This book, beautifully packaged and bound, is a cherishable little artefact in the mould of all those cute popular histories aiming to emulate Dava Sobel's Longitude. But whereas such books have usually sought to magnify a small subject, Barbara Freese has had the opposite problem.
Freese - formerly an assistant attorney-general in Minnesota, who became interested in coal having been involved in the regulation of the industry - seems daunted by the scale of her subject matter early on. At times, you can almost hear her sighing with exhaustion as she tries to cut through the primordial undergrowth.
There are some good passages describing the steaming prehistoric forests from which coal was formed. I especially liked a description of a tree from the Carboniferous period, the lepidodendron, which was about 175ft tall and had leaves a yard long. But an irritating folksiness keeps creeping in. Freese notes that the millipedes wandering through these forests could reach six feet in length, reverentially adding "'as long as a cow', as David Attenborough has put it". Yes, or as long as anything else that's roughly six feet long.
It is with relief, you suspect, that she arrives at medieval times and the start of serious coal use, and here onwards the book hits its stride. It is fascinating to learn that, in the reign of Edward I, various commissions were set up to look at the problem of coal smoke; that, before canaries, mice were used to detect poisonous gas in coal mines (their snouts turned pinkish if it was present but, mines being extremely dark places, it was always difficult to ascertain the precise hue); that the Victorians were very reluctant to exchange their open coal fires for coal-burning stoves because they liked the brightness, especially as coal smoke was making their cities ever darker.
Freese's prose becomes increasingly confident as the book goes on. She describes our industrial revolution - during which we produced more coal than the rest of the world put together - as "Britain's war against nature"; and in her grace note to a chapter on George Stephenson, she observes: "Now, through the locomotive, coal could haul itself."
In the 1890s, America's coal production outstripped ours, and Freese's narrative moves across the Atlantic - hence Arthur Scargill's absence from the index. In the US, oil would become king, partly, as in Britain, because the miners' unions were regarded as too strong. Freese writes that "coal's only victory over oil" has been in the production of electricity, but this is a pretty big triumph. Freese gives a vivid description of a power plant in north Minnesota where the scale of output is such that when lumps of the stoker's traditional enemy, clinker, form in the boilers, they are "the size of a minivan" and must be blown apart by explosives, whereas in the days of Victorian steam engines, a few prods with a fire iron would have sufficed. As Freese observers, because coal is largely used today only in power stations, it is rarely seen by ordinary people. This is a worthwhile point when you consider that working-class characters in Victorian or Edwardian fiction never seem to be more than a few paces from a coal heap.
The consequences of America's fossil fuel burning, and especially its coal burning, are carefully and readably explained in the closing pages. Freese's environmentalism is to the fore in the writing, yet is so measured and sensible that, all in all, you just wish she was president of her country . . . But then there's China, currently burning coal like there's no tomorrow - which there may well not be.
Freese's solution? Hydrogen, separated from water using wind and solar power. She ends with an appeal to the coal industry: will coal be seen in the future as something that brought catastrophic consequences or "as an energy source that . . . ultimately gave us the power to build a world that no longer needed coal"? It's an invitation to commit suicide just at a time when, thanks to George Bush, things are really looking up for American coal. As such, it's most unlikely to be heeded but, once read, it certainly lingers hauntingly in the mind.
Andrew Martin's novel The Necropolis Railway is out in paperback from Faber & Faber
