The Wavewatcher's Companion by Gavin Pretor-Pinney – review

By Victoria Segal

In his acknowledgements, the author admits that The Wavewatcher's Companion was a "really difficult" book to write; it's to his credit that the follow-up to his bestselling The Cloudspotter's Guide is not entirely impossible to read. Shifting his gaze from the sky to the sea after a trip to the beach with his young daughter, he wonders about the nature of waves, be they sound, light, brain or Mexican. Pretor-Pinney has the gifted teacher's knack for finding the right metaphor to hook the attention: the choppy surface of the sea is like "a roomful of toddlers under the dubious guidance of a hyperactive childminder", while a group of newly landed aliens looking for McDonalds is enlisted to help explain refraction. The book's intellectual beachcombing gathers up swine flu, the banking crisis and dub reggae alongside Swinburne, Heraclitus and Hogarth, the deliberately quaint illustrations emphasising the idea that this is a work of gentlemanly, cane-carrying old-school amateurism rather than one of slick CGI-blitzed modern pop-science.