Robyn Arianrhod, author of Einstein's Heroes, launched My Sister Chaos at Readings Books & Music Carlton most elegantly last month. Here's her speech:
I’ve always greatly admired fiction-writers for their use of language, and their inventiveness in creating and telling stories. However, although non-fiction writers cannot invent stories, we can try to be inventive in the way we tell them. Certainly in my own writing, I try to combine the novelist’s art of storytelling with ideas about the language, the people and the history of mathematics. So you can imagine how delighted I was when I discovered in Lara a novelist who has made use of the mathematician’s art!
And I do mean mathematical ‘art’ rather than ‘content’, because there are no equations in the novel; nor is Lara’s story about a sympathetic mathematical character – on the contrary, the main character uses map-making and the idea of mathematical proof to create an obsessive, emotionally dysfunctional kind of security. Actually, I’m usually wary when the pursuit of mathematics is assumed to be synonymous with a lack of emotion, but it turns out that My Sister Chaos uses the traditional divide between science and art in a transcendent way. I’ll talk more about that later, but to get back to my point about the ‘mathematician’s art’, it seems to me that Lara has used cartographic and mathematical metaphors to tell a story with two of the hallmarks of a good piece of mathematics: economy of expression, and conceptual complexity or intellectual sophistication.
By 'intellectual sophistication', I don't necessarily mean difficult or absturse. One of the beauties of Newton's law of gravity or Einstein's E=mc2 is that these equations can be understood by anyone who has studied elementary algebra. This type of simple, economical way of expressing deep ideas gives the mathematical language its spare beauty and elegance. Similarly My Sister Chaos is not difficult or abstruse, but what Lara has done is to create an intellectually elegant and economical way of telling an important but difficult story.
We are used to hearing every day about the huge ethical and practical dilemmas in responding to the twenty-first century’s horrifying number of wars and refugees – we are often overwhelmed by this knowledge and we don’t always know how to respond on a personal level. We may not want to think about such a difficult topic when we sit down to read a novel – but this is where the sophistication and economy of My Sister Chaos comes into it. There is no sensationalism; rather, Lara’s imaginative use of scientific metaphors facilitates a spare, economical story that enables readers to focus on the mental world of one refugee who, on the face of it, is just like many of us. She has a house and a job in a profession that she loves – but she has a secret inner life. Indeed, she lives almost completely in a world of the mind, albeit a fractured world torn apart by war, and papered over by the seeming normality of life in a country like Australia. It makes us wonder anew how many of the people living around us have terrible secrets that we know nothing about.
These awful secrets are also embedded in the mysterious way in which the story is told. We don’t know the names or nationality of the two sisters at the heart of the book – all we know is the bare outline of their history. And yet, in a way this outline is very dense: it is the sisters’ lives pared back to their essence, just as a few symbols in a mathematical equation can express the essence of a complex idea. This pared-back narrative expresses not only the effects of war, but also the essence of being an outsider, of the use and abuse of power, and the psychological effects of dislocation, discrimination, and trauma. These are huge issues that apply in various situations, and which often overwhelm us in their details. By using the mathematician’s art of focusing on universal patterns, however, Lara has enabled us to look at these issues in a different way.
As I’ve just indicated, the cartographer has a sister; she is an artist, and here Lara builds tension by drawing on the apparent divide between the arts and sciences. And, as I’ve already mentioned, it is only an apparent divide, a stereotype in which mathematicians are seen as logical and unemotional, while artists are supposed to be spontaneous free spirits. But Newton and Einstein, the most iconic mathematical physicists of all, were sometimes quite out of control emotionally, and in many ways they were completely free spirits. More importantly, they could not have built their rigorous mathematical theories with logic alone: they needed a goodly dose of ‘artistic’ imagination and intuition. However, as an emotional person myself, I do know the calming joy that comes with the complete certainty of pure mathematical logic and proof. So I understand why Lara’s cartographer turns to precise maps and the idea of proof in her quest for security and stability as she tries to heal after the appalling chaos of her recent past.
As for the tension between the obsessive, seemingly logical cartographer and her artistic, apparently free-spirited sister, the cartographer cannot allow herself to succumb to any emotion that might feed her fear of chaos. But as I said before, Lara ultimately transcends this traditional stereotyping of artists and mathematicians. On the one hand, her cartographer ultimately uses ‘logic’ in a way that embodies chaos, which fascinated me because in mathematics, too, logic can be used to analyse truly chaotic ‘systems’. On the other hand, mathematical ‘chaos’ is not always as chaotic as the term ‘chaos theory’ might suggest: it is true that in some applications, some mathematical models of reality cannot make accurate predictions over the very long term – recall the famous image of the flapping of a butterfly’s wings changing the long-term weather prediction half a world away – but this does not mean these mathematical models are chaotic or unreliable in all situations. Analogously, Lara’s artistic character is not as chaotic as she seems – and the reader discovers this in a denouement that is as thrilling as it is original.
Of course, all this is just my view: I’ve spoken about the beauty of mathematics, but one of the beauties of literature is that it often means different things to different people!
