Versatility and Virtuosity

It’s a strange business to be looking at some of the big books that press for attention at this time of year. A historical thriller about the pursuit of the regicides of Charles I by Robert Harris, a man who has written thrillers about the great Roman orator Cicero, about algorithms and Munich, about the Dreyfus affair and the Lord knows what. Then in a different category, there is the new novel by Kamila Shamsie, the London-based Pakistani-born novelist who is followed by multitudes but who is only incidentally a popular novelist. Her last novel, Home Fire, reviewed in Quadrant, was a masterpiece: a re-enactment of the Antigone myth so swift and so idiomatic—dead boy implicated in ISIS, Muslim Home Secretary, blindingly righteous girl—that it sweeps the reader trained in this sort of thing along so compellingly that by the time he recognises the prototype Sophocles and Hegelian dialectic have become footnotes to the novel.

Then, like nothing on earth, there are the two novels (if that’s what they are) by the old master, now eighty-nine, Cormac McCarthy. All the pretty horses have ridden off into a narrative sunset, the road that seemed to end the world is a cavalcade to this reverberating enigma. A girl, long ago dead by her own hand, the brother who had an adoration for her and works on oil rigs, the shadow of some fantasticated death vision (in whose mind?) of a character with flippers who performs a sort of vaudeville dance of death as the girl replies laconically. Endless talk of quantum physics, uncertainty principles that leave us none the wiser; mint gold coins designed by the great Saint-Gaudens, glimpses of Oppenheimer, horrorscapes of Nagasaki, the voice of the hero’s grandmother, Christian and kind. The endless digressive analysis of every Christian or God-denying paradigm, Pascalian or whatever, as elegant fellows in Borsalino hats tell waiters not to pour the wine, to leave the water. And in the midst of every narrative confusion, a lordliness of language almost abstract that nonetheless evokes worlds upon worlds. Not a book for the superior funster, not a book for many of the devotees of that Pakistani sense of the tumult of the world against a changing seasonal London landscape, but what Roland Barthes used to call a writerly book. A book that pays homage to language when there is no other god in sight.

So let’s take the middle way first, which has its own sense of darkness and woods where all direct ways are lost. Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie is the work of a novelist who has, book by book, built up a canvas that can contain worlds.

Shamsie is a novelist with marked details of perception and occlusion that carry conviction even though Best of Friends seems on the face of it a much more relaxed book than her Muslim British tragedy of the girl who defies the man who stands for the state at all costs including the violation of the sacred which is also the fundamentally human. Shamsie knows with an effortless intimacy how the stench of the personal is the crying for burial of human endeavour in extremis.

We begin in Karachi in 1988. There are two fourteen-year-old girls who are best friends, who cherish each other like the enigmas of their own souls. They have a deep friendship which is not to be confused with mere “propinquity” (the word Lear uses when he rejects Cordelia). There is the closeness which comes from happening to be near someone but then there is the depth of true friendship which is older than memory because it has always been there. One girl comes from a big-time commercial family which owns a leather company. The other is the daughter of a cricket journalist who has a television show in humble Urdu. The girl from the rich and powerful family is someone who understands dominion and the decisive nature of assertion, of putting fear into those who get in her way or maltreat her. The journalist’s daughter is gentler and intent on kindness.

At every point of Best of Friends politics underwrites the beating of the heart and the apprehension of the mind. The old journalist is visited balefully by a brigadier who wants some gesture of approval, some television endorsement of the Pakistani dictator General Zia ul-Haq. If he doesn’t give it, anything could happen. He might be flogged or worse. And then, by the grace of all that’s good, the dictator is himself killed.

Cut to something that seems to have nothing to do with politics. The two friends are at a party and the milder girl from the liberal family has the hots for a boy who is afire with desire for the tough friend and also has a dodgy mate with frosted windows to his car who acts in a scary way.

The upshot is dramatic and both girls eventually make their way to Britain, the softer girl a bit later than the fierce one: she hits Cambridge at the time of other Pakistani milestones. Needless to say, we later get reference to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, one of democracy’s great wan hopes.

