Still, the warmth of the writing indicates that he still has fond memories of his old flame and the wise uncle who first introduced them, and this book stands as a fitting tribute to both.