"The Gold Bug Variations" by Richard Powers

 

A librarian, Jan O'Deigh, and Franklin Todd, a computer technician, try to discover the story behind Frank's colleague, Stuart Ressler, who used to be a scientist on the cutting-edge of research into the mechanism by which DNA (its double helix structure recently discovered by Watson and Crick) controls genetic inheritance. As they learn about the Stuart's love affair, they themselves fall in love.

There are three narratives: Jan's present-day narrative, told in the first person; Jan's memories of the previous year when she and the now absent Frank tried to uncover Stuart's story, also told by Jan; Stuart's story from 1957, told from his perspective but in the third-person.

There are a lot of thematic correspondences:

• The Gold Bug: a short story by Edgar Allen Poe about cryptography. Ressler's task is to decoding in the sense that he is trying understand which of the 64 possible combinations of triplets of RNA correspond to which of the twenty amino acids that build up proteins.
• The Goldberg variations: a suite of musical pieces by Bach whose structure seems to mirror the combinations of the bases in the RNA triplets.
• The fact the Jan is a librarian and DNA is, in a sense, a giant reference book of how to build proteins.
• The fact that Frank and Stuart work with computers and computer programs are, in a sense, similar to DNA
• The fact that Stuart gets cancer (not a spoiler, we learn this early): cancer is caused by inaccurate replications of DNA
• Love as the drive towards reproduction and the problems this may have for some people
• The fact that the story is about the love affairs bonding two pairs of people, as in DNA the bases are paired: A with T and C with G, unless there is an error in replication, symbolised in the book by infidelity.

It is the interplay of themes that is, one senses, most important for the novelist and he extends this to the idea that the text is also a coded message that the reader is deciphering into ideas; word-play is often used to show what might happen to the thoughts generated when the code is changed slightly: "Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?" (Ch 12)

Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid by Douglas Hofstadter plays with similar ideas.

It is a fascinating book but it is long. If there is an excursion which can provide further illustration of the theme, the author does not hesitate to explore it. Thus, one character discovers that his daughter is colour-blind and, since he isn't, disowns her: classic red-green colour-blindness in carried on the X chromosome so that, for a girl to have it, she must inherit it from both her mother (where it could be recessive) and her father (where it couldn't). A computer malfunction has life-or-death consequences. But there are other aspects which seem less related to the theme. Do we need to know the profession of Jan's ex-partner? Do we need to learn about an obscure Flemish painter (Frank's dissertation is on art history)? These trees sometimes seemed to get in the way of my seeing the wood.

And Powers has a very long-winded style. One sentence is rarely enough: "She is a natural history, a sovereign kingdom, a theory about her environment, a virtuoso pedal-point performance. She follows a curve, a cadence, an animal locomotion he cannot help but lose himself to. Jeanette Ross is her own phylum." (Ch 11) It's certainly a virtuouso performance but I often felt that a little more precision, a little more succinctness, a little less prolixity ... it's catching!

This is an author who expects a lot of his readers: "A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor's cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler's area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering's side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. On Ressler's side: the formal gardens of Versailles." (Ch 10) It's not just the need to have some sort of understanding of biuochemistry and thermodynamics and French history; you also need to be able to decipher sufficient of the unusual words (osmotic, entropic, arboreal, mimeograph, ruminant etc) to have the motivation to keep reading. On the other hand, the richness of the vocabulary and the ecstatic juxtaposition of so many ideas make reading this book a rewarding experience, even though it slows you up. But perhaps there's a happy medium, combining verbal and mental pyrotechnics with more conciseness, making the book an exhilarating romp up a hillside rather than an arduous slog up a mountain.

