The subject of Jay Owens’s new book has long been trying to kill me. Like 300 million or so people around the world, I am asthmatic; what’s more, I am allergic to dust mites. As such, I have long considered dust an enemy, to be eradicated with the help of a vacuum cleaner or a swift wipe with a jiffy cloth. But Owens is out to broaden our perspective on what we might have thought of up to now as a mere nuisance. Dust contains multitudes, from minerals to the black carbon emitted by cars and industry, to “skin flakes, pet dander, hair, textile fibres … the dust under your sofa contains the world”.
Owens had chronicled her own obsession with dust in a newsletter, Disturbances, before writing this book, and brings to the subject a microscopist’s eye and an infectious zeal. Dust, we learn, is “always sub-millimetre in scale, and very often a hundred or thousand times smaller than that”. But as a result of its near invisibility, she says, nobody thinks about “what it might be doing or where it should go: it is so tiny, so totally, absolutely mundane, that is slips beneath the limits of vision”.
