Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller review – a marvel of narrative non fiction

This genre-defying journey into the science of classification weaves memoir and history in shimmering prose

Lulu Miller’s book arrives in the UK four years late, already an international bestseller. Fittingly for a story about the limits of& categorisation, it defies literary taxonomy. The frame is a biography of& David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University and tireless ichthyologist whose team catalogued one-fifth of all the fish we& can identify today. But that frame contains a memoir, a love story, philosophy, psychology, true crime, some powerful reportage and a decent stab at the meaning of life, all in about 200 pages. File under sui generis.

Miller, an American science journalist, first latched on to Jordan’s story while in the throes of heartbreak, shame and annihilating depression, seeing him as an exemplar of perseverance against the odds. In 1883, a few years into his fish-collecting career, a bolt of lightning set fire to Jordan’s laboratory, incinerating every specimen and document. Undeterred, he began all over again, only for the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to reduce his life’s work to a ruin of broken glass, spilt ethanol, rotting flesh and suddenly useless name tags. Jordan pressed on. Whenever he could identify a fish from memory, he sewed a tag into its flesh, insisting that no matter how great the visiting catastrophe, “it is the will of man that shapes the facts”. He epitomised what HG Wells at the time identified as America’s invincible, “ultra-human” faith in its own resilience. Raised by an& atheist biochemist who told her life was chaos without purpose, Miller was entranced by this “wonderful bastard” who believed he could catch the world in a net and force it to make sense.