282- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

282- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey's Novels 

The Secret Knowledge

The Secret Knowledge (2013) is the seventh novel by Scottish writer Andrew Crumey. It was his first since returning to his original UK publisher Dedalus Books, and was awarded a grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Part of the writing was done while the author was visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. It was longlisted for the Guardian's "Not the Booker" prize.

Synopsis

In 1913, composer Pierre Klauer envisages marriage to his sweetheart and fame for his new work, The Secret Knowledge. Then tragedy strikes. A century later, concert pianist David Conroy hopes the rediscovered score might revive his own flagging career. Music, history, politics and philosophy become intertwined in a multi-layered story that spans a century. Revolutionary agitators, Holocaust refugees and sixties’ student protesters are counterpointed with artists and entrepreneurs in our own age of austerity. All play their part in revealing the shocking truth that Conroy must finally face – the real meaning of The Secret Knowledge.

Themes

Some of the action is set in Scotland at the time of the Battle of George Square. Other parts are set in France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the United States.

Specific reference is made to the socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, who appear as characters in the novel. A chapter set on Capri and based on Benjamin's love for Asja Lacis is written in the collage style of One Way Street. Benjamin's suicide at Portbou is also made part of the plot.

The novel is, in part, concerned with the concepts of the multiverse and quantum suicide, which have featured in previous novels by Crumey, and in articles and conference talks. Reference is made to motifs from Crumey's earlier novels, particularly the Rosier Corporation which appeared in Mobius Dick. The missing wife of pianist David Conroy (called Laura) appears to be the same character of that name, who appeared in Mobius Dick and is referenced again in The Great Chain of Unbeing.

Reception

Publishers Weekly called it an "intelligent work of speculative fiction" with "heavy-handed melodrama" in places, but said "the philosophical questions the book raises are clever and insightful."

Reviewing it for the Historical Novel Society, Lucinda Byatt wrote: "Whether this qualifies as historical fiction is a moot point: it’s set in multiple pasts... Described as an “intellectual mystery”, the book explores the illusion of progress in history, perhaps also in our individual lives, a tribute to Benjamin’s own theories. Interestingly, the women are the most coherent and linear characters: Yvette and Paige, in particular, but even the historical figure, Hannah Arendt, who appears in the book alongside Theodor Adorno.

The Sunday Herald reviewer Lesley McDowell called it a "novel of ideas... more accessible than some may expect, and more gripping and more encompassing, too."

James Smart wrote in The Guardian, "With its enthusiasm for secret societies and acts that echo through time, The Secret Knowledge mines the fruitful ground between Cloud Atlas and Foucault's Pendulum, but fails to reach the heights of either. The dialogue can be tooth-wrenchingly annoying... but some scenes – a febrile union meeting, a loaded meeting between rival pianists – are wonderful."

Sputnik Caledonia

Sputnik Caledonia (2008) is a novel by British writer Andrew Crumey which won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, the UK's largest literary prize at the time.

It depicts a Scottish boy who longs to be a spaceman, is transported to a parallel communist Scotland where he takes part in a space mission to a black hole, and returns to the real world in middle age, possibly as a ghost. The novel is in three “Books”, with the central one (set in the alternate world) being longest, predominantly serious in tone, while the outer sections are shorter and more humorous. The title refers to the Russian Sputnik program and the alternative name for Scotland, Caledonia, suggesting the idea of Scotland as a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

The book was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, losing to Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture. The other shortlisted authors were Mohammed Hanif, Adam Mars-Jones and Toni Morrison. It was also shortlisted in the fiction category of the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards, losing to James Kelman's Kieron Smith, Boy.

Plot

Book One

Robbie Coyle, nine years old at the start of the book, lives in Kenzie in Scotland's Central Belt in the early 1970s. He dreams of going into space; but because of his father's anti-American, pro-Soviet views, he wants to be a cosmonaut rather than an astronaut. He picks up an Eastern European radio station called Voice of the Red Star, imagines it to be a telepathic signal from another planet, and begs to be taken there.

Book Two

Nineteen-year-old Robert Coyle lives in the British Democratic Republic – a Communist state founded after the overthrow of Nazi occupation in the “Great Patriotic War” – and has arrived at the Installation, a secret military base in Scotland, to take part in a space mission. A strange new object has been detected in the Solar System, believed to be a black hole, and the volunteers are to explore it telepathically. Robert has confused memories of the time before his arrival, and the reader is left guessing the connection between Books One and Two. Perhaps the Robbie of Book One has been transported to the other world as he wished; or perhaps the Robert in Book Two is a “parallel” version of the younger Robbie in Book One. The Installation itself is like a “black hole” in the sense that people arrive from the outside, but nobody ever seems to leave - except perhaps in death.

Book Three

In a present-day recognisable reality, Robbie's parents from Book One are now pensioners. Their story alternates with that of “the kid”, a runaway 13-year-old obsessed with science fiction stories such as Doctor Who, and with the idea that “in an infinite universe everything is possible”. He meets a middle aged man (“the stranger”) who claims to be a spaceman on a mission. The stranger could be the parallel-world Robert grown older - or a terrorist engaged in identity theft. Resisting logical resolution, the novel reprises and reworks themes that have recurred throughout the course of the book, creating an aesthetic unity that is emotionally ambivalent: a juxtaposition of the comic tone of Book One with the dark pessimism of Book Two.

Reception

Jonathan Coe called Sputnik Caledonia "the most impressive achievement yet from a still undervalued writer: in its combination of dystopian science fiction with warm but unsentimental childhood memoir, it struck me as being firmly in the tradition of - and worthy of comparison with - Alasdair Gray's Lanark."

In The Scotsman David Stenhouse wrote that Sputnik Caledonia was one of "very few" Scottish literary works that "actually does come close to 'envisioning' an alternative version of Scottish statehood".

Ken MacLeod called it a "very fine novel", adding "it looks like SF. But it can't be read as SF... In Sputnik Caledonia, the parallel world is a metaphor of what is lost in every choice. That's why the book is literary fiction and not SF, and is all the better for it."

Critical analysis

David Goldie in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945 considered Sputnik Caledonia "reminiscent of Gray's Lanark in the way it doubles its central character, Robbie Coyle, a Scottish boy fixated on space exploration, with Robert Coyle, trainee cosmonaut in a parallel British People's Republic, contrasting homegrown Bildungsroman with dystopian counterfactual history."

Lisa Harrison compared Sputnik Caledonia with Matthew Fitt's But'n'Ben A-Go-Go. "Their fictive worlds are Scotland, though not as we know it - they each present a Scotland stripped of stereotyping, thus reformed and redefined through fiction."