C hristopher Dewdney’s intriguing new book, Acquainted with the Night, is what its subtitle says it is: a series of excursions through the twelve hours of every twenty-four that we spend where the sun doesn’t shine. It’s a fascinating miscellany of things you might bump into when the lights are out; or, conversely, of things that might bump into you. Who has never been mesmerized by the night? Who’s never been afraid of it? No hands go up. Night is a universal experience—everyone everywhere has been through it—and thus a universal symbol; although, like all such symbols, it has its positive and its negative variants.
A reviewer should have nothing up her sleeves, so I must reveal here that I know the author. His father, Selwyn Dewdney, was a canoe-tripping pal of my father’s. Thus I was aware of Christopher Dewdney when I was more or less grown up and he was still a boy. The kinds of things that caught his fancy when he was much younger—Why do rotten logs glow in the dark? Why are sunsets red? What is the green flash? What happens if you sample the well-known poisonous mushroom the Fly Agaric? Why do moths desire lightbulbs? What is your liver doing when you are asleep but it is awake?—such items still catch his fancy. Perhaps that’s why this book is so full of boyish enthusiasm.
Christopher Dewdney came to my mother’s ninetieth birthday party. Others brought chocolates and flowers; Dewdney brought a rock. It was from an inland ridge that marked an ancient shore of Lake Superior; he’d picked it up almost forty years before, on a canoe trip with my mother. Who hasn’t carted such rocks home as mementos and then forgotten where they came from? But Dewdney remembered, and presented the rock, along with a few words on what kind of rock it was, geology being one of his excitements. Set a mind like that loose on a subject like “night” and you get this book.
People like Chistopher Dewdney collect stuff, and then they arrange the stuff in cabinets. When they are showing you the cabinets, they tell you how they came across the snail or bug or saint’s toenail or whatever, and why it’s important, and what it suggests in the greater scheme of things. And so it is with Acquainted with the Night: it interweaves personal experience with speculations and unexpected factoids, arranged according to the twelve hours of night. But this is not a Victorian museum, with everything dry and labeled and under glass, because Dewdney is also a poet. Acquainted with the Night brings together his two main strengths—his gift for language, and his insatiable curiosity about almost everything. The prose moves from the strictly informative to the lyrical to the charming to the amusing to the odd to the strangely moving without batting an eye. Dracula? Ordeals at the sleep clinic? Astronomy? Goddesses of Night? Dreaming? The Manson family and their nocturnal creepings about? Bio-luminescence? Film noir? Fireworks festivals? Eat-in-the-dark restaurants? Werewolves? The circadian rhythm? UFO sightings? Painters of nocturnes? Goatsuckers? It’s all here, stuck with quotations from a lot of well-known poets and writers, and—this being Dewdney—from many others nobody else has heard of.
Dewdney begins with a common childhood experience: sneaking out at night and wandering around in the darkness. Almost everyone I know used to do that. (Almost every Canadian, that is: in most of Canada, there are no venomous snakes. A child from a tropical climate would have to think twice.) We can still recall the magic of those innocently illicit but thrilling escapades, and these are words that recur in Dewdney’s book: magic, illicit, thrilling. The words for night items enthrall him:
Night is profoundly in our souls and minds, our hearts and bodies. It is woven into our language. There are a thousand and one Arabian nights and each night has a thousand eyes. There is music in the night and a nightingale sings in Barclay Square. Night crawlers glisten on residential lawns, while downtown, night owls rub shoulders with fly-by-nights. . . . There are night watchmen, night-walkers, and night stalkers. Ladies of the night come and go.
(Dewdney has dutifully collected some ladies of the night; prostitutes are here, and famous courtesans; but they are not a main attraction for him. Given the choice between a ravishing lady of the night and a ravishing beetle of the night, one suspects he would take the beetle.)
Each of the chapters in this book has both an hour and a title. Thus 8:00 P.M. is “The Children’s Hour.” Within each chapter there are also sub-chapters, and it would have conveyed a greater sense of the book’s range and richness had these been listed on the contents page. “The Children’s Hour,” for instance, has three subsections in addition to its introductory pages: “Victorian Europe and the Birth of Children’s Literature,” “The Bridge to Dreams: Four Children’s Night Classics,” and “Night Games.” The second of these subsections contains a beautiful analysis of the Margaret Wise Brown classic Goodnight Moon: its eerie but comforting effects, and how it obtains them. Hint to readers: this is a browser’s book. You can go back and forth in it. But don’t skip any of the chapters without checking the subsection headings first, or you may miss a gem.
I could go on. And Dewdney does go on, occasionally a little too long, but there’s something for everyone in his Cabinet of Dr. Callidewdney, and some readers will want to know more about, for instance, the acetylcholine-flooded pons or the noctilucent clouds or the eyeless American cavefishes or the life story of Galileo than others will. He could hardly have left anything out, or roars would have arisen. Some roars will arise anyway. For instance, he says that “contrary to the Lord of the Rings trilogy,” dwarfs cannot go out by day or they will turn to stone. Every Ringhead in Middle Earth will be on his case: surely nothing can be contrary to Lord of the Rings! Imagine the hate mail. But before licking that stamp, ask yourself: Who else would have told you that the Panzer divisions invading Poland were on bennies? Or that a vampire bat consumes 60 percent of its own weight at one feed? Or that our sensitivity to dust peaks at 11:00 P.M.? It all balances out.
“Part of the process of writing about night was trying to gain a perspective that made it new, not commonplace,” says Dewdney. He found it helpful to imagine that he was a being from another planet, one that had no night. Quite possibly this isn’t the first time he’s pictured himself as an extraterrestrial. In any case, his method worked: as you read these pages, your life will change, because the way you see half of it will change. The night we’re all familiar with will emerge as a fresh thing, deeper, fuller, older, younger, more evocative, more intimate, larger, more spectacular, and yes, more magical, and much more thrilling.