"When we cease to understand the world" by Benjamin Labatut

 Fictionalised biographies of twentieth century scientists and mathematicians including Wilhelm Scheele, Fritz Haber (responsible both for making poison gas used in World War I and artificial fertiliser used to feed an ever-expanding population), Karl Schwarschild, Werner Heisenberg, Louis de Broglie, and Erwin Schrodinger, and mathematicians Alexander Grothendieck and Shinichi Mochikuzi. These are people who have made incredible discoveries, many of which are immensely difficult for ordinary people (and, in some cases, for top mathematicians and scientists) to comprehend. The theme of the book seems to be that such discoveries require geniuses who are more or less mad, sometimes before or during the making of their discoveries, sometimes afterwards. Some of the biographies include intimate details, such as the masturbatory habits of Schrodinger, which don't normally find their way into conventional biographies. It is only in the acknowledgements that I discovered "This is a work of fiction based on real events. The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book." At this point, the growing sense of unease I had felt as I read towards the end made sense. 

The author's thesis is, I think, that science is fundamentally bad. Scientists are either mad or evil and sometimes both. Scheele and Haber made poisons, and Haber is also to blame for facilitating over-population (without Haber more people would have starved to death so that the world's population would be smaller which might be an acceptable end but the means, for those who starve, might not be so acceptable), I'm not defending Haber, who seems to have felt no moral compunction about making poison gases, but I'm not sure you can extrapolate from one bad man to blame the whole of science, which is really just a disciplined harnessing of man's innate curiosity.  

If science doesn't harm others, the author seems to be saying, it harms the scientists, and the stories of Grothendieck and Heisenberg and Schrodinger are employed as examples. They are mad, or they become mad. But if the biographies have been fictionalised, then the evidence for the author's claims is corrupt and untrustworthy. It's bad data. The thesis is flawed. 

This is a beautifully written book but in the end he is trying to prove the trope of the mad scientist by using intellectual dishonesty.

Shorlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021

November 2022; 188 pages

Added on 27th November

The more I think about it, the angrier I become. By using the trope of the mad scientist - the cliche that genius tips into madness - Labatut implies that advances in science should be resisted lest they make us all mad. But the way he does this is fundamentally intellectually dishonest. He starts with chemists making poisons, and here his book is, more or less, factual biography. But then he moves into the realm of quantum physics and adds increasing amounts of fiction to blacken the characters of Heisenberg and Schrodinger and to caricature them as lunatics. It is only in the acknowledgements at the end that he tells you that the later parts of the book are mostly fiction.

I have no argument about using fiction to tell truths - I write novels - but it seems to me that you should be upfront about this, not seduce your reader into believing that the shocking details you recount are genuine biography.

If a scientist were to falsify his evidence in order to prove his theory he would be condemned. If the only way that Labatut can prove his thesis is by resorting to this kind of trickery, that suggests to me that his thesis is wrong.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God