Spatial awareness

Space travel meets Scottish socialism in Andrew Crumey's Sputnik Caledonia, says Euan Ferguson
Sputnik Caledonia by Andrew Crumey

Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

Picador £20, pp552

When it was still just a work in progress, this received the Northern Rock Writer's Award: £60,000, Britain's most luscious literary handout. Without much doubt, it was the best investment the doomed bank has made over the past few years.

Robbie Coyle grows up in Scotland in the early Seventies dreaming of flying to the stars. Not an astronaut, but a cosmonaut, for his father Joe's strong socialism (now looking as delightfully quaint as three television channels) colours much of the way the boy understands the world: the poisons of America, the hope of Russia. Joe's many monologues - crazed pieces of twisted internal logic, shot through with genuine scientific knowledge and a desire to teach rather than brainwash - are a nostalgic delight, caught just so; we warm rather than sneer.

Robbie, bright but odd, takes Einstein from the library in a bid to understand relativity. Crumey, a theoretical physicist as well as novelist - this is his sixth and undoubtedly his best - likes his parallel universes. So dear Robbie dies about a third of the way through. Or does he? There's a line mid-book when he asks one of his mentors: 'How do I know it's the truth?' The answer is: 'You don't. So, if you prefer, let's call it the next stage.' So, rather, Robbie goes somewhere else, sort of.

It is a dystopian parallel, a socialist Britain, and he's a soldier, picked for a space flight and trained in an institute, cut off from the rest of Scotland, the rest of the world, in the same way as happened with the real Russian intellectual institute, near Novosibirsk. This is where the reader's mild struggle becomes hugely rewarding.

Dystopia can be very badly done, simply echoes of other writers, but Crumey has created something that lingers long in the mind; more so, even, than the fictional town of Kenzie in which the book opens. The food, the layout, the threats and jealousy, the sex, the snobbery, the fear of the unspoken - all concrete, tastable, roundly imagined, deeply disturbing, no less so for the sudden and subtle, never crass, echoes, mixed and twisted, of characters from Robbie's early/real life. One of the strangest echoes, heard only after finishing the book, is the way the Seventies attitude (in Scotland at least) to women lingers on in the dystopia: they're either kindly, rather dumb matrons or super-bright if scary whores. At least, I hope it's a deliberate echo.

Robbie gets, sort of, to go to the stars. Not in any traditional sense, but through a complex series of psychic experiments to communicate, urgently, with a strange star hurtling towards Earth. It is only towards the end of this middle section you begin to realise, with a strange, late frisson, that the celestial body could be his parallel, early life. He does, at the end, make it back, physical years after he left Kenzie, but in two guises, older and younger, in time to meet his own father just before the latter's death.

Much is unexplained. The novel doesn't resolve itself. Nothing so simple. You are invited to use your own brain to grasp the links between Goethe and science, the circular thinking of Kant and the inward gravity of black holes, come out with your own answers, your own universe. There are echoes, here, of Alasdair Gray's Lanark: echoes, oddly enough, of Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up! And it can be read in a number of ways: a quiet tirade about the exploitation of communism, an imagining of how a very Scottish kind of global communism might have tasted (cold, grey, just a wee bit kinder) or even a not unsympathetic attempt to understand the skewed thinking of British apologists.

In a way, none of it should work but it does, gloriously. There is some beautiful writing, and quiet fun. Along the way one gets to learn a surprising amount about the historical, near-poetic links between hard science and philosophy. At the end, however, two aspects linger; the deftly drawn parallel world, a real haunting triumph, and the very real, very human, quietly tragic tale, only properly there at the very end, of a good if misguided man, father Joe, given up on competing global philosophies but struggling with something far harder, harder than Einstein or Goethe: to cope, simply, with the loss of his wee boy.

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