In their mid-forties, each of the girlfriends is a tower of success. Fierce girl is a start-up investor, a world which she handles like a Formula One racing driver. Soft girl is a bastion of towering rectitude as a very prescient and universally respected human rights advocate. For a long stretch the obvious temperamental and implicitly political differences between the two soulmates are mere trivial contrasts for these two women. No propinquity is going to get in the way of what they share and cherish.

And along the way there is plenty of incidental realism, even the clutter of realism as other relationships are filled in. Fierce woman is gay and married to an easygoing partner, a sometime artist of Nigerian background and they have a primary-school-aged daughter who is black, African black, though there had been subcontinental sperm in her making. Bleeding-heart girlfriend has no equivalent set-up, though she is an impressive power in the land as well as a compassionate one.

Best of Friends is effortlessly credible in the way it establishes the ease with which the two women, long domiciled in Britain though formed by far-off and violent Pakistan, can have effortless dealings with a British government which is happy to exploit the connection.

Shamsie’s vision of contemporary Britain from the perspective of two successful sometime Pakistani women is nothing if not cold-eyed. She talks about the charm of politicians who position themselves to be able to look at everyone in the room. People who don’t laugh at jokes but say, “That’s funny.” She’s also at every point sensitive to the fundamental and world-creating idiom of fiction. She’ll say—and we don’t feel it’s stolen from Shaw, however congruent with him—that at a certain point as people get older their appearance is dominated not by their features but by their character.

And this level of circumambient realism gives tremendous ballast to a book that might have seemed overly schematic. Just as the depiction of what can happen to potential immigrants or residents at the hands of a government forever willing to exploit the refugee world is done chillingly and will carry conviction with the reader regardless of her ideology.

But Best of Friends is a table-turning novel, a novel of love and authoritarianism and shifting perspectives of two women as it were blindly linked who come to see new configurations of each other, as does the reader. At one level Kamila Shamsie has written the ultimate girlfriends book which exploits what can go wrong with young girls who turn into middle-aged women. Early on there is the summarising reflection that no one can be the same at forty-five as they were at fourteen. Best of Friends toys with this proposition but it’s a lot more than a book about two girls who like George Michael records and who come to realise they have opposite visions of the world.

Of course at some level, they have always known this, and part of the paradox of the shifting perspectives of Best of Friends is the suggestion that the liberal friend’s moral luxury is underwritten by the authoritarianism of her fierce blood sister. There is the suggestion that her good friend is almost always the beneficiary of power. All of which makes Best of Friends a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde story, not least because it is a sacred friendship book containing history and when the friendship is fraught with the terrible matter of Pakistan it is bound to have an element of horror, an element of terror.

Kamila Shamsie has written a novel at the edge of sentimentalism which is also a complex malediction against the times we live in, yet it illuminates almost in passing the glittering brilliance of Pakistani women in Britain. In characteristic Shamsie fashion one of the crucial scenes is set at Lord’s cricket ground. As an image of Rishi Sunak’s Britain, let alone Imran Khan’s Pakistan, it is dire.

So Best of Friends is a personal book full of ageing girl stuff which is also an elegiac treatment of the towering moral pertinence of what has happened to the world that was once part of the Raj as well as the darker-than-it-looks perspective on the price that is paid by the successful Pakistanis who make it in a born-to-rule world. But it’s a book which should command a large readership and it should be read knowing as little as possible about the ins and outs of the horrors it contemplates.

It verges on allegory and is also full of the rich dramas of nostalgia but its vision will outstare the elements of soapiness and schadenfreude that Shamsie toys with. It is ultimately a bleaker book than its fol de rol betokens but it is a richer book for that. There is a care but also a depth of moral scrutiny in all of Shamsie’s work which is greater than the surface glow of what otherwise connects with the parameters of women’s fiction. What underlines the seriousness behind the girl stuff is the detailing of the stitching and the way a story that can look both circular and predictable is offered with all its bareness as a paradigm of a figurative world where everyone—however high-reaching—seeks asylum.

Refuge of a kind is central to Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion, which was the one book I read for nothing but pleasure recently, by some irony during the strange holiday created by the Queen’s death. It is a long (400-page) depiction of the quest for the small number of people who did not receive the benefit, amounting to absolution, of the Act of Oblivion which Charles II promulgated, wiping the slate for the half of Britain who had supported the parliamentary side during the English Civil War.

