The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt
| The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt | |
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| Category: Literary Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Lesley Mason
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| Summary: Academic goings on in pre-war Cambridge. Beautifully imagined – if only the maths didn’t get in the way. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 496 | Date: February 2009 |
| Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing plc | |
| ISBN: 978-0747596325 | |
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If you watch the American detective series Numbers on television and not only enjoy it, but actually follow the maths – then you will love this book. If, like most of us, you enjoy it because you skip over the maths, then you will eventually enjoy this book, once you realise you have to take the same viewpoint: the math isn't the point!
I had been lost so many times by page 30 I'd given up caring whether the theorems were real or imaginary. After all a theorem is imaginary until it's proven – and the point about most of these is that they haven't been. (I think?!) Certainly they hadn't been at the time of the story, which is the point at which the maths, which is not the point, is explained… Or not.
The good news arrives when the main protagonist, one G. H. Hardy, Cambridge mathematics lecturer (later professor), asserts that pure mathematics is essentially pointless. Intriguing. Beautiful. Absorbing. But of no practical application whatsoever.
That was the sanction I needed to stop trying to understand the numbers and start concentrating on the characters.
In January 1913 Hardy received a package from India, which contains a letter from a clerk working at the Madras Port Trust Office, who claims to be an untutored genius on the brink of solving one of the most important mathematical problems of the day. Hardy is not the only person in academia to receive this package, but he is the only one to respond. For reasons not entirely connected with the tantalising mystery offered by the Indian Clerk, but also rooted in Hardy's own personality and the petty politics of Cambridge society, he determines to bring Srinivasa Ramanujan to England.
That in itself proves no easy feat, since there are religious injunctions and difficult mothers to be got around first, but come to Cambridge the clerk does and thus begins a tale whose importance probably is only understood by those who get the maths. Sadly, I suspect they may never read it.
This isn't a history. It is a novel. But the facts of the story are true. Hardy and Ramanujan are real people. The one was instrumental in bringing the other to study under him at Cambridge. All of those peculiar conundrums are accurate. And Ramanujan really was a genius.
The fact that it is a novel – and purports not to be anything else – gives the author free rein to make not only Hardy and Ramanujan the people he hopes they were, but also to populate the pages with all of the other luminaries of the time whose paths they crossed – Bertrand Russell, D H Lawrence, John Maynard Keynes, Harald Bohr (brother of Niels), members of the Bloomsbury Group and the ladies of the Cambridge magazine among others – and make them equally as he imagines they might have been. Were any of them really like this? Who knows, but in the context it works.
Leavitt gives us a Cambridge to rival Brideshead's Oxford: just as full of camp effete dons and pretentious societies. Accepting that most English chaps at University in those days came up through the public school system, which might have had an impact, one can't help feeling that there must have been some among them who (a) liked women and/or (b) were really there for the actual work, the learning and the teaching. The few who fall into these categories in Leavitt's imagination are scorned by those who fit the stereotype…or fall foul of the free-loving ways of the upper classes, which won't touch the lower ranks for a generation or two yet.
It is a rich and characterful world, however, and in the context of the novel, utterly believable. The various reactions of the Indians in either trying to conform to English ways or steadfastly refusing to do so, is balanced by the reactions of the English from various strands of society to them. The middle class university wife's protectionist attitude born of one trip to India contrasts neatly with the London landlady, who simply learns the basics on the ground and applies them. The politics of the time are woven into the lives of these people. The approach of war and machinations of those who wanted to fight and those who (conscientiously or otherwise) didn't was not a minor matter. It touched people deeply, and this comes through.
Meanwhile, however, the backstabbing and high table sniping continue unabated in what remains of college.
Of course there also has to be a love story or two or more…
Hardy is on record as saying that his discovery of Ramanujan was the one romantic incident in his life. The sense in which he uses romantic in that quote is open to question. Whether he was romantically or sexually smitten with the handsome young Tamil or not, it is clear that he felt they had some kind of connection that went beyond the mathematical collaboration. Indications are that it was not reciprocated.
Meanwhile, one married couple have come to an accommodation that meets both their needs and disinterests, while another struggles under only half a realisation that such strains exist.
Discourses on religion and the nature of the universe almost go without saying.
It would be a most excellent read. If only one didn't keep getting distracted by wondering what those long strings of numbers and symbols and Greek letters actually mean. If anything.
I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to The Bookbag.
Further reading suggestion: for more mathematical biographical imaginings try A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin.
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt at Amazon.com.
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