Love and Other Thought Experiments: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

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Don’t worry if you can’t think of any famous thought experiments because all the ones used in this book are briefly explained at the start of their chapter. Eliza, her partner, does not believe her, though she decides to lie for the sake of preserving their relationship.

Philosophy meets fiction in this beguiling and intriguing novel of minds, hearts, other worlds, love, death and everything in between. We have multiple times, but also multiple timelines, multiple realities, even multiple versions of the “same” person.And there is also the ant (‘character’) that Rachel thinks crawled into her eye (the ant is essential and brilliantly told in first person in chapter 4). The family is untraditional because a lesbian married couple (Rachel and Eliza) decide to have a child using sperm donated by one half of another gay married couple (Hal and Greg). This collection of scattered but interconnected short stories across which its various characters interact and intersect in their various paths, seem to all revolve around the same central questions: what is life?

This becomes a bit more difficult in the final 2 or 3 chapters, which dragged a mite and veered a little bit too much into sci-fi and AI territory for my taste. And while at first you may read this first chapter as fairly conventional, with the ant simply an oddity, you would be mistaken – the ant (as well as the Pascal code which occasionally enters the flow), are far from oddities; in fact they are equally important to the narrative as Rachel and Eliza and vital to the fate of a far wider group. The first arises from Pascal’s wager, although not with an explicit reference to religion, but more to ask the question of when it may be rational to believe in the irrational, here whether Eliza should believe her wife, Rachel, that an ant has crawled into her eye and stayed there (wonderfully based on an incident where the author herself had ants living in her computer, to the disbelief of her son).It becomes a book that explores human and non-human consciousness, parallel worlds, artificial intelligence, religious faith. I mention the subject of her degree and PhD as they so closely fit the character and nature of this book and her University (where she now works) as it effectively excludes her from the Goldsmith Prize – which is where I otherwise may have naturally expected this intriguing novel to feature. Everything after that is complicated, as we have one chapter narrated by the ant, which is nibbling away on Rachel’s tumour and we have Arthur who becomes an astronaut flying missions to Mars. This is a special novel that reminds me that the form of the novel can still surprise and take us to unexpected places, to feel unexpected things and perhaps even to expand our capacity for feeling and understanding. If I were a thought experiment,’ Rachel asked Eliza as they got into bed that night, ‘What one would I be?