It was an extraordinary period in British history and it marked the end of the Renaissance or Shakespearean moment in British culture. Andrew Marvell, who supported the Roundheads but was also a late Metaphysical poet, wrote this grave and poignant account of the death of the Cavalier king Charles Stuart:

He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable scene,

But with his keener eye

The axe’s edge did try;

Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless right,

But bowed his comely head

Down as upon a bed.

His son, Charles II, was shrewd enough to realise that Britain could not stay internecine forever and he and his Chief Minister Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, knew that if you subjected a small number of people to being hanged, drawn and quartered and if you dug up the body of Oliver Cromwell—the Lord Protector and Puritan leader who declared of Charles I, “I will cut off his head with the Crown upon it”—you would achieve enough in terms of the terror-making extremity of the state.

Act of Oblivion concentrates on a couple of the regicides who made their way to America and sought shelter and solace among the new religious settlements in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The book is in its brilliant way a depiction of two escapees dealing with shrewd and compassionate people who would help them, as well as others who out of artfulness or dire necessity are compelled to turn them away.

Robert Harris succeeds in creating a more or less credible vision of the America which was being created in the midst of this desperation as well as the temperamental differences in the case of the principal refugees and the twists and turns their minds take as they recollect not only the bulwark of their salvation but the contradictions in Cromwell, say, or the sanctimonious nature of many of the Christians they have to deal with. Both of the regicides are based on real people.

The character Harris invents is the sleuth figure who does everything in his power to hunt them down. Harris contends, believably enough, that figures like this must have existed and he gives a credible reality to this obsessive figure so that we come to share the bitter manhunt he makes of his own mind. There are also the tricks he plays on the wife of one of the escapees and the way she has to move and disguise herself in order to cope with what the manhunter is bent on doing.

It’s an odd book, Act of Oblivion. It shows Robert Harris at the extremity of his historico-imaginative powers. Many marvelled at the way he succeeded in creating suspense in An Officer and a Spy even though the subject matter of the Dreyfus case was so well known and the path was so well trodden. Act of Oblivion is a comparable tour de force though part of the effect of the early American setting is to make that world seem sparser and to make the isolation of the various stages of withdrawal and the precariousness of the runaways in hiding seem like dots of colour on a snowbound landscape.

Harris’s previous book, Conclave, performed the odd leap of pretending that modernity had never happened (which didn’t quite work) but the thing that odd book highlighted is that he is not in the local sense a great master of period dialogue. Act of Oblivion is in its way a magnificently structured account of figures in hiding and of the somewhat manic figure bent on tracking them down. But Harris, although he’s good at the overall period flavour (at least structurally and in terms of depiction) doesn’t quite capture verbally the kind of thunder and eloquence that leap off the page in, say, Peter Ackroyd’s seventeenth-century volumes in his History of England or the spectacular use of quotation in popular books about this period like Antonia Fraser’s life of Cromwell or her account of the Gunpowder Plot.

Our sense of seventeenth-century colonial America is probably formed by the rhetorical language Arthur Miller invented for the somewhat later depiction of Salem, Massachusetts, in The Crucible. Harris is perhaps influenced by this when he depicts the Puritan spiritual leaders, though he resists the full drumbeat of it.

The book is at its best when he can let himself go with the put-upon urbanity of Clarendon (who tires of the quest) and the way he depicts the suffering wife and the contrasted regicides, but that sense of what Hopkins called “the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation” is not something Harris can fully recreate verbally: he is not Hilary Mantel. What he is brilliant at—and this is analogous with the Dreyfus book—is articulating the different parts of the winding stair of the story he is recreating. He is a great master of the suspense-laden chapter or incident, and he needs to be to get the full measure of a story that is fascinating as an exercise but is difficult to make fully pictorial because it is a story of hideaways.

None of this is to deny that Act of Oblivion performs expertly and more or less arrestingly the exacting juggling feat of being a suspense-laden if episodic historical novel which is also—over a very long tract of time—a page turner. Harris is a much more wide-ranging, a more spectacularly bright thriller writer than John le Carré. He has a storytelling mind that is cinematic in its virtuosity. Imagine if Hitler had won in Fatherland. Imagine ghosting a Tony Blair figure, what about Pompeii, what about Cicero, that supreme forensic prosecutor? It’s all there, and the versatility sits in tandem with the virtuosity. But he doesn’t have, as le Carré did, the conman father in the attic singing a baleful tune. He doesn’t have that damaged sense of self-betrayal that gives le Carré his affinity with Graham Greene and his strange artistic intensity. He has nearly everything else, however, and we should be grateful for that.

