Entanglement by Steven Boykey Sidley (Picador Africa)
This debut novel comes to us not so much entangled as garlanded in favourable shouts from no fewer than four South African writers and opinion-makers: Denis Beckett, Kevin Bloom, Rian Malan and Ivan Vladislavic. I mention this for the reader’s benefit.
I found it an enjoyable read but have a few reservations. Sidley creates a protagonist, Jared Borowitz, who is a physicist and a professor, esteemed in the academic world. No longer in the first flush of youth, into his second serious relationship and increasingly grumpy, Borowitz appears to be at a crisis point. Sidley explores his relationships with his girlfriend, Katherine, a psychologist, with his friend, bad boy Ryan, and sundry others.
It is reminiscent of the film The Big Chill and David Lodge’s novels set in university environs; it even has a touch of Woody Allen in that Sidley examines the concerns of the educated, the rich and the talented.
There is no specific country described, but the realm of global intelligentsia is familiar territory.
The book will amuse and delight many people who are fans of Richard Dawkins and others who have engaged the public imagination around science and rationality and who dismiss homeopathy, astrology, religion and so on.
It may annoy many others. And though it makes much of the primacy of rational thought and the significance and joy of science, the novel is ultimately about morality and the purpose of life.
Sidley creates a believable and interesting set of characters with clever and subtle dialogue. Much reading and research has gone into this novel, but he does have a tendency to explain too much.
One could argue that some fields of knowledge need to be elucidated for the common reader, but in a novel a fine balance is required, as is accuracy. A friend, well versed in popular science, who has studied Dawkins, Richard Feynman and Karl Popper, said there were places where Sidley had misrepresented some ideas.
This friend took particular exception to attributing to Popper the requirement that scientific proofs be “logical, repeatable, defensible, and unfalsifiable” when Popper’s most outstanding contribution to the field was his insistence that hypotheses be falsifiable.
Mixed up
Sidley has also attributed to Feynman a statement that is a mixture of Niels Bohr, Feynman and perhaps Lao Tzu.
There are several places in Entanglement where glib and insensitive attitudes are embedded in the text in such a way that one is not sure whether they are cleverly attributed to Borowitz, or are inadvertent revelations of the author’s mindset.
In a passage in which he extols the virtue of dining out with friends, Borowitz sees this as “an act of grace”. Driving through the city “he stares at the mad, dispossessed or hungry huddled in doorways with appropriate pity —”
Juxtaposed with the smug satisfaction of the “act of grace”, this seems arrogant. There are several such infelicities.
However much Sidley loves and admires his protagonist, arrogant and dismissive as Borowitz is, one feels the author is setting him up for a fall.
It happens when Borowitz and friends go off for a weekend in the country and events take a nasty turn.
Sidley creates a wonderful situation that has the reader hanging on the edge, only to bog down his narrative with many long explanatory asides. Generally, much tighter editing would have been good.