Gavin Pretor-Pinney is a giggler inveterate, with the smooth, rubicund features of a British banker and a crushed lisp, exuberant in his passions and determined to heal the damage wreaked by geography masters the world over.
'It's amazing how in the wrong hands, a subject can be mangled,' he says from a farmhouse near Beziers in southern France, where he is on holiday with his wife, Liz, and their two daughters, Flora Cirrus and Verity Iris. His first book, The Cloudspotter's Guide, sold more than 250,000 copies in 17 translations and is now regarded as the bible of a new religion. His second, The Wave Watcher's Companion, released in June, is up for the same destiny.
'It was an incredible struggle to get the Cloud book published,' he recalls. 'Twenty-eight editors turned the book down, and even the guy who eventually bought it said no originally.' The response to Pretor-Pinney's second book was different. 'They were like: come on! What's your next book gonna be? So I rather impulsively said, 'Well, I think waves are rather interesting, but I'm afraid I don't have a proposal.'' Which is when, he says, his publishers lost their minds. 'They told me not to worry about the proposal. I sold the book on a single word: waves.' His laughter is incredulous.
Pretor-Pinney first became intrigued by waves while watching gliders surfing the Morning Glory, a majestic, columnar 1,000km-long Australian cloud. 'This long line of clouds, you can see them in satellite images. They stretch for the length of Britain - miles and miles and miles long. I remember watching it from the street - it was so quiet, just a dog barking, with the moon still out - and as it approached, like a wave, it rolled towards me. The sky suddenly went overcast, and then the cloud rolled beyond me. In that moonlight, it had a silvery sheen. I felt like I was underwater.'
He applied what he describes as his 'Asperger's-like' focus to waves, discovering their connection to every other kind of wave - infrared, micro, shock, light, Mexican. Waves, he enthuses, are not frozen in time as the water within the wave will, at any moment, be left behind as the wave moves on. 'Waves pass through the medium of water in almost exactly the same way human spirit passes through the medium of the body - over time, where every atom is replaced.' And like its literary predecessor, The Wave Watcher's Companion achieves the improbable: it restores a sense of magic to the world.
The tone of the book is intimate, informative, wonderfully funny. 'The crests and troughs now grow agitated and chaotic,' he writes. 'They rush this way and that, running into each other, tumbling over each other, like a roomful of toddlers under the dubious guidance of a hyperactive childminder.' With intellectual grace, Pretor-Pinney manages to link the human heartbeat to the slithering of snakes, the collapse of suspension bridges, the shimmer of butterfly wings, and gridlock. 'It's all about waves,' he says.