Shooting Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1916 – the first motion picture filmed underwater, no less – J Ernest Williamson trembled: “No words can adequately describe the sickening horror one feels when from some dark mysterious lair, the great lidless eyes of the octopus stare at one… One’s very soul seems to shrink.” And the image of giant octopuses enveloping ships, pulling sailors to watery graves and generally being the writhing, eight-armed stuff of shivery nightmares has pervaded our culture. In The Soul of an Octopus, the American author and naturalist Sy Montgomery seeks to de-monsterise the intriguing creatures. And it’s testament to some fine writing that by the end, stroking an octopus’s head or getting a “love bite” from one of its 1,600 suckers seems downright desirable.
Where Montgomery really convinces the squeamish is not in show-and-tell encounters with various octopuses but in her quest to try and know this misunderstood “alien”. She discovers they’re highly intelligent, capable of tenderness, playfulness, happiness and friendship. All of which are recognisably human characteristics, of course, and Montgomery is well aware of the dangers of anthropomorphising. But she’s firmly in the camp that believes animal science should allow for thoughts, feelings and personality. As the person who designs the complex puzzles for the octopuses to solve tells her: “Octopuses have their own intelligence that we can’t match.”
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