Rating:2/5
Review:
Very disappointing
I have enjoyed Edward St. Aubyn’s work in the past but I was very
disappointed in Double Blind – so much so that I gave up before the
end.
The story is of
three friends and associated characters and is well summarised in the
publishers’ blurb, as two of them embark on a deep love affair and
another becomes seriously ill with a brain tumour. St. Aubyn uses
this on which to hang a lot (and I mean a lot) of talk and internal
monologue about the nature of science, the roles of genetics and
environment in human development, psychoanalysis, ecology, mental
illness, where and how brain activity becomes consciousness...and so
on.
He writes well (of
course), although I found the dialogue a bit clunky at times, with
things like this when discussing memories: “ ‘I’ve heard that
some people can catch a ride on a madeleine,’ said Hunter, ‘but
the French already have the patent on that low-tech time machine.’
” Really? As a spontaneous remark in a discussion? Hmm. I also
found some of the characterisation a bit crude, especially the
thoroughly unsubtle contrast between Francis, the poorly paid but
sincere ecological researcher who is lovely, mindful and holistic,
and Howard, the billionaire grasping, exploitative, drug-riddled,
reductionist sexual predator.
What really got me,
though, was the sheer hogwash talked about science in places. There
follows a lengthy quotation from the book which both gives a flavour
of its style and content and also illustrate why I got so annoyed
with it:
“Space, instead of
being a desolate interval between pinpricks of sentience, must be the
conscious medium in which these more obvious forms of consciousness
were concentrated. If matter was not inherently conscious, then one
had to fall back on the official story that the pinpricks of
sentience existed in an otherwise inanimate universe thanks to a
mind-numbingly long poker game in which the elements of the Periodic
Table had been dealt out again and again until one bit of deadness
haphazardly acquired the Full House of life, and then only a few
million hands later, the Royal Flush of consciousness. This Royal
Flush Theory was defended by three rowdy musketeers: Randomness,
Complexity and Emergence. Hurrah! They came with all the plumage and
the inane bravado of swashbuckling heroes who love nothing better
than to get themselves into an impossible position: fighting for
reductionism’s attempt to subsume the irreducible. Despite all
their rooftop antics, the only proposition they really had to offer
was that luck multiplied by time transubstantiated matter. It was
like claiming that if a child played Lego for long enough her mother
might come down one day and find a blue whale emerging from the
carpet. After the initial struggle to get her smartphone back from
the whale in which enough consciousness had emerged for it to google
the location of the nearest beach, and after telling her daughter to
please stop playing with that Lego set, a certain perplexity might
set in about how matter had rearranged itself so unexpectedly. The
authoritative answer would be that it had become complex thanks to
Complexity, and that once Complexity passed a critical threshold,
consciousness emerged thanks to Emergence, and that it was forbidden
to think that consciousness was involved at any earlier stage because
Randomness had been placed there to banish superstition. This
explanation might not strike the puzzled parent as entirely
persuasive. It was, after all, a creation myth with many rivals.”
And:
“Science had swept
away these childish stories of sneezing gods and dreaming gods, of
divine artists and divine sperm, of golden rain and copulating swans,
in order to place some thoroughly sanitised but equally
non-explanatory concepts at the inception of its narratives.”
And
“How It Began, a
subject to which the only coherent response was silence.”
This is not the
place for a detailed thesis on the philosophy of science, but I will
say that
a) Evolution is a
mind-numbingly long poker game, but the theory stands up to every
test to which it is subjected, and
b) Current theories
about the origins of the universe are most certainly not Creation
Myths. They have both a logical, evidential structure and, vitally,
predictive power. The “non-explanatory concepts” are simply
statements that our knowledge is incomplete - but one of science’s
great strengths is that it acknowledges when it doesn’t know things
but strives to learn more. The science which works on the origin of
the universe has brought us, among many, many other things, the
internet and Covid vaccines. Creation myths have not. And the idea
that our only response to the question of how it all began should be
silence...well, ironically, words fail me.
Enough. I ploughed
on through a good deal more of this stuff in a wide range of subjects
but found it deeply unsatisfying and sometimes thoroughly annoying.
Eventually I decided that life was too short. There are some good
things about this book, but there is also a good deal of utter
hogwash. I expected better from Edward St. Aubyn and I can’t
recommend this.
(My thanks to
Vintage Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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