FICTION: The Circles of Archimedesby Padraic Fallon Lintott Press 320pp £18.95
THIS NOT REALLY a conventional novel, I think it fair to say, but it is nonetheless a most admirable and stimulating work; and its author is not really a novelist, but he is a most interesting man. Padraic Fallon is the youngest son of the distinguished poet Padraic Fallon (the Elder). He is a distinguished financial journalist, chairman of a financial publishing company based in London, Euromoney, and a director of Daily Mailand General Trust. He is also a man of great learning and philosophical acumen, and it is nice to be able to claim him for Ireland.
Previously the author of a dramatised memoir of his childhood, A Hymn of the Dawn(2003), he embarks in the present work on an ingenious exploration of the personality and achievements of perhaps the greatest mathematician of antiquity, Archimedes of Syracuse. Since we really know sadly little about Archimedes the man (apart from the fact of his springing out of his bath, shouting "eureka", after having solved a problem about the displacement of masses), Fallon sets out to invest him with a personality and a history, and he does this most effectively.
He does it, though, in a most curious way, in the process weaving in mythological motifs from both Ireland and Egypt, and a rather attractive love story to boot. The book is made up of a sequence of passages: (1) Narrative, wherein is presented a scenario from the present, involving a wandering Irishman called Aengus (the mythological resonance is no accident) hiding out in the depths of the English countryside, taking an interest in a sinister character called Seth (again, Egyptian resonance no accident), who lives nearby, and his two dependent females, Kate (representing, I suspect, the goddess Hecate) and Bridget (giving a hint of the Celtic moon goddess Brigid); (2) The Greek, wherein the ghost of Archimedes communes with Aengus, and tells him his story; and (3) The Book of Aengus, a sort of diary or journal in which we learn progressively more of Aengus’s troubled past and convoluted mind. (He has a failed marriage with a drug addict behind him, has travelled over most of the world, and now lives in and for his books.)
These three segments are cleverly interwoven to produce what turns out to be quite a lively narrative, while conveying to us a great deal of admirably well researched information about Greco-Roman history, mathematics, cosmic physics and a host of other things besides. I will not spoil the story by revealing the denouement of the plot, but it holds the attention to the last page.
This book makes demands on the reader, but it is very much worth the effort. It is not a realist work of fiction but a distinctly surrealist one. One thinks of Hermann Hesse or someone such. There is fine description of scenery and wildlife, and of the various prehistoric monuments of that part of England. Its real subject, though, is nothing less than the structure and order of the cosmos (which is what Archimedes was in search of), and it is guaranteed to broaden the mind, if it does not blow it first.
John Dillon is emeritus professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin
