Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells review – treasures from the depths

Helen Scales’s investigation offers a rewarding glimpse of another world, filled with strange and reclusive creatures

Seashells tantalise the eye in several ways. In shingle, in the chaos of haphazard forms, a tiny shell stands out as a work of geometrical design. Often one picks it up and finds half is missing. The markings, patterns of orange, brown and yellow, are apparently regular, but so small that they begin to blur. A shell like this is a lost thing, left behind, prompting visions of an underwater landscape of sediment and swaying weed, where soft spines and frilly shapes emerge from the lips of the shells. In a flinch they are gone.

One opening looks like a human ear. Another is a black slit. The darkness inside tells of self-sequestration – of creatures backing into the narrowest of spaces. Yet shells also hint that they may contain worlds. They may be portals. We hold a shell to an ear and hear the sound of wind and breaking waves. Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher of the meanings of shapes and spaces, wrote of how the shell was, for the ancients, a symbol of the body enclosing the soul. Shells made him think, too, of human withdrawal into isolation.

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