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. We didn’t like that.
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”.
In Duncan's fiction, the Irish realist tradition converges with a cerebral European mode
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. It’s a feat of engineering that the story can cut between these two temporalities and their respective revelations, as it plays with multiple philosophical traditions, while navigating the landscapes of the several distinct historical settings to which the novel takes us.
Beyond these accomplishments, A Thought Without Collision does not feel abstruse or tricksy to read. Its mysteries, like the mysteries of the universe, are not here to infuriate reading groups. When Catherine’s father stakes his farm on American stock market investments, we see how floating abstractions are tethered to material realities.
From his debut, Love Notes from a German Building Site, through The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth, all Duncan’s novels share a meticulous, patient narrative voice. While some have leaned on a blurry psychological disintegration for their denouement, here the conclusions are more definite: with economic gestures, he offers glimpses of the characters’ new worlds. The novel often reads as a realist Irish rural story: hens underfoot, cold black tea on the table, drizzle. Catherine, so dignified, with a bone-deep sadness contracted via childhood tragedy, could almost be a William Trevor character. But in Duncan’s fiction that tradition converges with a cerebral European mode that is drawn to philosophy, architecture, madness and exile. I can’t think of another writer who draws from the same seams in any comparable way.
The prose is exceptionally, perhaps deceptively, straightforward. When Alois makes dinner, he “sets a dark pot on his range to boil. He then lifts a skillet from the wall and begins to heat it up. He takes butter from his tiny pantry and carves a half-inch cube from it. Then he takes a delph pot from a cupboard and from it lifts two eggs, with which to prepare an omelette.”
This physical attention is intense (there’s more detail here than in a cookbook) but not sustained (it isn’t Knausgård), and so the close descriptions, when they come, seem weighted with something other than themselves. What is the “tiny pantry” here to impart? Is it contextual detail, or a metaphor? We might consider the relation to Wittgensteinian language games; the differing positions played by words as they arise from, and become a part of, actions in the world.
There is also a plainer effect of this superfluity of precision, which is that it feels suggestive – like a photorealistic still life, where the careful replication of detail is an occasion to meditate on something seen through it. In A Thought Without Collision, every half-inch cube of butter makes you wonder.
• A Thought Without Collision by Adrian Duncan is published by Tuskar Rock (£14.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