• Selected quotes:
• "Ressler's definition of chance: the die is random, but we keep on rolling until we hot necessity." (Ch 1)
• "Those few months were the only ones of my life that I experienced firsthand." (Ch 1)
• "The angel-files in each half-stair must somehow be capable of latching on to their proper mates out of angelic bouillabaisse." (Ch 4)
• "It had succumbed to creeping graffiti fungus, the surreal, urgently illegible signatures of the buried." (Ch 4)
• "We are the by-product of the mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us." (Ch 5)
• "News confuses significant with novel." (Ch 7)
• "Her curves tend toward a topographical fullness he associates with varsity cheerleaders and nursing mothers." (Ch 7)
• "Even level-headed women are programmed to spread themselves through every available backwater of the gene pool. At thirty, though, lust is no longer the giddy-maker it once was." (Ch 7)
• "The innovations that daily made a liar of Ecclesiastes. Recent sighting of the W particle. Stone Age tribe hitherto escaping detection. Pioneer 10, passing Neptune on its way to being the first artificial thing to quit the solar system." (Ch 14)
• "Organisms are only the necessary evil, the way DNA has hit upon to make more DNA." (Ch 15)
• "The male model of parenthood: everything between ejaculation and tossing the football with the twelve-year-old is trivial." (Ch 17)
• "There are a lot more ways to fall off the tightrope than to inch forward." (Ch 19)
• "Genetic engineering is full of attempts to replace a dense, diversified, heterogeneous assortment of strains with one superior one. Something about us is in love with whittling down: we want the one solution that will drive out all the others." (Ch 19)
• "I recently saw French literature defined as English literature without the Bard." (Ch 20)
• "The first article of scientific skepticism: meaning always reveals pattern, but pattern does not necessarily imply meaning." (Ch 20)
• "Part of me dearly wants to pay taxes. I love schools, sidewalks, museums, research funding, food relief. You simply cannot get a better return on investment." (Ch 21)
• "Ultimately, the Goldbergs are about the paradox of variation, preserved divergence, the transition effect inherent in terraced unfolding, the change in nature attendant upon a change in degree. How necessity might arise out of chance. How difference might arise out of more of the same." (Ch 28)

Gosh, this was hard work to read. But so worthwhile. I suspect that the verbal dexterity and the unquestionable polymathic brilliance of the author will mean that this book lingers in my memory long after easier but more trivial books have been forgotten.

August 2023; 675 pages

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

"A Box of Birds" by Charles Fernyhough

This is a high concept novel of ideas with some great characters, some fantastic settings, and some beautiful prose.

In this slightly dystopian novel set in the near future in UK-Dthe narrator is a female neuroscientist, Dr Yvonne Churcher, working with humans and animals to discover the secrets of the Lorenzo Circuit, a critical feature of human memory. Her problem, apart from the obligatory failed love affair, is that she has lost her sense of self. From her study she knows that her consciousness is an illusion: there is no control centre in her brain, she is a seething mass of conflicting thoughts; her identity depends on which thought happens to be uppermost at any one time. 'Me' is a body, a single unified encasing shell. Her mind is, as it were, a box of birds (which is an idea derived from Plato's Theaetetus:

• "I’ll be back to being a network of activity, one neural cluster buzzing another neural cluster, one lot of bio-electrical traffic taking the ring-road around the soul; one deluded meat puppet sizing up another deluded meat puppet and wanting to fight it or fuck it or whatever." (1.1)
• "‘I’m empty,’ I say. ‘There’s no “me” to do the thinking. I’m an illusion. The confection of a restless, pattern-seeking brain.’" (1.3)
• "Plato said the mind is like an aviary full of birds, one for every thought or memory you’ve ever had. They’re all there, all these thoughts and bits of knowledge: the problem is catching them." (1.4)
• "Where does your sense of morality come from, if you’re just a bundle of nerves? Why did you want to come here today, if you didn’t have a self to do your wanting with?" (2.10)
• "Consciousness is a confection, the fantasy of a brain obsessed with finding coherence, and I’ve been trained not to trust it." (2.14)

Another important idea is that promulgated by James and his friends in the squat where he lives. They are mimicking Christ's disciples, all being intended suicides rescued at the apical moment by 'David Overstrand' a semi-mythical figure whose death has (perhaps) been faked. They are named after the places they were rescued, for example 'Level Ten' was on the top floor of a multi-storey car park from which he intended to jump. They believe that what is important is the story that you tell and that there are many possible stories for the same evidence. Thus their animal rights group is called Conscience, Con-Science, because they believe (like certain post-modernist social scientists) that science privileges only the scientific method as a way of arriving at the truth and there are many more.

