For several years I ran community groups that involved reading books aloud with other adults. Sharing the experience of reading in that way made me notice how, when one or more of us was baffled by a story, this bafflement was rarely experienced without an accompanying sense of mild anger. It was so easy to make us, the readers, angry – at the characters; at the author; perhaps even at the nature of this reality on which we’d lost our grip.
We were confronted with the fact that our capacity to understand the world was limited. Irish author Adrian Duncan’s fifth novel, A Thought Without Collision, takes risks with this bafflement: it relates and conveys an experience of being mystified by the universe. As it opens, in Ireland in 1923, it is becoming apparent that six-year-old Catherine has exceptional academic gifts, and that her father’s farm is failing.
In the next chapter, set in 1951, Dr Josef Alois, a Tyrolean émigré academic in his mid-50s, is living in his self-built house on the east coast of Scotland. He is alone until Catherine reappears, “a handsome woman in her mid-thirties”, and now an Oxford professor. The second chapter ends starkly: Alois “is more unwell than he believes and will perish in one month and eleven days”.
Details of Alois’s biography, and aspects of his two books, are drawn from the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The novel references the philosopher’s near-contemporaries, GE Moore, Gottlob Frege and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Like Alois and Catherine, these men laboured to establish a particular understanding of the world.
Some pages of A Thought Without Collision present diagrams or passages of algebraic logic. Throughout, descriptions of small, mysterious places (“pockets” in Catherine’s mind, pits dug in the ground, golf holes, a swallow’s nest) are emblems of the other worlds that surround us, intimated but not available to human knowledge. As Catherine’s intelligence becomes increasingly polymathic, her interest ranges from complex mathematics to animal sentience.
She pictures hidden worlds in the sky: a “plane of translucent and unconnected fragments above them all”. The narrative is related in short, alternating chapters that switch between the two time periods. This creates a sense of flickering movement, like chevrons on a motorway: we see Catherine’s life speed by, an effect intensified by Alois’s impending death.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
