The Weight of Numbers

October 23, 2006
Math whiz Anthony Burden has anonymous alley sex at the height of the London blitz, which produces Saul Cogan, an eventual jaded-idealist-turned-human-trafficker. The botched childhood abduction of Stacey Chavez—eventually an epileptic, anorexic supermodel—obliquely links the three, as does a gift encyclopedia set rigged with a bomb to assassinate a Mozambique revolutionary. That much one is able to confirm in Ings's deceptively readable, dizzyingly constructed novel: the sentences are conventional, but the things they describe are not, and abrupt shifts in time and setting (Paris; London; Mozambique; Cape Canaveral, Fla.; etc.) are even more jarring. Through it all, Anthony struggles with madness, marriage and sexual identity; Stacey battles illness and sudden stardom; and Saul drifts through the world as "a ghost in the globalized machine." Ings, a London-based science fiction novelist, offers further clues to their common story in the form of adventurer Nick Jinks, who haunts the three like Zelig. This Pynchon-on-speed romp relies heavily on coincidence and trivia—Anthony and Stacey seem to be crushed by the weight of history, self-destruction and destiny, while antiheroes Nick and Saul skirt history's edges—yet Ings's mad, mad world is held together to the very last page by humor, vivid depictions and a deeply compelling emotional core.

January 1, 2007
In this latest from British novelist/science writer Ings, fictional characters intermingle with historical ones through the major events of the last century, such as World War II, the U.S.-Soviet space race, the anti-apartheid movement and the bloody civil wars in Africa, the development of psychiatric therapies, and the dawn of telecommunications. Their stories link up through a shadowy character sometimes known as Nick Jinks, whose life on the run and brushes with fame make him seem a more sinister version of Forrest Gump. Among the characters who cross paths with Jinks are Kathleen, whose mathematical talents languish when she is overlooked for war work and who ends up an unhappy housewife in the more prosperous decades that follow; Deborah, a childhood kidnap victim who remains traumatized by her past; and her daughter, Stacey, an anorexic performance artist who grows up unaware of her mother's terrible secrets. A "Ragtime" for the millennium, this is a clever novel, though the parts are ultimately more striking than the whole. For most public libraries.Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

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