• "‘Reality?’ Level Ten says. ‘The objective truth about the world that only science can deliver? Nice one, Yvonne: you just told a really good story.’" (2.9)

But the novel is also a fast moving thriller with a number of exotic locations, such as Yvonne's  lab where she experiments on genetically modified mice and her treehouse home, the squat where James and his animal rights activists live, a conference hotel in Florida, a tea hut on the moors, the underground tunnels of an old lead mine,  and a church in Verona. The three principal characters are:

• Yvonne: a neuroscientist haunted by the thought that there is no 'she' in command of her consciousness but only a dynamic ragbag of thoughts and impressions which are scarcely under control. She is recovering from a failed relationship with fellow neuroscientist Marius and now really, really fancies her student James: "The light from his bedside lamp is gilding the arches of his insteps." (2.10) was a line I found utterly original, conjuring up a hauntingly beautiful and even sexy image.
• James: a member of a group of animal rights activists who were each on the point of suicide before being rescued by their semi-divine guru 'David Overstrand'. James copes with his box of birds by telling stories to himself and acting out a variety of different roles so that it hard for Yvonne (or perhaps James himself) to know who he really is ("It’s not what’s beneath the layers, it’s the fact that the layers are there at all. He’s like me, in that respect. The layers are what he is."; 2.16; "Sometimes you can get a better idea of who you are by being someone else. The gods have always known that. The avatars, the incarnations: anyone but who they really are."; 2.24) in particular whether he is her ally or systematically betraying her to the enemy.
• Gareth: a young prodigy computer hacker who insists on calling Yvonne, his tutor, 'Miss'. Gareth wants to recreate consciousness and steals Yvonne's work on the Lorenzo Circuit. This makes him a target for Sansom and he has to go into hiding, where he remains for most of the story.

I found the overall setting of the book a little problematic. When is is set? An eighty-five year old lady remembers the Shadows: "She’s twenty-four again. England is new. The Shadows cruise down the dual carriageway under our window, quiffs a-tremble, Strats zinging in the breeze. And on the back seat of their convertible Rolls, a young immigrant bride cannot think about dying, can’t see into that distance, cannot even frame the thought." (2.9) This suggests a dating of around 2016. The university town is described as mediaeval and there is a football riot, all very modern day, but the undergraduates are called 'betas' which conjures up images of Brave New World and there are other images which suggest a little higher tech than I am expecting. There is a mixture of fictionalised locations and real locations which threw me. Perhaps this muddle is deliberate and meant to unbalance me, as when Gareth insists on calling his university teacher 'Miss', a title more often reserved for teachers at primary school.

This book is therefore a sort of James Bond thrillers with a wreck of a car, some truly exciting but realistic locations, a convincing reason for the baddies to be bad (they are searching for a cure for Alzheimers which would be fantastically profitable) ,some realistically flawed characters, and some great prose:

