Book Review: The Genius in My Basement: The Biography of a Happy Man, by Alexander Masters

When you study mathematics at Cambridge – still the best place in the world to do so – two alphas in your finals will get you a third-class degree; five, a second-class; 12, a first. Simon Phillips Norton reputedly scored 50. Nearly 60 now, he lives in the basement of a house in Cambridge, in a pair of rooms of incredible squalor, living on a diet of rice and tinned mackerel, surrounded by piles of bus timetables dating back decades, among many other things.

Alexander Masters, who lives in the same house, has decided to write his biography. Masters has experience dealing with the flotsam of society: his award-winning Stuart: A Life Backwards told the story of how someone became homeless.

This is a less harrowing book. Its subtitle is “the biography of a happy man” and it tells how the most gifted mathematician in the country turned into someone most of us would cross the street to avoid. The result is not entirely a success. At one point he winkles out the catastrophe that made Norton lose focus on his area of mathematics. (Group Theory, and a subset of that, a theoretical puzzle he calls The Monster. Try to imagine a Sudoko square whose number of rows and columns is 54 digits long, and which exists in 196,883 dimensions). It was grief, says Phillips. And what caused it? In Norton’s own words: “Aaaaaahh, hunnh, ugggh … The 1985 Deregulation of the Buses Act.”

In other terms, this book is a complete success, producing something that enlarges not only our understanding of Group Theory, but of the human mind. The reader at first all but recoils from Norton’s eccentricity; but by the time Masters says, “Simon’s only mental pathology is an excessive desire to obey local housing law”, about a third of the way in, we begin to see what he means. By the end we have come just about to love him.

We relish his extreme precision – he’s always pulling Masters up on inaccuracies, sparking reflections on biography’s flawed nature – his bizarre behaviour, his lack of egotism, the noises. Let Norton have the last words: “Aaah, I mean to say … uuugh … it is and it is not about fun. Oh dear. Can I go now, please?”