Book review: Mr G: A Novel About The Creation

Snow said in his Rede Lecture “So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had”.

Notwithstanding the breathless enthusiasm of Brian Cox or the bestseller status of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time, the general level of scientific knowledge among those involved in the arts is not, fundamentally, much better. There may be a broader superficial acquaintance – but Snow’s point seems, to me, to stand. Put another way, it’s as difficult to find someone who doesn’t know that E=mc² as it is to find someone who actually understands what it means. There are notable exceptions. Thomas Pynchon’s fantasias on entropy and David Foster Wallace’s vertigo at infinities stand out; closer to home, Andrew Crumey and China Miéville have winningly imagined the ramifications, paradoxes and sheer strangeness inherent in quantum physics.

Alan Lightman is in the same category. The first person to hold a joint professorial appointment in science and humanities at MIT, his 1992 novel Einstein’s Dreams was a bestseller and The Diagnosis in 2000 was a remarkably prescient account of technological excess and information overload. His new novel, Mr g, is a complete and unabashed delight, and should be required reading for those still stuck in Snow’s intellectual chasm.

The narrator – one assumes he is the titular Mr g, although he is unnamed in the text – lives in the Void with his Uncle Deva and his Aunt Penelope. The novel opens: “As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe”. The first three words are crucial: in the moment Mr g makes his decision, time itself is created. Beforehand, everything was simultaneous; and even consciousness was latent. Aunt Penelope is furious: “You should never have created the past and the future. We were happy here. See, now I must say were, where before … Oh! There it is again”. Undeterred, Mr g creates a universe, and its necessary potentiality creates countless others. Encouraged by Uncle Deva to concentrate on one and really do his best with it, Mr g selects a universe – he calls it Aalam-104729 – and rolls up his sleeves, metaphorically.

Lightman’s witty, charming novel is in part an extended cadenza on Hume’s lines from the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: “This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.” Mr g’s creation of the universe has unforeseen side-effects in the Void. Firstly, in creating the universe he begins to understand himself, and his act of volition creates a shadowy counterpart, Belhor and his scurrilous pet Baphomet, who often question Mr g about his intentions towards Aalam-104729.

Mr g agrees that, having established his universe, he will not interfere with its development or intervene in its evolution. He establishes three rules: it is symmetrical in time and space, there are no absolutes – everything is relative – and every event is necessarily caused by a previous event.

From these rules, quarks, muons and bosons lead to atoms, stars, molecules, planets, proteins, life and eventually minds. There are some very funny, knowing and surprisingly tender moments as Mr g observes creation: when the first photons appear he says. “Thus, when I created matter and energy, I also created darkness and light, and I decided that these things were also good, although I was not sure at the moment exactly what they would be good for.”

Lightman wonderfully conveys the sheer scale – the trillion-ness – of this universe, and it is scale, and the chance afforded by it, which leads to the minds that can wonder what lay behind the first cause. In one scene, as he ponders the nature of consciousness, Mr g sits, unobserved, on a planet, heaping together a “gelatinous hodge-podge of cells”, trying to ascertain when biochemistry becomes sentience. It is only when he prods with it a stick – a lovely counterpoint to Michelangelo’s divine finger in the Sistine Chapel Ceiling – that the organic lump realises “Something is out there. Something is out there. Something is out there and it has touched me.” The whole history of the universe is, in a banal and glorious way, the history of things banging together.

The scientific story gradually gives way to an ethical one, as Belhor interrogates Mr g on death, suffering, the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”, and Penelope and Deva advise on responsibility, beauty and whether or not there should be such a thing as a soul. Although the story of the universe proceeds as one might expect, there is enough mystery in the lives of the immortals to keep the reader enchanted. Mr g more than stands comparison with Italo Calvino’s similar work, Cosmicomics in blending science and art, fact and feeling.

There is, after the last star winks out, a final twist that alert readers will be expecting. As the book closes, and Mr g thinks about whether or not to have another bash at this universe business, we understand that what we did not see was the emergence of beings with two arms, two legs and two eyes on the third planet from a yellow sun. We have been reading, as Thomas Carlyle said, “the tragedy of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted by particular desire”.

• Mr G: A Novel About The Creation

BY Alan Lightman

Corsair, 256 pp, £9.99