• "James has scented it, the doubt that’s at the heart of me. It’s like I’ve thrown open a door onto a party you can hear from the street, only to show that there’s nothing there." (1.1)
• "Rain scores the windows, etching obscure diagrams onto the glass, cross-hatching areas of substance and uncertainty." (1.3)
• "Fixed in oils on the walls, long-dead churchmen avoid each other’s stares." (1.3)
• "Owl-hoots lob back and forwards in the moonlight." (1.5)
• "A fierce burning breaks out on my neck, metastasizes to my armpits, and then fades to a fizzy calm." (1.5)
• "A car is not a self-portrait. Just because my vehicle is falling apart, it doesn’t mean my life is." (1.6)
• "I want to imagine her in an impossible bikini, busty and lithe, the talk of the subcontinent. Now, at eighty-five, her skin has the powdery wrinklings of a nutmeg." (2.9)
• "A thin mouth that looks as though it’s tasting tin." (2.9)
• "A river is the only true absence in a city. You can’t build on it, fill it with rubbish, park your car there. You need that connection with nothingness in the midst of all the chaos." (2.9)
• "Most of the time he’s just another well-spoken beta, with that flat way of talking which is a sure sign that there’s something he’s trying to hide: a privileged background, a dad with a title, one of those bonuses of birth that do so much to smooth the transition into Lycee life." (2.10)
• "He’s too gauche and playground-fresh, too certain that he’s already conquered the world, to pick a fight with." (2.10)
• "He’d bought me two pints of some medal-winning beer, and I was well past my irretrievable blab point." (2.10)
• "College was getting me down. It was full of really safe people who just wanted the dream home and the dream holidays and the whole vacuous affluence deal. They thought having money would give them freedom to make choices. Yeah, choices between this kind of soulless shit and that kind of soulless shit." (2.10)
• "America. When I was a kid and it only existed on TV, I thought it was made of a different substance to the world I knew." (2.11)
• "The shower is so powerful that I come out expecting to see hail-damage on my skin." (2.11)
• "There is a hell specifically for academics, that you can spend your whole life banging away at a problem and there can be people on the other side, banging away at the same rock." (2.11)
• "Around one corner I come across a toy-sized Latino going at the floor with a carpet-sweeper. There is no dirt to sweep up. It feels like a terrible injustice, that this harmless man should be made to waste his time on an utterly clean corridor. He’s the human slave in some apocalyptic future’s robot world, dwarfed by space-station architecture. I want to talk to him, ask how you can have your pointless tasks set out for you in the minutest detail and still manage to go about them with dignity." (2.11)
• "A minibar is a beautiful thing. It gives you no anxiety of choice. You start with the ready-mixed cocktails, move on to the beer and macadamia nuts, and finish with Toblerone and whisky." (2.11)
• "His dog collar is a wonky Möbius strip." (2.13)
• "There’s a bruised looseness under his eyes, signs of sleeplessness." (2.14)
• "Sometimes he has the face of a hassled executive, a kind of clammy, bloated frazzlement. I wonder what happened to the face he deserves." (2.14)
• "Her real name’s Stephanie. Needless to say, she hates her real name." (2.16)
• "It’s one thing getting lost in the fog. But getting lost on a clear blue day, when you can see for twenty miles and still have no idea where you’re going — that’s a whole different kind of lostness." (2.16) Nice metaphor. Gareth has told her that he has given her a clue and it is in plain sight but she just can't see it. Also a metaphor for Yvonne herself, lost in trying to make sense of her box of birds.
• "Every terrifying thing you can possibly imagine can take shape in that darkness. The brain works overtime, making its hypotheses, and they’re never proved wrong. And forests are noisy places." (2.16)
• "I consume it like a shredder." (2.17)
• "I’m the decided, not the decider." (2.19)
• "Your cortex has only got a part-time interest in the truth. For the rest of the time it’s a deceitful egotist, just wanting to suit its own needs." (2.19)
• "When the big stuff happens you feel it directly in your body, opening taps and setting hormonal fires, squeezing the gut like nicotine." (2.21)
• "With their dinner parties and the whole sick rigmarole of suburban fakery; they’d made it so that being alive was no different to not being alive." (2.24)
• "You can’t be bigger than your own story." (2.24) Is this another version of the Godel Incompleteness Theorem?
• "Graceful dying is just the proof of it. She’s going out as she came in, a bundle of automatic routines that can cope perfectly well without the buzz of being here." (2.27)

This is one of those books which I will remember for a while. It has some brilliant characters and some powerful ideas. I am not sure that the thriller genre is best suited to it. It is a novel of ideas and that sits ill with the fast pace and conventions of a thriller. I loved the locations and the luxuriousness of the prose nudge it towards the genre of literary fiction. 

A novel in which the author has attempted a great deal. It may not have been perfectly realised but it is still powerful and haunting. April 2020

The author is a genuine scientist whose research into the voices we hear in our heads is summarised in the very readable book: The Voices Within.