The strangest and the grandest books to hit the world like time bombs for the Christmas stocking are the two interconnected novels by Cormac McCarthy, the one the footnote to the other in dialogue form, but with an overlapping story and set of preoccupations. We might have thought we knew about Cormac McCarthy. Wasn’t he the man who convinced Harold Bloom with Blood Meridian, a novel of a violence so extreme as to seem excessive, that he had written a masterpiece? Hadn’t he put together a trilogy of cowboy stories—was it the late great John Clarke who said All the Pretty Horses made you feel the wind in your hair (or, he added, in his case, scalp)—and which made the unbelieving reader feel, bit by bit and lassoing incident by lassoing incident, that these death-defying yarns are, God help us, works of art? Is it true if you look at them again that they can seem a bit like the maddening poetry and rhetoric of Faulkner colliding with the plainchant of Hemingway? Need that matter, however, given how the fusion sounds? Was No Country for Old Men like a bucket of blood thrown in the filmgoer’s face? What were we to make of The Road with its starkness and its pitiless depiction of father and son at the very edge of a world where all were at war with all and only the most basic bond was left as things came to an end? How much did the John Hillcoat film with Viggo Mortensen as the father and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the son work as a palimpsest of the book: the memory holds them as a blended totality.

Now we have two books which are actually one at the edge of impossibility, a piece of fiction and its addendum about madness and mathematics and their interplay. It starts masterfully with the music of a master:

It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones … He thought that he should pray but he’d no prayer for such a thing. He bowed his head. Tower of Ivory, he said. House of Gold. She had tied her dress with a red sash so that she’d be found. Some bit of colour in the scrupulous desolation. On this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day.

The huntsman who finds the body of a dead girl is impelled by God knows what to invoke and recite for want of better words the litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary and then they are heard again in the first sentence of the next section. “This then would be Chicago in the winter of the last year of her life. In a week’s time she would return to Stella Maris and from there wander away into the bleak Wisconsin woods.” Stella Maris, star of the sea, is another of the titles of the figure Catholics call Our Lady, Notre Dame, though in the context of this terribly late—is it?—Cormac McCarthy work of postfiction or anti-fiction or whatever, Stella Maris is the name of the mental hospital where this young girl, long possessed by death as something she might hug in darkness or open her arms to, is a patient.

He’s in love.

Pity.

It’s worse than that.

How so?

He’s in love with his sister …

But of course it gets worse …

He’s in love with his sister and she’s dead.

He is Bobby Western, oil rigger, one-time physics student, sometime racing car driver, likeable laconic gentle guy. She is his sister Alicia Western, a few years younger, born in 1951, dead in 1972. She is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and she is also dazzlingly and confoundingly a mathematical genius. We hear her in dialogue for a large fraction of Stella Maris talking to her psychiatrist about the glories of mathematics, about Wittgenstein saying mathematics was a tautology, about Gödel, about Feynman and the whole catastrophic chorus. If you’re the kind of person who in some stoned stupor of your youth was told by the nearest fellow smoker who had studied pure maths that you were in danger of discovering set theory then great enraptured chanted cycles of this book will be sounded-out unintelligibles, as they are to the psychiatrist of Stella Maris who may be some symbolic stand-in for the reader and who has not heard of the philosopher Quine and who is not—encouragingly—a complete dolt because he understands that only the patient has in Rimbaud’s phrase (not that our chap in the book would know it) the key to the barbarous sideshow “la parade sauvage”.

Our heroine, who is a racier figure in Stella Maris than in The Passenger—partly because she is the scintillated centre of the dialogic investigation—one suspects has her own key to the sideshow. She has from the time of puberty been visited by visions of strange vaudeville tempters. There is the Kid, a bald dwarf with thalidomide-style deformities, flippers in place of hands, who dances about making bad jokes in a parade of savageries which are hellish if you like but intelligible and crypto-funny.

