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PRINT He was the father of game theory, and an ea
rly harbinger of a technology we may come to fear every bit as much as the atom bomb: artificial intelligence. So Late in the Day Claire Keegan [Faber] Claire Keegan’s short story So Late in the Day encapsulates a couple’s doomed relationship – an Irish, modern nod to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Little do we know in the first page, Keegan plants its prophecy; ‘the knowledge of how everything must end.’ The plot centres around dejected, repressed Cathal living alone in Arklow. Keegan meticulously selects adjectives that set up his personality; he sees the ‘blank’ sky, drinking his ‘bitter’ coffee. After an ‘uneventful’ day in his Dublin office, the narrative shifts to his recent relationship with Sabine from Normandy. Keegan introduces Sabine and her zeal through precise details like how she browses in farmers’ markets, forages hazelnuts and bakes clafoutis. Whereas Cathal’s romantic incompetence is epitomised by his meek marriage proposal as he trails off saying, ‘You know neither one of us is getting any younger.’ After persuasion, Sabine agrees to wed and moves into his place. While still unpacking, he becomes venomously unnerved by the mere presence of her possessions ‘as though the house now belonged to her also… going around in a tracksuit, sweating.’ Noting his discomfort, she confronts him only to be told, ‘It’s just too much reality.’ Overall, a succinct story revealing how one man’s misery destroys his relationship, quenching love’s lustful delusion into its final ember. Keegan’s parable illustrates that despite the illusion of love, it’s never too late in the day to walk away. AA The Maniac Benjamín Labatut [Pushkin Press] In the summer, as Oppenheimer blazed its way across our cinema screens, we were invited to revisit an archetype: an old narrative of scientists driven by passion but manipulated by power; of discoveries made in the spirit of cumulative understanding but employed to the most nullifyingly monstrous ends. But what if that same passion served some malign power from the start? And what if manipulation and monstrosity undergird the very nature that scientists set out to strip bare? Another figure present for the Manhattan Project was Johnny von Neumann. He was no archetype, as we learn from Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac, but a new kind of man. He was so prodigious that a full enumeration of his contributions proves beyond the scope of this book. We can safely say, however, that he was the father of game theory, and an early harbinger of a technology we may come to fear every bit as much as the atom bomb: artificial intelligence. Von Neumann forms the nucleus of this intensely diffuse novel. But it opens with the story of the physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who in 1933 murdered his intellectually disabled son Vassily before turning the gun on himself; it concludes with the story of the computer program AlphaGo, which in 2016 defeated the world’s best Go player in a feat many considered impossible. Even in the central chapters, we never encounter von Neumann directly, but through the first-person (and therefore biased) accounts of those who knew him – his friends, his teachers, his colleagues, his wives… In attempting this approach, the writer must be dextrous enough to ventriloquise many voices convincingly. Conveniently for Labatut, von Neumann’s peers turn out to be stultifyingly unanimous on two points: his unique brilliance and the unsettling, “nonhuman” quality of that same brilliance. Labatut goes on making this point long after he has proven it, and so we are treated to such tiring banalities as this: ‘I once saw him take two books to the toilet, for fear that he might finish the first one before he was done.’ And Labatut does not always capture the idiosyncrasies of voice so pivotal to the kind of polyphonic novel he has written. Most sound like variations on each other, down to their penchant for hyperbole, for the frenetic, and for the mystical. In other words, they almost all sound like Labatut. On those rare occasions when he tries to inflect a voice with the personality of its speaker, the results are mixed. The account of Richard Feynman reads like the product of a large language model (complete with American colloquialisms circa 1950). There is one clearly dissenting voice, stylistically speaking: that of Nils Aall Barricelli, who – in a breakthrough whose influence von Neumann never acknowledged – simulated the evolution of populations of digital organisms. This story was a throwback to Labatut’s debut, When We Cease to Understand the World, in that it comes vividly alive through the kind of writing at which he excels: vignettes of scientists at work at their savage, obsessive vanities, ‘understanding by way of destruction. A lunatic’s insight.’ Although Labatut shows little here of the cold versatility he sees in his subject, he may yet secure his breakthrough.’ DMG 52