Sundry village entomologists and botanists were amateurs of biology. Gilbert is fascinated by the 19th‑century passion for exploration, taxonomy and classification that led, via Darwin's barnacles, to his concept of evolution by natural selection. This archaic lore does nothing for Ambrose's health, nor can it satisfy Alma's curiosity – traditionally the sin of Eve, linked with lust and gluttony. According to Böhme, God imprinted prescriptions for human ailments in medicinal plants – brain-shaped walnuts for headaches, celandines for jaundice. The novel takes its title from Jakob Böhme's The Signature of All Things (1622), a work that enthrals Alma's dottily mystical husband, Ambrose Pike. When Alma takes off for Tahiti, she too sails in the aftermath of a failed marriage and to feed a gargantuan appetite for knowledge. Gilbert's bestselling memoir of her pilgrimage to Italy and India, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything, followed her quest for wisdom after her divorce. Her story is a historical-fantastical jeu d'esprit, a feminist fable, a cabinet of curiosities, a scholarly romp. Alma will visit Tahiti and settle in Amsterdam.
Two pages later Henry is off to Peru, and settles in Philadelphia. Picaresque in form, grotesque in characterisation and antic in disposition, The Signature of All Things whisks us through more than a century and from Kew to Hawaii, where Henry sees Captain Cook being clubbed to death.
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