Scientific storyteller

In 1959, in Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, C.P. Snow highlighted the gulf which then existed between science and the arts. Practitioners of each, he wrote, were unable to speak to the other, having no common language. This divisive state of affairs, he concluded, was detrimental to the future of society as a whole and had to be addressed. Forty years on and the problem is, if anything, more acute.

The one area of science which has achieved some kind of cross-cultural understanding is zoology, largely through television wildlife programmes. It was certainly how Sanjida O'Connell became interested in animals, rather than the "pet" route. Her mother's love of plants and the countryside did not, she says, extend to animals. As a result, O'Connell's interest has always been cerebral rather than sentimental and she has never had a pet herself - unless, she says, you count the hedgehog in the garden who's there to eat the slugs.

Now 28, Sanjida O'Connell is herself a producer/director of nature programmes for the BBC, thus continuing the science-for-the-masses tradition. But she has gone further. She is not only a zoologist, she is a novelist in whose work science is not an add-on but an integral part of the whole.

Her first novel, Theory of Mind, explored ideas of empathy and autism within the framework of a love-story-cum-thriller. Described by the London Times as "taut, complex and highly original" it won her the Betty Trask Award. The overall idea came to O'Connell during the first year of her Ph.D on chimpanzee behaviour. She didn't start writing, however, until her fieldwork was complete.

"I wanted the experience of working with chimps and although I had read about people with autism, I hadn't met any, and I didn't think I could write about it until I had, because I wanted the book to be quite scientific in the sense of actually seeing what it's like to do experiments, to go through that process. Because I think that most people, even if they keep up with science, don't really know just how frustrating everything is."

The same themes were later developed in a non-fiction context in Mind-reading: How We Learn to Love and Life, published in paperback last month. This month sees the publication of her second novel, Angel Bird. The subject this time is magpies, but as in Theory of Mind, she weaves a complex narrative from disparate threads: promiscuity, fidelity, food, drugs, family secrets and the mind's ability to block out painful memories. Human behaviour, she points out, is as much a part of zoology as animal behaviour and the genetic predisposition of magpies finds parallels in the genetic predisposition of men and women. The overall theme of the novel, she says, is free will and what happens when the fixed lines of scientific research collide with the apparent randomness of human behaviour. But above all, Sanjida O'Connell believes in delivering her readers a good yarn: "I wouldn't want to write something that was just about two people's relationship and didn't have a climax and an ending. The story is the vehicle that you hang ideas and thoughts on."

Angel Bird is set in a tightly-knit community on the Ard Peninsula. Like Niall, her English zoologist narrator, Ireland is the place where Sanjida O'Connell feels most comfortable - though, like Niall, the relationship is as much emotional as physical. As her name implies, Sanjida is half Irish and half Bangladeshi. Her mother Rosemary, now head of modern languages at a girls' school in Yorkshire, is from Belfast. However, her marriage with Sanjida's father (who she met at Exeter University) was short-lived, and James O'Connell from Cork, recently retired professor of peace studies at York University, has been Sanjida's stepfather since she was three. At 18, she had the choice of reverting to her natural father's surname but decided to stick with O'Connell, "because I thought it reflected who I was in a way, being brought up by him and having this mixture of background". She has both British and Irish passports. The decision to set Angel Bird in Ireland was a reflection of this aspect of her identity. She also wanted to portray the country that she knew, one that she feels rarely gets a look-in. "There are so many books and films about Ireland and all they focus on is the sectarian violence. I just wanted to write something that was Irish, recognisably set in Ireland, but that didn't have anything to do with politics." Ireland, she says, is the least violent place she knows. The other side of her inheritance, that of the Asian outsider, is also reflected in Angel Bird. The pressures on Asian children brought up in a non-Asian society should not be underestimated, she believes. "The children are in a quite weird situation where their parents are perhaps more traditional at home than they would be back in Pakistan or India, because they are trying to hold on to their culture. But they're also growing up in a quite different society and wanting to be their own person." Even as a small child, she knew she was different from her pale-skinned friends in Whitehead, Co Antrim: "I didn't really fit in, but I fitted in better than anywhere else because of having parents that were Irish." It was a different story when the family moved from Ireland to the north of England. She was 10 and for the first time came into contact with other Asian children. However, their alien family structures meant she had nothing in common with them. Meanwhile both Asians and English - all of whom spoke with the same strong local accent - mocked her for her Northern Irish accent. She found the inspiration for writing fiction not in scientist role-models, says O'Connell - in fact she can only think of one, Carl Sagan - but in the work of novelists, specifically William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach and Ian Banks's The Wasp Factory, and more recently Ian McEwan with Everlasting Love. Even there, she says, you can see the joins. "Like Michael Crichton - he just puts chunks of science speak in his novels and because he's Michael Crichton, he can get away with it." The only scientist who even partly succeeds in straddling both worlds, she says, is Richard Dawkins. "In his book on the selfish gene theory he says that just because science can explain certain things, it doesn't take away the wonder of it, so he's got poetry in there as well. But that's quite unusual really." Sanjida O'Connell has never had a problem combining the two cultures. In her novels, lyrical prose melds seamlessly into a science-based storyline while the non-fiction Mindreading is studded with references to the arts, from Aristotle to Milan Kundera, Macchiavelli to Robert Frost, Shakespeare to Asimov.

The reason science delivered by fiction is largely bolt-on, while at the same time, scientists persist in retaining their keep-out blinkers, is the result, she believes, of a divisive education system.

O'Connell eventually managed to study zoology and philosophy at Bristol University - unheard of at the time. Zoology required two science subjects at A-level; Sanjida took chemistry, biology, German and history but was forced to drop English literature and art. (The usual number of A-levels taken for university entrance in Britain is three.) But it took determination, not only on her part, but that of her parents. Her love of literature survived because it was already firmly in place. As a teenager she devoured contemporary fiction and wrote "angst-ridden, rather bad poetry" and short stories, one of which was published in Spare Rib when she was 18. She is a regular contributor to the science pages of the Guardian. However, instead of applauding her crusading work, the response from scientists, she says, is almost entirely negative. "They don't like it if you are trying to make science accessible to your average person. They have the idea that if it's not written in the way they would write it, then it's not the whole truth, so therefore you shouldn't write about it. And I feel strongly that because science is funded by taxpayers, they have a duty to make it as accessible as possible."

Angel Bird is published by Black Swan, price £6.99 in the UK. Mindreading: How We Learn To Love And Life is published by Arrow, price £6.99