Andrew Crumey
Picador, £7.99
IT IS an interesting fact that two of the most brilliant and experimental writers of what we could call scienti
fic fiction began with academic specialisms in physics, that purest and most masculine of the sciences. Richard Powers, the experimental American writer, enrolled as a physics major in college before turning to English Literature. Andrew Crumey went one better and completed a PhD in theoretical physics.
The two writers on opposite sides of the Atlantic have been following parallel paths; each writing elegant literary novels which combine a deep understanding of theoretical science with ingenious narrative structures.
Some time ago, Powers was awarded a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation worth half a million dollars. In this country, Crumey, who served as literary editor of this newspaper, scooped the biggest literary prize going: a £60,000 grant from Northern Rock allowed him to write his latest novel full time. As it turns out, it was one of the bank's wiser investments.
Sputnik Caledonia is a bold advance on Crumey's five previous novels. In Möbius Dick and Mr Mee the reader often marvelled at Crumey's intelligence and narrative skill but sometimes longed for something resembling a character to put in an appearance. In Sputnik Caledonia Crumey's wit has matured into broad though intelligent comedy, science has been rooted in its social and historical context, and characters are distinct individuals, not types or exemplars of some narrative trick or astonishing twist.
Like Alasdair Gray's Lanark, which it resembles in both scale and ambition, Sputnik Caledonia is a novel in separate books in which a recognisable Scottish reality is contrasted with a distorted, fantastical version of itself.
Section one is a warm, nostalgic portrait of a West of Scotland childhood dominated by two powerful forces, the dreams of our hero Robbie Coyle, who wants nothing less than to go into space, and those of his father Joe.
Joe is the kind of humane, scientifically-minded socialist dad who often appears in Gray's novels. Because of his single-minded devotion to socialism (the Coyle's neighbours, the Dunbars, will be first against the wall come the revolution because of their conspicuously bourgeois lifestyle), Robbie decides that he wants to be a cosmonaut. He spends his time dreaming of a life in space, though disturbing pseudo-sexual thoughts flit across his pre-adolescent mind too.
In section two, Scottish social realism is translated into something more disturbing. Coyle has the chance to live out his own dreams in a fantasy land drawn from his father's: a secretive scientific installation on Scottish soil is devoted to the space race, but in an alternative political reality, a British People's Republic where the laws of physics are taught in terms of the timeless principles of dialectical materialism.
His mission is to travel to what in the capitalist world is called a "Black Hole". In one of this novel's wittiest asides he and his fellow recruits are told: "We reject the term, with its colonialist implications, its unsavoury air of medieval clericalism, its sheer inaccuracy." Before long it is dubbed the "Red Star". Will Coyle qualify for the mission, and will his messy, inchoate love life ever resolve itself into an adult relationship? The socialist paradise is closer to a prison camp than Robbie's dad would ever have believed. It has made spies of neighbours, subversives of Christians and prostitutes of decent women, forced to sell their bodies to the political elite to gain basic foodstuffs. It has also generated one of the most memorable villains in recent Scottish writing, the odious Davis, a senior party apparatchik who makes it his business to first root out, then exploit human weaknesses.
Section three is both a culmination and a contradiction of much that has gone before. We are back in the Scotland of the first section but Robbie's parents, Joe and Anne, are older, failing. Their broad comedy has soured in the face of family tragedy, Joe himself is teetering on the edge of dementia, and they are struggling to deal with the loss of their son. What has happened to Robbie?
Not everything works. The novel feels too long and should be edited in the middle. Robbie is an oddly inconsistent character, by turns dreamy and gentle, masterful and occasionally cruel, and the tone in the final section sometimes swerves too abruptly between comedy and pathos.
But the sweep and scope of Sputnik Caledonia should leave you breathless with admiration: not only do we learn, as we often have from Crumey's novels before, but we also laugh, a lot. The final revelation on which the novel ends is both emotionally powerful and intensely satisfying. Sputnik Caledonia is a quantum leap forward for the Scottish novel.
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