Everything is crypto-something and any attempt to impose coherence on McCarthy’s dark visionary cloud of mathematics and madness will be untrue to its very deliberated storm of unknowing. People eat hamburgers and buy them for each other. Women talk kindly and oil riggers offer jobs and amiable rogues discourse on Pascal and perdition as they smoke cigars and wear elegant Borsalino hats and adopt an air of piratical panache.

If you want a sense of the almost circumlocutory movie of life, full of an inflected emotion and characters glimpsed or heard from nowhere, this is a book (books) which will keep you going. One hook to the book is that the father of the brother and sister, hero and heroine, worked on the atom bomb at Los Alamos and this is a kind of leitmotif of the books which yields this spectacular purple passage about the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki:

Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favours.

This has an extraordinary virtuosity and power. It’s preceded by this reassuringly elegant passage in which the non-mathematical who know a bit of history will feel secure:

Oppenheimer was a chainsmoker with a chronic cough and bad teeth. His eyes were a striking blue. He had an accent of some kind. Almost Irish. He wore good clothes but they hung on him. He weighed nothing. Groves hired him because he had seen he could not be intimidated. That was all. A lot of very smart people thought he was possibly the smartest man God ever made. Odd chap, that God.

There’s also a moment in Stella Maris where Oppenheimer visits a great mathematician in hospital and says to the nurse that he must look after this man, he’s the greatest logician since Aristotle, and the nurse gives the impression that now he has two nutcases on his hands. But this work is only substrately a book about the bomb.

The story goes that Cormac McCarthy has spent a large part of his time in the last stretch talking to mathematicians and physicists and he has found great solace discoursing with the brightest people on earth. His fiction project is essentially to show rocket scientists (in the metaphorical sense) going off their rockers. Was this good for his fiction, or has he compounded it with a fractured babble, a stuttering of madness and death which will yield nothing so much as an overwhelming confusion with the risk of it seeming wholly improbable and some of it by any reckoning (and certainly an ignorant one) indecipherable? Certainly we clutch at the glimpsed minutiae of mimesis. When the hero Bobby Western finds a great quantity of mint gold coins—a development as unlikely as anything in a cowboy story—it is an immense relief to discover that they were designed by Saint-Gaudens, who did the great equestrian monument to Sherman in Central Park, even if you had forgotten or never known that the great sculptor designed gold coins.

The time schemes of The Passenger are wildly confusing and so is everything, though you couldn’t argue too strenuously that this was anything but lifelike. When Western sits like a penitent it’s in fact eight years after his sister’s death. She tells her psych in Stella Maris that she went to Italy to see Bobby who was in a coma—from his racing accident—and refused to have him declared brain dead. In an odd way the circumscribing murk of all this is a bit like Faulkner at his most narratologically forbidding as in Absalom, Absalom! and Bobby Western’s laconic grace does have something in common with Hemingway. The sort of space Cormac McCarthy puts around him, saying nothing or little, is beautifully eloquent.

And eloquence is certainly part of the subject of his story. There is that remarkable figure Long John Sheddan who addresses our hero, as if he were some kind of figure in Treasure Island, as “Squire”. Here is one bit of his ruminative self-confidence:

Isnt the purpose of pain to instruct? Well piss upon it. I’m just in a funk. In the end you can escape everything but yourself. We too are different creatures, Squire. Which I’ve said to exhaustion. But what we share—aside from intelligence and a low grade generalized contempt for the world and all in it—is an airy and mindless egotism. If I told you that I was concerned for your soul you would fall out of your chair laughing. You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it’s a bad bargain.

And then there is his deathbed letter which Western reads when Sheddan is several weeks dead which is debonair like all his utterances. It’s odd to think that Cormac McCarthy of all people should have caught through the figure of Sheddan a lot of the comedy of taking life seriously. The Hamlet stance of poised tragicomedy:

Enough. I’ve never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I’ve never understood in the slightest why I was here. If there is an afterlife—and I pray most fervently that there is not—I can only hope that they wont sing. Be of good cheer, Squire. This was the ongoing adjuration of the early Christians and in this at least they were right. You know that I’ve always thought your history unnecessarily embittered. Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice. Thank you for your friendship. In twenty years I dont recall a word of criticism. And for this alone deep blessings be upon you. If we should meet again I hope there will be something in the way of a wateringhole where I can stand you a round. Perhaps show you about the place. Look for a tall and somewhat raffish-looking chap in a tailored robe.

