So off he goes aboard the Beagle (""Is this the dreadful sea I am going to spend years of my life enduring? However shall I withstand it?"")-to Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos: he collects specimens he explores the interior he frets over his clerical future he gets mail from home (""He consumed the letter in one misty gulp"") he observes provocative geology (""Never would I have thought that I could love rocks and mountains and plains and ravines more than my beetles!""). Then comes the offer to be the naturalist on a world voyage: Charles feels ""faint with astonishment and shock"" (throughout, he shakes and quivers like a Barbara Cartland ingenue) but manages to win his dear father's blessing for the trip, with help from Uncle Josiah Wedgewood.
Stone begins with Charles just out of school-waiting to begin his career as a cleric, his heart belonging, however, to beetle-collecting.
The result is the worst of both worlds: the stultifying detail of academia mixed with the awkward, saccharine mock-ups of bio-fiction at its stuffiest. If this hard-working but epically dull ""biographical novel"" hadn't come equipped with a famous byline, would it have been published at all-let alone with bookclub hoopla? Stone at his best (whatever his limitations) has found some emotional focus for the heroes of his fictional biographies but here-perhaps because there's been no major Darwin bio recently-he adopts the unselective, year-by-year approach of an academic, yet without the intellectual force or depth expected from a serious biographer.
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