A Game for Sharpened Knives

GAME WITH SHARPENED KNIVES

Neil Belton

328pp. | Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £14.99. | 0 297 64359 2




Erwin Schrödinger, who has the melancholy distinction of being the only
Nobel Prizewinner less famous than his own, imaginary, pet, was capable
of clear thinking at levels of rigour and abstraction that astonished
his colleagues and tamed the wild postulates of quantum theory. The
cat-matter, thought-experiment or parable, displays the intolerable
consequences of bringing into the classical physics of everyday life
the commonplaces of the quantum universe where choices are not
either/or but simultaneously both/neither. (The two outcomes, the
purring puss and the cat cadaver, are not opposed but “superposed”, a
humpty-dumpty word that enables six impossible things before breakfast,
and is every bit as scandalous as the Copenhagen interpretation, which
might be summarized as: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I
contradict myself”.)

Bold in speculation, in the problems of everyday life, and especially
in political and sexual matters, Schrödinger was muddled, cowardly and
self-deluding. He left the University of Berlin in 1933, denouncing
political interference in academic matters, and was admired by
democrats for his staunchness; a post was created for him at Oxford. In
1936, to the bewilderment of anti-fascists, and his patrons in
particular, he accepted a professorship in Graz, shortly before the
predictable Anschluss. Worse, he published an odious and fulsome letter
of apology. “We hope it is not too late for the deep heart of Germany
to forgive this latecomer”, he wrote. The National Socialists flaunted
his apology, but saw no reason to forgive him: within months he was
dismissed. He escaped to Italy, and was offered shelter and succour by
Ireland’s Taoiseach, Éamon de Valéra, who was a mathematician before he
was a revolutionary and dreamed of a Dublin Institute of Advanced
Studies. (During the Dublin meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, in 1957, I was continually told – in pubs and
other places – that Dev was one of the twelve persons in the world who
understood Relativity. A friend, assigned to watch him during a lecture
on theoretical physics, reported that he seemed at ease.) Negotiations
between the asylum-seeker and various reluctant bureaucrats were
awkward; Schrödinger required Ireland’s welcome to be extended not only
to his wife, but also to the wife of a scientific colleague who was his
current mistress and the mother of his child.

Dublin was not then the city of a thousand welcomes, the European
pleasure-city it has become in the past couple of decades. Neutral
Ireland, like the dead-and-alive cat that stalks discreetly through
these pages (even making an unobtrusive crossing of O’Connell Street on
the dust jacket), is – in Neil Belton’s reading – heavy with two
possible futures, and cautious politicians are preparing to welcome the
victory of either side. This even entails contemplating “how it might
be necessary to facilitate the identification of certain people of
alien origin deemed hostile to the de facto power . . . the Board of
Works might wish ‘to take cognisance of certain eventualities, for
example the need to allocate facilities of a temporary nature for
housing that sort of person’”. Meanwhile there are hundreds of
casualties in air raids on Belfast, and occasional bombs falling in
Dublin, as ambiguous (or rather as bivalent) as the unopened,
unresolved cat-basket.

Belton is writing fiction, not history, or even historical fiction; it
is not clear what restrictions of the imagination apply. The
mathematician is permitted long, carefully plotted, amply detailed,
reflective walks and cycle-rides about the shores of Dublin Bay; the
impatient may come to resent the intrusive ornithology. He roams, his
ruminations are pregnant with theoretical physics (and also genetics
and geology; on the matter of plate tectonics he seems to be better
informed than was possible in the 1940s). Timidly, I would assert that
the physics is unconvincing – not as physics, but as narrative. Some
streams of consciousness, though tributary to Anna Livia, are too
turbid for safe swimming, full of real and fanciful terrors, and
superposed felines, living and defunct. The reader, this reader, could
not help thinking, irreverently, “meanwhile, in Michael Frayn’s
Copenhagen . . .”.

On these walks, and elsewhere, there are a series of encounters with
obscurely threatening characters, several of whom scare poor Erwin half
to death, and with reason: Golz, refugee shoemaker and Nazi agent;
Keegan, well-informed policeman; silver-tongued diplomats who issue
obscure warnings; the small malignant smuggler who brings condoms
(inter alia) from the North. Altogether too much violent trouble seems
to be focused on Schrödinger’s peaceful suburb. None of this deflects
Schrödinger from his pursuit of the radical whistle-blower Sinead,
which involves him in multiple duplicity towards his previous loved
ones.

Neil Belton behaves with leisurely good manners towards his readers,
who are given, surely, sufficient warning not to expect any simple
resolution. I was gripped, but felt that at the end I was ungently let
drop. Unexpectedly, the most powerful writing is Schrödinger’s
extensive narration of his traumatic memories of the horrors of war,
memories from another battlefield, an earlier war – not, according to
the acknowledgements, Schrödinger’s memories, in truth. The box remains
unopened: not a resolution, but perhaps an explication of how the
curious cat got into that awkward predicament.


© 2005 THE TLS EDUCATION LTD