I wasn’t surprised to find that this author originally trained as a structural engineer. There is something so meticulous, measured and structured in his prose that it suggested a mind of infinite precision. A slender novel this tells the story of a Russian mathematician in the 1950s, who is surveying a bog in Ireland. He receives a telegram that requires him to return to Leningrad for a “special appointment“. Given the political climate of the time and the reputation such a country has, both the reader and Lobachevsky realises that it is potentially a death sentence. And so Nikolai goes into hiding on a remote island in the Shannon estuary, where he works with the island families. It gives him plenty of time to think.
This is not a book of action. It’s a book of contemplation. A curious paradox ensues, where the routine and mundane stuff of life exists alongside the fear of a violent regime. Our protagonist muses on cows and other agricultural phenomena. It’s like an extended soliloquy from a condemned man. A modern day Hamlet perhaps? Nikolai is not a man of endeavour, he observes and studies his fellow man and the situations he’s in with a logical and systematic dispassion almost. You get the sense he’s not driven by a wealth of emotion. And yet his observations do show a depth of feeling. It’s as if he is drawing a parallel between the cruelty of land and people, and the cruelty of a political system. It’s as if he sees everything as inevitable without actually saying so.
Some of the mathematics within the book eluded me. Each part of the book was prefaced with some kind of geometric maxim? For example, “ Shadow cast by pyramid travels over the lower vertex of triangle; circle spins past in the background, followed in the distance by an oscillating, square.“ I get a picture in my head, but I don’t know what it means!
The prose is paradoxically languid while describing intense physical activity, but it meanders through nature’s harmony and its violence. The description of the thunderstorm is exquisite. A sense of static beauty provides the entire novel and yet, for this reader, anyway, a sense of the enigmatic prevailed too. I had the sense on occasions that something was just out of my reach, as if I were missing something salient. Perhaps that’s a good reason, maybe, to re-read the book! Also, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this in our politically correct times, but it came across as a very male book! Apologies if that is inappropriate.
This has been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Historical Fiction prize 2023, and I shall be interested to see how it fares.
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