Four centuries back, Francis Bacon opined that certain books should be “chewed and digested”. Add “slowly” after the first verb and you start to get a taste of Madeleine Thien’s fourth novel.
Lina in middle age recalls the rainy season 50 years earlier, when she, at age 7, with her ailing father reached the Sea. Yes, with a capital letter. They’re part-way through an unspecified journey; a flight of some sort. There are intimations of climatic and political apocalypse.
Those who have travelled with them soon move on, but parent and child stay, in this place where conventional conceptions of place and time shift, reform, elude; where each window in the shape-changing warren of rooms gives glimpses of a different ocean.
The Sea is, or seems, a semi-abandoned, semi-derelict outpost of a semi-forgotten kingdom. But nothing definite can be said about it. In its ever-changing rooms, Lina meets an impressively assorted trio: a mid-20th-century philosopher escaping Nazi venom; an eighth-century Chinese poet called Jupiter; a 17th-century Jewish savant. If they bear striking resemblances to Hannah Arendt, Tang Dynasty scholar Du Fu and Baruch Spinoza, respectively, and if they happen to feature in the three randomly chosen volumes Lina and her father have carried into exile, what else do you expect in a setting of such disorientation and discontinuity?
Years pass. Lina spends much of her time listening to the above threesome, hearing about their lives. The narrative pulls sideways, backwards, upwards.
Philosophical and scientific expositions, plus historical narratives, pack the pages. St Augustine’s trinity is discussed. So are Einstein, plague in 17th-century Amsterdam, René Descartes’ peripatetic lifestyle, the “Eighty-Eight Immortals”.
There’s room also for the Maigret stories, a missile silo that’s now “the mother lode of servers and system mirrors”, how to grind a telescope lens, an upright Berlin citizen slapping a Jewish shopkeeper across the face, the Papist Tavern where chaps discuss cats’ souls. If variety were the spice of literature…
It streams on, inexhaustibly inventive and virtuosic. Characters glide in and out of other lands and decades. All of Lina’s riddling new friends have tales of voyages or journeys. All are concerned with preserving and interpreting books. And all discourse or meditate on virtue, truth or its non-existence, whether everything is always in motion, what to do when you love someone but can’t save them, and if “the perfect garden and the perfect wild” can co-exist.
Motifs of losing and rediscovering, yearning and accepting in a world that is frail yet enduring, thread through the novel. There are many questions, very few confident answers.
Words like “profound”, “subtle”, “contemplative” and “searching” are often applied to Thien’s fiction. This one builds a world of nuances and glimpses, and does so in close, meticulous prose that alters with each voice, offering metaphor and mathematics, poetry, Mandarin and Spanish.
Step carefully through it. Don’t fret about what you don’t understand; take pleasure in what you learn. Yes, it’s a novel that makes you work hard. Very hard. Nothing wrong with that.
The Book Of Records, by Madeleine Thien (Granta, $32.99), is out now.
