US REVIEWS OF "THE POISON PRINCIPLE"

New York Times
April 20, 2003

'Poison': Toxicology and Autobiography
By MARINA WARNER

Like goblin fruits, poisons flourish their seductiveness under appetizing colors: they lurk inside the plumpest, reddest mushrooms and the loveliest flowers, inside the trumpets of datura, in poppy heads and foxglove bells. They come dressed in beckoning words and phrases, too: mandragora, belladonna, henbane, fly agaric, ''green dream.''

The wicked queen in the fairy tale offers Snow White a corrupted apple; her progenitor, the stepmother in Shakespeare's ''Cymbeline,'' decocts ''violets, cowslips and primroses'' for her deadly pharmacopeia. Medea sends Jason's new wife an envenomed dress that burns her up on contact with her skin. Thetis dips her son Achilles in the waters of the Styx so that he might become impervious to all things that harm mortal creatures (but she holds him by his heel, and that, as we know, stays vulnerable). Gail Bell quotes the great protoscientist Paracelsus' perception that ''all substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.'' From the apothecary and the herbalist to the witch and the murderer is but a little step.

Bell, an Australian pharmacist, knows intimately the dangers of the medicine cabinet. She also inherited a secret history: her father warned her against opening the box full of small glass-stoppered bottles that had come to him from his father, William Macbeth, a traveling healer, a layer on of hands, a maker of a patent tonic and author of a treatise on preventing ''premature decay.'' ''Never, never do that. You could die,'' Bell's father said, snatching the vial she was about to sniff. In 1927, 3-year-old Patrick Macbeth died of drinking strychnine; he was the second of William Macbeth's sons to die within a year, so Bell was told, and on good family authority, that their father had done away with them.

Her book, ''Poison,'' measures out, in small loving spoonfuls, grains of information about this private family story. There is a riveting aside when she remembers how ''long ago, when I was stuck in the back room of an old pharmacy compounding medicine in a trance of boredom, I put a glass to the common wall between the dispensary and the surgery next door to better hear the muffled voices that hummed off and on all day.'' This secret listening in, to which she confesses with blushes, continues as she eavesdrops on the rivalries and sorrows among her own immediate kin. Fractures appear: it is surprising how very recent history, in a country keen to own a past, should so quickly fall into ruins. But Gail Bell's father was orphaned at 10, and sent, as a kind of indentured child laborer, to a small farm.

The shame in which the aspirations of British colonial gentility can wrap an emerging national identity created a great silence around William Macbeth; ''family lore,'' Bell writes, is ''the dead zone of secrets, severity and things withheld.'' But, as she discovers, her grandfather was clearly a charmer, a dandy who wore a morning suit and drove expensive cars: his is also a pioneer story, for frontiers have always offered opportunities to snake-oil merchants; and druggists, long before the coming of Viagra, have promised sexual vigor (unfortunately Bell could find no trace of Macbeth's Strengthening Tonic, ''tested in the Highlands of Scotland on the descendants of the great warriors of Culloden'').

Bell's narrative method weaves in and out, sometimes frustratingly, and at times the reader longs for a steadier, more ample texture. It would have been interesting, for instance, to hear more about a quack's role in and around suburban Sydney and the summer resorts of the Blue Mountains. But Bell is less interested in social history than in the practice of storytelling itself. Her book gradually turns into an oblique, suggestive meditation on family memory, on story and history, fantasy and fact, and opens up into an inquiry into the intricate cheating games romancing and revenge play with the truth.

In ''The Plague,'' Albert Camus writes that every prisoner and every exile experiences the profound suffering of living with a memory that has no purpose. Bell's relatives obeyed the emotional dynamic that requires painful memories to have a rationale. Since Bell has constructed her story as a tease, a quasi-suspense tale of decryption, it would be a spoiling act to disclose the outcome. But it conforms to the general thrust of her book, that poisoners fascinate us far in excess of their incidence, that the bitter pill, the medicine bottle labeled ''Drink me'' issue above all an invitation to the fabulous imagination.

Bell tells an emblematic tale of a circus elephant that died of arsenic poisoning: lurid suspicions of dark strangers from out of town were soon circulating. But eventually an analysis of the poor beast's stomach contents revealed . . . weedkiller. Bell's poisoners are the boogeymen we love to fear: the strangers who hide razor blades in apples, the Gypsies who steal babies. She does not explore the complex difficulty that presents itself so urgently today, that such false texts and made-up stories have the power to drive events in the real world, that life imitates art.

Between the quiet drip feed of her personal memoir, Bell mixes in stronger flavors: ingredients from criminology and psychology, botany and chemistry. She gives an inspired account of the original story of Hamlet and the poisoning of Hamlet's father from its medieval source, and adds several twists. Cleopatra's death, a conspiracy theory about Napoleon's murder by arsenic and Flaubert's sadism toward Emma Bovary find their place in her poison chest. From the Chamber of Horrors, the obsessions of thrillers and newspaper records, she analyzes uses, dosages and symptoms -- of cyanide, hemlock, arsenic and her grandfather's favorite, strychnine.

The new fascinating corpus of substance biographies will soon require special display sections in bookshops: Ciaran Carson in ''Fishing for Amber,'' and Simon Garfield with ''Mauve,'' his history of the color, for example, have extended the range of the approach into myth and poetry on the one hand and and the history of manufactures and inventions on the other. Bell has given this cunning and original history of poison an intimate inflection, in keeping with the current autobiographical tendency. The stories overheard by her ear to the glass against the partition wall confirm that even if the poisoned apple is not much more than gossip, its potent dangers should not be underestimated.


Marina Warner's recent books include ''No Go the Bogeyman'' and ''The Leto Bundle,'' a novel.

From Library Journal

We can find poisons in history with Socrates and hemlock, in literature with Madame Bovary and arsenic, and in a modern news report with an execution by lethal injection. But do we know where poisons come from and how they work? At the same time, there are poisons that are nontoxic and nonchemical but equally deadly; these are in the lies or half-truths that are passed down within a family. Bell, an Australian pharmacist, was prompted by an odious poisoning story within her own family over 75 years ago to begin a detective story that spans a decade. The result of her expert and determined sleuthing is a factual account of this past event, one that rewrites family history with truth. Chapters on her detective work alternate with chapters that trace a multitude of poisons through history, myth, paintings, and literature. Bell tells us where these substances come from, how they are administered, how they poison, etc. The writing is lucid and fascinating. Readers will enjoy Bell's personal saga, her scientific and historical facts, and the resolution. Highly recommended for all collections.

Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences Inc., RTP, Raleigh, NC
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.