No stones unturned
The Stonehenge Letters is Harry Karlinsky’s second novel. Like his first, The Evolution Of Inanimate Objects, it’s presented as if it were a non-fiction book. It has an introduction, a postscript, appendices, a bibliography, photos, illustrations and diagrams. Oh, and footnotes.
Karlinsky is also a practicing psychiatrist in Vancouver. The conceit of this book is, while doing research on why Sigmund Freud was never awarded a Nobel Prize, a psychiatrist discovers an unknown cache of letters from a handful of early Nobel Prize laureates to the executor of Nobel’s will. It turns out there was a secret Nobel Prize the public doesn’t know about, and that only previous winners of the prize were eligible to apply. All this has been kept secret until now.
The secret Nobel was to be awarded to the person who could explain or discover the mystery of Stonehenge. The book follows a trail that begins with Nobel and his biography, including his successes and failures, his loves and losses and his establishment of the famous prizes.
Nobel was himself a scientist, a chemist and inventor of explosives. While on a visit to England to buy a parcel of land for use in his experiments, he visits Stonehenge and falls in love with the woman whose husband is trying to sell him the property. In the end he doesn’t buy Stonehenge and its surroundings, but he does keep up a lifelong correspondence with the woman. Through his affection for her, Nobel is prompted to contribute to the preservation of the historic site and to consider funding research into its origins.
After his death, the executors of his will discover his letters to this woman and his intent to set aside money for the prize. They inform the past winners of the Nobel of their eligibility in this new contest. Several of them take up the challenge. Their letters detailing their solutions to the mystery of Stonehenge form a part of this book.
What’s particularly delightful about Karlinsky’s novel is how difficult it is to separate actual fact from his fictitious imaginings. Although the reader does understand that the Stonehenge prize is completely imaginary, most of the details about the real historical characters are known facts. There are occasional spots where Karlinsky is winking at us, but never so obviously or so outrageously as to crack the veneer of his invented nonfiction narrative.
We’ve seen something of this kind of thing before; for instance both Jorge Luis Borges and Stanislaw Lem wrote reviews of imaginary books. But Karlinsky carries the idea through the length of an entire book, written as though by an expert for a general audience. It’s a clever and playful idea and he carries it off stylishly.
As far as the narrative goes, I found it slower to start than I expected. And I was hoping that the individual letters themselves would form a larger part of the book. But Karlinsky’s interest isn’t in the mystery of Stonehenge, it’s in the connections, links and influences between different areas of discourse: science, the arts, history and literature. As such he spends more time talking about the characters, their motivations and movements, than about Stonehenge. And thankfully so, because the last thing we need is another crackpot book calling itself history which turns out to be claptrap. Instead what we’ve got is a crackpot novel that turns out to be completely engaging and delightful. Michel Basilières’ second novel, A Free Man, will be published in 2015.