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To Have or To Hold, as the name suggests, is about relationships, but not as you might expect. As the twist in the title hints, the book is not simply an encyclopaedia of different species and how they live happily together until death does them part. It is about symbiosis, which author Sophie Pavelle writes, “isn’t pretty”. That’s because she’s talking about parasitism, “an astounding, ancient form of symbiosis where the suffering of one species enables the survival of another”. In exploring a series of different parasitic relationships, Pavelle is also holding up a mirror to our own perceptions of the workings of the web of life. The hugely complex interconnections between species that can be disturbing and repulsive, and how that can be a beautiful thing. From mint-sauce worms to early spider orchids and narrow-headed ants, To Have or To Hold is a kaleidoscope of colour and wonder that is certainly not for the faint-hearted.
The journey starts before we even open the book. The cover art, created by designer Jasmine Parker, is seriously trippy. It displays a luminous posy of different creatures, which on closer inspection is made up of those described in its pages. It is as if we are seeing a living organism through other-than-human eyes, which is, of course, the point.
Alongside the beautiful, inevitably, there is also the unsettling, and some of the case studies Pavelle introduces can get under the skin more than others. The one that really got me (and still haunts my dreams) was the Sacculina barnacle. This invades a crab’s shell and grows a root system inside the host body, later emerging as a fake egg sack, tricking the crustacean into thinking it is pregnant. Some crabs survive the invasion. My toes are curl-ing just writing this. Is it a biological revulsion or a cultural one? I’m not sure. Perhaps, Pavelle might argue, it doesn’t matter. Being both fascinated and disgusted is in our nature, she writes. “We should be grateful for this evolutionary gift – when our gut can be wrenched and our mind stays riveted.”
Pavelle doesn’t need to rely on her own personal journey as much as other books in the Nature writing genre sometimes do. The theatre of life to which she introduces us creates the drama. There are, however, other human actors on whom she relies to take us with her. These are the experts, the ‘mentors’ of her journey whose passion and obsession serve to cut through the initial sense of horror to infect the reader with some of their enthusiasm. There is Tasha Philipps, for example, who describes the sunfish as a “bin lid with wings”, and yet they are “the most stunning vessels for life”. Charlotte Davies loves lifting stones to find shore crabs infected with barnacles, and Vicky Hunt describes the “remarkable lifestyle” of the hairworm, which has “enormous potential to spark our curiosity”. Through their eyes, we too become worried about why researchers are finding fewer shore crabs than they used to, what will happen to the sunfish in warming seas, how much parasitism can teach us about the world and how it functions, and why the loss of one species is a tragedy for us all.
The tone of the book is both relaxed and energetic, much like Pavelle’s informative and cheerful social media presence. As a skilled science communicator, she is a wonderfully reassuring guide through a fantastically complicated labyrinth of connec-tions, of which humans are just one minuscule part, leaving us at last to open the door to a new perception of the world and our place in it.
To Have or To Hold: Nature’s Hidden Relationships by Sophie Pavelle. Bloomsbury, 2025. ISBN: 9781399412162
