Science and Romance

These two novels will appeal to readers who hope through fiction to learn something—one of the books delves into the intricacies of higher mathematics while the other offers more than glimpses into the rarefied world of particle physics. But what we learn much more is what it is like to live in a certain time and a certain place. In Robert Carr’s Continuums, that place and time is Ceausescu’s Romania in the 1960s and ’70s; in David Manicom’s Anna’s Shadow, it is Moscow in the late autumn of 1993 with Mikhail Gorbachev’s experiment with democracy imploding around Boris Yeltsin’s ears. The main characters in both books are brilliant women (there is something about strong, able East European women that seems to appeal to the western male, including the western male writer), each trying to get out of her country: Anna Mikataev is a physicist at work on something so sensitive to the global arms race she needs to be given refuge in the basement of the Canadian embassy; Alexandra Semeu is a world-renowned mathematician hungering for the opportunities available to someone of her stature in the West. But while the main characters are brainy Eastern Bloc women, their accompanying protagonists in both cases are Canadian men enlisted to aid their cause.

David Manicom, who has written seven other books of non-fiction and poetry, has a day job as a Canadian foreign service officer, currently in India. But he was once posted to Moscow, which is where he recreates for his characters, Anna and the Canadian mid-level embassy analyst Adrian, that world of the embassy and the little island of foreigners operating in an environment that is not so much hostile as perplexing and unknowable. Around them, as Yeltsin in the Kremlin faces off against the parliamentarians in the Russian White House, the world is in flux. “This is the era of deep conspiracies but also deep disarray,” Manicom has one of his Russian characters offer at one point. On one side is the old paranoid Soviet Russia not quite yet dead; on the other, the new crazy oligarchic Russia not quite in full throttle with no Vladimir Putin yet in sight to forge the synthesis. “There is always the question of who is manipulating for money or power, and who is just lonely and desperate to keep their job and family intact.” Having no idea otherwise what it would be like inside a foreign embassy at that time, we trust Manicom’s depictions to be authentic. His ability to convince us simply through how he has his characters behave in their comings and goings—the poignant little parties they and their families hold in the sad (but safe) embassy canteen, the concern with how the Canadian Football League is doing back home, the sense that they can only trust one another but by the same token cannot actually do that either—is the greater strength of the book, in some ways more compelling than the plotted narrative.

It is greater because the book wants to be a thriller. Much of what transpires in the action around Anna and Adrian is spy-versus-spy reminiscent of the sketches in MAD Magazine in the 1960s. Everyone could be a potential double agent. The Russians have at least two known security services at odds and in competition, if not at cross-purposes, with one another. On the other side, the Americans and even the Canadians are up to their elbows in their own intrigues. Absent is the slapstick, even lighthearted nature of the MAD cartoons, although everything is just as solipsistic, with the drama often superseding the stakes and that making everything a bit precious or even ludicrous. Which is, I guess, what you get when paranoia rules.

Manicom provides some nice bits of description like this of a provincial administration building: “It was lumpish, a ten-storey cube fronted with heavy blocks of reddish stone grimed by decades of industrial soot and trimmed in black at every opportunity: black doorways, windows, cornices. It had been built after the war using the labour of German prisoners and the designs of architects Stalin had forgotten to have shot.” But there is a density to the story that is sometimes hard to follow, involving explanations of both the intricacies of particle physics and also the gamesmanship of the foreign embassies. The reader can try to sort through these, or simply allow such complexities to serve as a stand-in for the real complexities of the moment of history, a collapse of something and a birth of something (equally paranoid and secretive) else.

Less intense is Robert Carr’s Continuums, to which the author likewise brings his personal experience and worldview. Carr was born in Bucharest in 1945 and fled Romania’s communist regime in 1969, the year he chooses as the beginning of a saga that then stretches over the next two decades in the life of Alexandra Semeu. High-end mathematics and the lives of its practitioners are the palette, and the reader needs to be ready for (and ready to appreciate) long passages of esoteric stuff. An example: “Why,” Aroso says, “is the distribution of primes [prime numbers] so messy? It just doesn’t fit the elegance of other laws of nature. And yet, is there anything more basic and important than the prime numbers? They are the basis of all numbers, and numbers are the fabric [of] all the laws of the universe. We accept the simplicity of E=mc2 as natural, and also as an intuitive confirmation of what our logic has told us to be true, but when it comes to the flow of prime numbers, we have only approximations. Aesthetically unappealing, too, these approximations. Complex, ugly.”

Alexandra’s character is joined serendipitously by a Canadian mathematician from Montreal, Charles, with whom she collaborates on a book and then an escape—going out of Romania to attend a conference and never looking back. She forms a romantic alliance with Charles, although one of the problems of the story is that we are never convinced that this is very strong. In both books, romance is supposed to connect the female characters with their Canadian saviours. Regrettably, in neither case are these relationships fully enough fleshed out to actually convince. Continuums, as well, goes off at some considerable length with a parallel biography, that of Alexandra’s mentor, Professor Aroso. A lot of this is handled second-hand, not engaging the reader as much as I suspect the author would have hoped. One wonders as to the purpose of this parallel, even competing narrative.

What is interesting are some structural techniques the two authors employ. Manicom sets his story inside a real, historical drama, creating the context within which the events of his novel could plausibly occur; nothing new here, but he does it with considerable skill. Carr goes further, trying something a bit daring by having his fictional characters interact with actual people, now-dead mathematicians of some fame and all google-able on the internet. People from the world of mathematics such as David Hilbert, Richard Courant and Olinde Rodrigues show up as figures with whom the book’s fictional characters have associated. The most important aspects of both books, though, are the success the writers have in putting us in Moscow, where the eerie suspense is palpable every time you see the shadowy KGB car idling across the street in the murky gloom, or in Bucharest, where a party apparatchik shows up to occupy his chair for every university departmental faculty meeting. What must it have been like to have to live like that?