Stella Maris has this with bells on because Alicia, the mad mathematical genius, is so indefatigably bright. She was a girl genius and she suffered terribly, her dream life her stigmata, and she resists drugs and refuses to believe in the intrinsic value of a prescription world that has nothing but a utile rationale and cannot define its own terms. She’s dazzling, of course:

I guess I should say that I’m surprised to hear you describe yourself as a lunatic.

I didn’t say that I so described myself.

Still if I insist that I’m sane, you have to consider the source of the claim.

And of course it shouldn’t come as a surprise to discover that people in rubber rooms have a worldview at odds with that of the people who put them there.

You’re not claiming equal legitimacy for the two views.

Okay, okay.

Okay, what?

Not if it would be a problem for you.

I feel we keep drifting away from the subject.

Which is?

You.

Well.

I think the sense of being an alien—as distinct from merely feeling alienated—is fairly common among mental patients.

Or among aliens.

The difficulty for Cormac McCarthy—and the reason his heroine is racier in Stella Maris—is that her performance is exhilarated and unstoppable.

Sometimes we hear simply from the psychiatrist that she is weeping but we don’t get it from the words. She rhapsodises about mathematics, about music, about the unknown genius who invented the violin and about her sexual love of her brother:

I thought that the fact that it wasnt acceptable wasnt really our problem. I knew that he loved me. He was just afraid. I’d known this was coming for a long time. There was no place else for me to go. I knew that we would have to run away but I didnt care about any of that. I kissed him in the car. We kissed twice, actually. The first time just very softly. He patted my hand as if in all innocence and turned to start the car but I put my hand on his cheek and turned him to me and we kissed again and this time there was no innocence in it at all and it took his breath. It took mine. I put my face on his shoulder. And he said we cant do this. You know we cant do this. I wanted to say that I knew no such thing. I should have. I kissed his cheek. I had no belief in his resolution but I was wrong. We never kissed again.

The incest, mutual and unconsummated, is done in a way that takes away the breath. Is the brio with which she elevates it the banner of her tragedy and her madness? Yes and no.

What are the literary precedents for the depiction of incest? In 1632 at the very terminus of the Shakespearean/Jacobean theatre there is John Ford’s lurid masterpiece ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore which would be enough to engender Puritan-style theatre closing in anyone. Visconti staged it with Romy Schneider and Alain Delon. Charlotte Rampling filmed it and Declan Donnellan did it in Sydney in 2012. It is blood-curdlingly grand and erotic for all its melodramatics. Stoppard references it in The Real Thing. Then there’s the last section of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, the long rhapsodic section which Blanchot said was written in a style of spellbinding sobriety. But Ulrich and Agathe have spent their lives apart which evaporates the psychology of the taboo-breaking somewhat.

It is difficult to know what has to be subtracted from this all but lunatic work of high and teetering fiction Cormac McCarthy has bequeathed us. Is it a mess? Well, yes. Does it bequeath an enthralment as well as an evocatively lighted literary metamorphosis out of its enthusiasms? Well, the former but not the latter. There are sections for instance including a discussion—yet again—of Kennedy’s death which will make the reader scream but it has a hell of a sense of reality through all the stammering and glamorisation. Is it a failure? Is it convincing as a great book of recondite wisdom? Is the first question answered by the second? Perhaps we have to see the madness which is all too vividly accessible and the mathematics which towers like a wall—as lunacies and luxuriances akin to the whale lore and the metaphysics of Moby-Dick.

You would go a long way, one might reckon, to read a more formidable work of contemporary fiction. The humour can be grand and the awareness of human dislocation and pain and the gangway between madness and perception is done as well as that perpetually problematic endeavour could be. Perhaps all we can do with Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris is take them as the semi-oracular gropings and grapplings of a master spirit. It would be interesting to hear what someone with a mathematical background as well as high literary interests—Kevin Hart, say, who discovered Euler’s Theorem for himself when he was thirteen, John Carroll perhaps, who as a young man is said to have been something of a wrangler—would make of the quantum physics and the set pieces but this much is true anyway. Be careful, though, of whose Christmas stocking you put it in. They might burn the house down.

Peter Craven is a Melbourne literary critic.