Fugue

 

A book set in the past which speaks so loudly to our present times as to be shouting in our faces. Except that it would do so in the most understated and droll manner behind a distinct partina of politeness and perhaps just a little condescension at our inability to appreciate the true architectonics of our financialised economy and society. One in which transactions are all ultimately mediated through money.

It would be unforgivable to say too much about the plot because there are so many delights to be savoured from the gradual unfolding of a series of ventriloquised perspectives on nominally the same events in which who is saying what and why is constantly in play.

There is also much joy to be had in considering who might be the model for some of the people at the heart of the novel, notably Andrew Bevel whose ambition to 'bend and align' reality so that he is always shown to have been, well, right is so reminiscent of so many powerful men and their equally powerful sense of entitlement. 

Men moreover who constantly refuse to accept that their success is a product of privilege or inheritance. All is down to their own genius. Unearned and unwarranted success is an anathema. Government intervention to prevent the great men from carrying out their vision is the great sin. 

Underpinning all of this is some spectacular gaslighting of the role of women and expressions of truly fundamental sexism. 

Yet the delicious irony of the book is that for all of the emphasis on mathematics and hard numbers it is art as much as science that underpins success.

One could almost say the music of mathematics. Bach would certainly have known that concept albeit with a side helping of the divine order and perhaps even numerology.

What an appreciation of the modernist novel and the music being written by the avant garde in the first decades of the 20th century provides is a sense that reality is just as much about what happens in the mind. 

Modernism was very concerned with technological progress. The outside world was changing but also how humans work inside, their psychology, the way that they thought about the world.

Modernists also rejected the omniscient narrator and 'character' as a nexus of social change. Interiority is much more important.

In the context of the novel there is a magnificent irony that the patterns of musical notation and the insights of the modernists which are concerned with understanding the dynamics of how things work in practice come to be considerably more significant than the assertion that genius, character and force of will are supreme.

The fugue is the perfect expression of the variations, the changes in order of the notes, the changes of rhythm. If you understand what causes the variations you understand the dynamics and you understand the world in practice, rather than in theory. 

In a nice parallel fugue is also a dissociative state of mind; in effect an amnesia for your own personality and identity resulting from long term trauma. 

For my money, so to speak, there is also a deliberate reference to Thales of Miletus; a pre-Socratic Greek philosophy who aimed to explain natural phenomena through hypotheses that referenced natural processes themselves. He might have based his system on water. What if, instead, the world is actually based on money?