Luke Davies: Isabelle The Navigator

Allen & Unwin

$39.95

Review: John McCrystal*

The first writer in English to explore the implications of contemporary cosmology for human beings was William Shakespeare. He recognised it for what it was - an attempt to explain reality - and his poetic instincts alerted him to its poignant futility in the face of the big questions of the human condition: why we die, why we live in the first place.

Twenty-first-century science, like the systematic religion of 400 years ago, is a way of explaining the universe. It has substituted infinity - immeasurable smallness and immeasurable expanse - for the omnipresence of God, and nothingness for damnation. It contains no fewer contradictions: notions such as nothingness at the heart of matter, order as a natural product of chaos take the place of the problem of evil created by a benevolent, omnipotent God. It has, if anything, less purchase on the human condition. Trying to understand our lives in scientific terms is like trying to understand the ecology of a rainforest from the workshop manual of a Hillman Avenger.

There's a recent trend for novelists to weave a little rocket science through their texts to show they're hip and at the cutting edge, to show they've got a handle on the existential implications of A Brief History of Time, quantum mechanics and chaos theory. Ian McEwan's A Child in Time was among the first, Alex Garland's The Tesseract is a more recent and particularly clever example, and there's even a local example, New Zealander Chad Taylor's Shirker. And to the list you can now add Isabelle the Navigator by Australia's finest young novelist, Luke Davies.

Isabelle has just lost two people she loves. First, her boyfriend was killed in a motorcycle accident. Then her father, a doctor who had been in a state of mental disintegration since being convicted of Medicare fraud, killed himself in a bizarre manner. Isabelle is learning to cope with loss. We learn the circumstances of each death, and the depth of her attachment to each man. Along the way, we get to know Isabelle.

And through bits and pieces from the journal in which her father charted his descent into madness, we get the rocket science.

Davies is aware, as Isabelle discovers, that peace of mind depends upon fiction, since "what everyone fails to notice, when talking to the other humans, to mothers and lovers and strangers in the street, is the one obvious point: 'future corpse, future corpse'." Death is a total negation and yet we ignore it; Descartes encouraged us to doubt that the world existed and yet it didn't stop him walking across the floor to his writing desk; quantum physicists reduce matter to nothingness in theory and yet, in practice, live ordinary lives.

That's the way our mind works. To her amazement, Isabelle finds herself able not only to move on from the deaths of loved ones, but even to be happy in their absence. We are left in little doubt that she will survive and even flourish.

Its subject matter is maudlin, but this is a supremely optimistic book. There are some creaky joins: some of the episodes Davies uses are too clearly magpied from his own recent experience, such that the inclusion of places he's been, people he's met make it read in places like What I did in my Holidays. But the characterisation is brilliant - it's a rare young male writer who can carry off first-person narration on behalf of a female character with such conviction - and Davies is a magnificent writer of prose. The same spare, limpid style that made the depressing lives of junkies into his memorable first novel Candy makes Isabelle the Navigator entrancing.

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.