"A field guide to reality" by Joanna Kavenna (riverrun, 2016)

There are many drawings by Oly Ralfe - some of them double-page spreads, some sharing the page with text. It begins in Oxford, 1216. Then it jumps - "When dawn breaks, Grosseteste finds he is in Cairo. It is the eleventh century." (p.13). Then the action moves to modern, misty, gargoyled Oxford. Eliade is working in a cafe. Solete, a philosophy lecturer, dies, leaving her a chest. It's empty. She was hoping for a book. She tries to solve clues, visiting various experts on Reality. She searches his house (where Grosseteste once lived and thought about the nature of light - Oxford has a Jericho area; the house is on Mesopotamia) and goes to see the carver of a pine-cone shaped sculpture that he owned. He sends her to see Lydia Cassavetes. She goes to a museum of theoretical discoveries. There's a history of the ether, a summary of theories of light, from "Light emanating from the eye, and illuminating the objects we apprehend" to "The great age of reality represented in the stars. Cumulative light, from the long distant past. Background radiation from the origins of time". The top floor, about the future, is empty. She thinks that Locke's idea of heaven might be empty rooms. The book reaches a low point with the Society of the Universal Chrysanthemum. The dreams were bad enough. Now we get tea-induced trips. Grosseteste writes arabic in the air. There's an explanation (which I knew already, and have used in a story) of why Newton described a rainbow as having 7 colours. She has trouble holding on to reality. At Quantum Futures she's shown some equations but that might as well be arabic for all the sense they make to her.

The book improves with the introduction of ψ - Schrodinger's wave function, but also "It has a numerical value 700 ... But it can denote the paranormal ... it can also represent the rare nucleotide pseudouridilic acid ... Or, in astronomy, it represents the planet Neptune" (p.199). Or "Reality divided into THREE" (p.203). The denouement isn't worth waiting for.

It seems neither clever nor interesting to me - the alternative world-views are too shallowly depicted. Read "The da Vinci Code" instead.

Other reviews

Suzi Feay (It is refreshing as well as disconcerting to read a novel that sets aside convention so resolutely, and to encounter a heroine who is so quirky, curious and clever on her quest through the quantum Wonderland.)
• Stuart Kelly (The book’s restlessness in terms of genre – one minute campus comedy, the next elegiac wistfulness, bemused one minute and enthrallingly enlightened the next – perfectly mirrors the novel’s major theme. ... For all the cerebral shenanigans, the novel has a core of loneliness, where ideas can be more present to us than the living or the dead, where “what if” and “if only” are more tangible than the here and now.)
• Jonathan McCalmont (Some reviewers have likened this book to Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder as both works feature intellectual patriarchs who brutalise young women with unwanted journeys through the history of Western philosophy. The telling difference is that while Gaarder’s book is absolutely committed to the idea that pre-Socratic philosophers might have something important to tell us about the nature of the world, A Field Guide to Reality is considerably more cynical not just about academia but also about the very concept of philosophical truth. ... On a structural level, A Field Guide to Reality is an exquisitely clever piece of writing as Kavenna begins the book on a note of genuine anger at both the elitism of academic institutions and the absolute worthlessness that characterises much of their intellectual output.)