Weaving science into fiction

‘ARCHANGEL’ by Andrea Barrett. W.W. Norton & Co. 238 pages. $24.95.

“The Ether of Space,” the second of five interlaced stories in Andrea Barrett’s elegantly contemplative new collection, takes place in 1920. Like the other four tales, and like Barrett’s National Book Award winner, “Ship Fever,” it is immersed in a scientific world of the past and set at a juncture where science and history collide. At that time, Einstein’s theory of relativity was supplanting earlier ways of envisioning the universe.

This story’s main character, Phoebe Wells Cornelius, is a successful popularizer of scientific theory. Among her writings are “books and articles for the interested ignorant — ‘Astronomy for the Young,’ ‘Eclipses for Everyone’” — and she has unusual ambition for a woman of her day. But those women face particular hardships, because so many of their sons and lovers and husbands have been lost in World War I. Phoebe’s own spouse and fellow forward- thinking scientist, Michael, died 10 years earlier after contracting measles.

Now Phoebe is a single mother living in a postwar culture where superstition reigns. The world has just lived through a time of terrible magic tricks. In the words of Oliver Lodge, a real scientist and showman whom Barrett writes into “The Ether of Space,” it has witnessed the way “a conclave of German politicians could, and did, operate on innumerable families in England and slaughter their most promising members without the direct action of a finger.”

“The Ether of Space” finds Phoebe attending a Lodge lecture, to which she cannot listen passively. She cannot make sense of Lodge’s ideas without sacrificing her own. Also populating this provocative story is a young scientist named Owen, Michael’s protégé, who will play a further role in this story collection. Another sign of the times can be seen in the condescendingly male tone of Owen’s correspondence with Phoebe.

She disappointed many acquaintances and relatives when she, as a scientist of promise who had succeeded more than many women of her day, chose to marry young and have a son named Sam. When Lodge comes to speak, Sam is old enough to accompany his mother to the lecture. And she is astounded by what her son writes afterward. He doesn’t understand Einstein’s thinking, but he knows it is important. He does understand Lodge as a polar opposite to progress, but the lecture has made him realize that man must reconcile the physical and spiritual worlds as best he can.

The best of the five stories in “Archangel” recall the power and mystery of Barrett’s “Ship Fever,” a National Book Award winner of exceptional delicacy and grace. Together, these five stories form a cycle, one that begins in 1908 with “The Investigators,” centering on the viewpoint of a 12-year-old boy, Constantine Boyd, who will reappear as Private Boyd in Northern Russia in the title story, which ends the book. Only 11 years separate “The Investigators” from “Archangel,” which is set in the Russian city of Arkhangelsk, but this book’s universe is very full. It also travels back to 1873 for “The Island,” set off New England and featuring the same gutsy Miss Atkins, who is Constantine’s gutsy teacher and also a scientist; she is one of the adventurous characters to whom “The Investigators” refers.