Kraken — Wendy Williams

Kraken
Wendy Williams
223 pages including index
published in 2011

This was a bittersweet pleasure to read. As an homage to Sandra I wanted to read some of her favourite books and writers this year and Weny Williams’ Kraken was one of the last books she was really enthusiastic about. I had gotten it for her as part of an Amazon order in June of last year, when it still looked she was going to beat her illness and to cheer her up in hospital. Once she had read, she was keen on me to read it too to see what I thought, but I never made the time to do so, having so much else to read. It’s something I regret now, as I would’ve liked to discuss this with her, but at the same time it is nice as well to be able to read a book that reminds me so much of her. Sandra loved squids, octopuses and every kind of cephalopods; they were her favourite animals and any book on them that was any good had her favour.

And Kraken is quite good. At some twohundred pages without the index it’s not an indepth treatment of Cephalopoda, but it is a good look at what makes these creatures so fascinating. The cephalopods are invertebrates, part of the molluscs, with octopussies and squid traditionally seen as evil devil beasts that as soon drown a sailor as look at them. Yet the more we learn about them, the more fascinating they’ve become. It’s quite clear that many of them are incredibly smart, well adapted to their surroundings and with some amazing abilities — most possess chromatophores, coloured pigment cells under conscious muscular control which they can use to camouflage themselves or even “speak” with. They’re curious, they’re playful and in short, they remind us a little bit of ourselves.

One other thing that has turned public opinion in favour of cephalopods has been their use in medical research, especially in neurological research. With some squid species the axon, one of the elementary building blocks of our brains and central nervous system is so big it can be seen with the naked eye, which of course helps a lot in studying it. In turn, studying this axon gave us a lot of insights into our own brains and got Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, together with John Eccles a Nobel prize in medicine. Cephalopods therefore are not just interesting in their own right, but also as a tool to understand ourselves better.

What Kraken provides is a good introduction to both these subjects, to what makes squids and octopodi and other cephalopods so interesting as well as what makes them so useful in research. Wendy Williams does well in covering both, without giving short shrift to either aspect, packing a lot of information in those twohundred pages. It reads quite quickly too and can be picked up by anybody with some interest in these creatures, no previous knowledge of them required.