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Seeing worlds through the eyes of a child


 

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, 'The Overstory', Richard Powers took us on a journey that decentred humanity and placed at its heart the life of trees - trees as the makers of the world we inhabit, that make the world possible for us - trees that themselves are a world unto themselves. A space we might intelligently inhabit, navigate but which instead we are bent on destroying.

In his latest novel, 'Bewilderment', he takes us further in two directions - the first is into the world of astrobiology - what might other planets' ecologies, of which there are millions, look like and second into the mind of a gifted eight-year-old boy, who has lost his animal rights lawyer mother to a car crash and whose father is trying the best he can to help him navigate loss and growing up aware of his sensitivity and vulnerability. 

One of the ways Theo, the father, beguiles and calms, Robin/Robbie, the son, is through imaginary trips to worlds that he, as an astrobiologist and an avid reader of science fiction, invents. One of the cumulative effects of these stories is the realization that life finds a way. It can take myriad forms in a whole spectrum of circumstances but that any particular form of life can come and go.

The novel is set in a turbulent near future where humanity appears, as now, intent, if not consciously, on going, unpicking the fabric of life in which it can live and move and be.

We are led into how this looks from the mind's eye view of a sensitive child. A sensitivity that triggers the educational system's desire to diagnose it and close it down (to which, though the diagnoses differ, medication is the answer) and how Theo tries to help. It is a moving portrayal of the foibles of parenthood for which no one is ever trained and in which no one ever fully succeeds. It is, also, a brilliant, disturbing exploration of the anxieties that many children now possess - a future of uncertainty haunted by gathering realities of collapse.

Into this space comes a friend of Robin's mother, a psychologist, and a researcher using brain scan technology and AI to entrain the mind to achieve different, more resilient states, using the amalgamated patterns of the past brain scans of others. Robin becomes a successful research subject and when he entrains on one of his mother's past brain scans momentarily a celebrity. Powers powerfully shows how mental frames might be changed and yet too how fragile such change can be. The research is suspended (in the fevered politics of the time, all deftly described, and too close for comfort) and Robin regresses. Is every technological solution, even one as apparently benign as this, simply insufficient to the complexities of the human mind and heart? Certainly, every solution is time-limited for Powers by the nature of the universe, creating and destroying life. He has fun at the expense of those eagerly awaiting the immortality of downloading their consciousness to a computer by having Theo invent a world where the outer surface is a cocoon of solar panels seeking to scoop up the last light of a dying universe as the downloaded 'consciousness' on the surface awaits inevitable extinction when the electricity falters and the lights go out!

As with Powers' previous book, you assume that the science that is woven through it is robust if on the speculative side. It is completely fascinating in its own right but never unbalances the narrative; and, it opens up more questions than it can presume to answer but that is one of its points.  We are invited to ponder worlds - inner and outer anew - and recover wonder. In this recovery, a wonder that decentres ourselves to a literal humility (standing on a particular place of fragile earth in our vulnerable psychologies), where we might find a way through to a renewed sensibility of a shared cosmos that depends in each and every one of its ecological niches a certain complex, rich diversity in order to flourish (and which any number of events might bring to an end but of which needless rapacity need not be one).

At its heart, it is a book that requests that we suffer a child to come to us and see with their eyes - attentive and wondering - what is the world we have made and how we might make it differently if we too had that attention and wonder. In that it is a deeply unsettling book - because when we truly look, the first real sight can only be to wonder: what have we done, do?

But it is unsettling too, for this reader, for despite its many virtues both the inner and outer worlds depicted for all their wonder strike me as strangely 'claustrophobic' because they remain, at heart, purposeless - a wonderous happenstance - there is no sense of why there is something rather than nothing, nor of the fundamental nature of things. There is no transcendence nor the possibility of other worlds enfolded in this one. If we are here today and gone tomorrow, why should we ultimately care? That we do, or some do, is evident but why is left hanging here. Evident wonder may be simply insufficient to save us from ourselves - we must go deeper inwards than any character here has had the resources to do.  Becoming as a little child is only the start of a journey, not its endpoint.


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