LITERARY FICTION
LITERARY FICTION
If Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer has left you mesmerised by the appalling miracles of nuclear physics, then The Maniac is the novel for you
THE MANIAC
by Benjamin Labatut (Pushkin Press £20, 368pp)
If Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer has left you mesmerised by the appalling miracles of nuclear physics, then The Maniac is the novel for you.
It tells the story of the less well-known, utterly brilliant Hungarian mathematician Johnny von Neumann, who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. He was also a pivotal figure in the development of the computer science we rely on so heavily today.
Labatut, whose previous novel When We Cease To Understand The World was championed by Barack Obama, deploys the same intoxicating blend of fact and fiction used in that book to recount von Neumann's life and achievements through the perspectives of those closest to him.
But he also tells, in two bookending chapters, the story of 1930s Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who killed himself in a fit of madness, and the portentous boardgame match between South Korean Lee Sedol and the DeepMind computer AlphaGo in 2016.
This marvel of a book, which inspires awe and dread in equal measure, is stalked by the greatest terrors of the 20th century, yet its final heart-stopping sentence makes clear the greatest terrors are yet to come.
For a while now Faulks has been exploring the wonders of neuroscience in his fiction, notably in his two linked Austrian-set novels, 2005's Human Traces and 2021's Snow Country, both of which set big human stories against historic advances in psychiatry
THE SEVENTH SON
by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson Heinemann £22, 368pp)
For a while now Faulks has been exploring the wonders of neuroscience in his fiction, notably in his two linked Austrian-set novels, 2005's Human Traces and 2021's Snow Country, both of which set big human stories against historic advances in psychiatry.
He takes a leap into a speculative future in The Seventh Son, in which a couple desperate for a baby employ the services of a ground-breaking lab and a willing surrogate in order to achieve their dream.
But the lab manipulates the sample for its own experimental ends, and the subsequent neurodivergent child, Seth, becomes, as an adult, an object of prurient public obsession after details of the experiment are leaked.
There's a lot of clunky scientific exposition in this novel and not a great deal of nuance: given the abundance of far from far-fetched ideas, it all feels oddly lifeless.
But there is a resonant hint of Frankenstein's wretched monster about Seth who, functional, capable and literate as he is, stands at the book's emotional centre, desperate for a companionship he can never find.
The prolific Tidhar has previously stuck to science fiction, but he is fast emerging as the leader of a new wave of Israeli literature
ADAMA
by Lavie Tidhar (Head of Zeus £20, 400pp)
Israeli literature has long been dominated by veteran heavyweights David Grossman and the late Amos Oz. The prolific Tidhar has previously stuck to science fiction, but he is fast emerging as the leader of a new wave of Israeli literature, thanks to his risky, exhilarating experiments with tone and genre.
His previous novel Maror, a drug and blood-splattered, potted, recent history of Israel, read like the literary equivalent of a Tarantino film. Adama, which means 'land' in Hebrew (although 'dam' means blood) reaches further back, to pre-state Palestine and its displaced persons camps, through the story of Ruth, whose family escaped the Nazis in Budapest and who spends much of her life on a kibbutz.
Yet in Tidhar's hands the kibbutz is no rose-tinted utopian community, but a harbinger of savage dislocation and violence. It's not an easy read, but Tidhar's imagination is both Old Testament through and through, and sick with a 21st-century disenchantment.
Comments 0
Share what you think
No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards.
