A Thought Without Collision Author: Adrian DuncanISBN-13: 9781805221975Publisher: Tuskar Rock PressGuideline Price: £12.99, 224ppIn 1896, statistician Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, nephew of novelist Maria, sat in a field and offered blobs of marmalade to a nest of wasps, timing their flights to and from home. He was seeking confirmation that the laws of probability could say something true about social behaviour, but he confessed the fiction of his study: “It has not fallen to the lot of every wasp to meet a statistician tendering sweets. Time must ordinarily be spent in looking for good things.” In his sublime new novel A Thought Without Collision, Adrian Duncan holds out honeyed substances in order to observe how industrious beings arc through time; it is a sweet tale, though full of artifice, calculation and grisly loss. Study Duncan’s mathematicians and you can learn how humans take the bait of the probable or live in the still unwitnessed realms of the possible.Duncan shuttles back and forth from the 1920s to the 1950s to weave the story of Catherine Carolan, Irish student turned Oxford mathematician, who is gradually drawn away from mathematical models toward the phenomenology of animal perception, where she “wonders what form the logic might take as it is lifted, dripping, from these other worlds”. The novel is an utterly fascinating exploration of how people teach and learn. An instructor wonders in the night, “When does collecting of this patterned kind bend itself into knowledge, and what does that moment feel or look like?” By oscillating in time from Catherine’s youth to her visit with a dying mentor, Duncan allows us to trace how “these crossing arcs” extend “past each other and out into ... the unknowable sky and the divine”.Of his seven books, this is Duncan’s most playful and most spellbinding. His narrative voice is newly charged with the grammar of fate and chance, the words “will” and “if” recurring to announce troubling promises and then to unlace their limits. It’s his first book to take his training in structural engineering, his constant wellspring, and channel it toward the architecture of recreation; in my favourite passage, late in the book, the topology of a golf course becomes the source of marvellous dinnseanchas on the names of numerals. A “number”, after all, is also what we call a song.Greg Londe teaches English at Cornell University