A Kind of Psychosis

We ended the twentieth century knowing less about the world than we did at the beginning. Physicists had robbed us of certainty. Newton and Faraday had lulled us into a false sense of security, then Schrödinger and Heisenberg pulled the cosmic rug from under our feet. In the twenty-first century how the cosmos is made and how it works have become impenetrable mysteries. Of course, the better- known disaster of the last century was murder on an industrial scale.

Novelists tend to shy away from such big-picture events, prefer ring to leave them to scientists and historians while they focus on local, individual tragedies or triumphs, usually with invented characters. Novels, after all, are primarily about people and only secondarily about ideas. Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (2021) is a big exception. This is the best new fiction I have read in years. On the first reading I was dazzled; on the second I was struck dumb. This is a very big- picture novel in which fact and fiction are interlaced so deftly that it doesn’t really matter which is which: it feels like the whole truth. Labatut was born in Rotterdam and has lived in Santiago, Chile, since he was 14. The book was originally published in Spanish as Un Verdor Terrible (2020, literally A Terrible Greening). From the beginning you will be lured into the illusion that it deals with real char- acters and actual events but, by the end, you will have realized it must be fiction. There is, Labatut explains in an afterword, only one made-up paragraph in the first chapter but he takes ever ‘greater liberties’ as the book progresses. When you find yourself occupying the mind of the physicist Werner Heisenberg as he raves on the island of Heligoland, then you can be pretty sure you are in a novel. Heisenberg was on that island because it has very little pollen. He had appalling allergies that prevented him from thinking. This mattered because he needed to explain to the world why Albert Einstein was wrong about, well, everything. In essence, Einstein had described the interior of the atom as being like our solar system with electrons whizzing around like the planets. This drove Heisenberg crazy. He was equally incensed by another great physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, who said it was all about waves. How on earth, raved Heisenberg, could we possibly know what went on inside the atom? We were dealing with objects so small that they lay far beyond human analysis. At a conference in 1927 most physicists seemed to agree, and Heisenberg’s quantum theory triumphed over Einstein. This signalled the end of determinism; science could no longer come up with a full and rational account of the material world. ‘Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle’, Labatut writes, ‘shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised.’ Newton’s physics, after 250 years, had crumbled to dust. This seemed to be clear evidence that our knowledge of the world was ceasing to make sense – staring into matter at its most fundamental we discovered an impossible opacity, a mountain which the human mind could not climb. This was, of course, an obscurity too far for ordinary folk in their ordinary lives. But, for Labatut, it is linked to more obvious examples of twentieth-century senselessness. His method involves the weaving of a tapestry of historical events that are not, at first, obviously connected. His writing is clear and direct and gives a sense of a straightforward narrative connection. But the only real connection is the long horror story that is the twentieth century. The rest is a novel in which we are taken – fictionally – into the minds of the protagonists. It is not a pretty sight. Labatut imagines the explorative intensity of the great physicists and mathematicians as a kind of psychosis, a process that obliterates a humane sense of the world. Nothing, therefore, could be more appropriate than to start his narrative with the monstrous Hermann Göring. When captured by the Allied forces, his fingers and toes are found to be a ‘furious red’ caused by the 100 dihydrocodeine pills he is taking each day (his suitcase contained 20,000 doses). As the war comes to an end we learn that the Nazis are fighting on drugs, their troops dosed with psychosis-inducing amphetamines. And, when it all goes wrong, the officers take cyanide, the twentieth century’s signature poison. This grim opening leads us to another pivotal figure in the narrative, the chemist Fritz Haber. Haber is shown as both an immense hero and an appalling anti-hero. His two great achievements were feeding the world and killing people. He fed the world – and massively increased its population – by extracting nitrogen from the air to make vast quantities of fertilizer. But he also killed people when, as a loyal German, he suggested using chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. It was the first use of gas in warfare. Labatut’s description of the gas’s effect on the French troops is nightmarish. Seeing, in his lab, the effects on one accidently gassed man, Haber’s wife Clara accuses him of perverting science. Such is her grief at what her husband has done that, at the end of a party at his house, she shoots herself. Haber won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1918. Later, his work also inspired the development of Zyklon B, the gas used to kill a million Jews in the Holocaust. Labatut links this slaughter made possible by science to Heisenberg’s traumatic discovery of the absolute limits of our wisdom. Such shocking juxtapositions are the key device of the novel. Labatut does not say what he is doing and where he is going, he simply follows the connections. It is a tribute to the quality and intensity of his writing that these connections seem to make perfect sense. But the whole point of Heisenberg’s discovery was that, as Einstein himself was horrified to discover, ‘the world Heisenberg had discovered was incompatible with common sense’. Erwin Schrödinger, meanwhile, provides further evidence of the near madness of these physicists. Having checked himself into a sanatorium he falls in love with the 12-year-old daughter of the manager called, by Labatut, Miss Herwig. He is distracted from his work but recovers enough to present, triumphantly, his latest research to his peers. They are overcome with his genius. He is applauded wherever he goes until, in Munich, Heisenberg leaps to his feet and erases Schrödinger’s calculations from the blackboard. He replaces them with his ‘matrices’ – the mathematical system which, he believes, is the only way of understanding the sub-atomic world. Mathematics occupies a further character-driven section of the book, primarily via another madman – Alexander Grothendieck, ‘who towered over mathematics like a veritable colossus’. He was not interested in the usual numbers and equations, he was solely driven by his urge to define the foundations of mathematics. And he was as strange as any physicist: ‘He liked ugly women, squalid apartments, dilapidated rooms.’ Grothendieck went some way to achieving his unification of mathematics, but, again, he had, like the physicists, established that the world had ceased to make sense. Meanwhile, the future was casting a shadow over this world of genius and madness. It was a shadow Labatut allows his hero Heisen berg to detect in a vision which he cannot, until years later, understand. ‘He was incapable of confessing his vision of the dead baby at his feet, or the thousands of figures who had surrounded him in the forest, as if wishing to warn him of something, before they were carbonized in an instant by that flash of blind light.’ In the long history of unintended consequences, the physicists’ construction of the pathway to nuclear war is, perhaps, the most terrible and the most cautionary. Coincidentally, I was reading Jordan Peterson’s recent book, We Who Wrestle with God (2024), at the same time as I was rereading Labatut. Peterson writes, ‘Man is simply in no position to question the fundamental order of reality.’ This, in a nutshell, is the same insight as Labatut’s. We can gaze in wonder at the edifice created by twentieth-century science, but we cannot make sense of it. Then, unexpectedly, towards the end, we are introduced to the narrator’s neighbour whom he calls ‘the night gardener’. His neigh bour gardens at night because he believes that the plants then suffer less when moved around. He had been a gifted mathematician, but he had given that up when he discovered the works of Grothendieck. T hen the narrator takes a walk with his daughter, and they find the bodies of two dogs that have been poisoned – the state of their bodies takes us back to the effects of chlorine gas on those First World War French soldiers. Suddenly the fiction has become personal and we see into the narrator’s character. He is, though mild-mannered, horrified by what he sees and seemingly lost in a dark forest of implications. I will stop there, because to tell you more about this strange and brilliant last section would be like giving away the name of the killer in a murder mystery. Labatut uses fictional elements to dramatize the crises – and the horrors – of the twentieth century. They say something terrible about our species. In searching for the truth of the world we have driven ourselves mad, turning physics, chemistry and mathematics into weapons of war. In the process, we have discovered that the truth we sought is an illusion. If there is a truth, it will for ever be denied us. I might be alone in regarding this as an optimistic message, but I don’t think I’d be alone in saying this is a great book.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Bryan Appleyard 2025