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Love and Other Thought Experiments: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

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It feels to me like this is a book that would reward a re-read. Knowing where it is heading would probably reveal some earlier connections that you miss on first reading. Perhaps the most fundamental questions of all that the book asks are what does it mean to love another person, what does it mean to grieve them. But there is also an overarching plot: Rachel and Eliza are a lesbian couple, and Rachel is firmly convinced that an ant has entered her body through her eye - which leads to contention in their relationship because Eliza, the scientist, has trouble believing her. Nevertheless (or maybe to overcome their problems), they decide to have a child with their gay friend Hal. From this basic premise, Ward extrapolates: She changes narrators, dives deeper into different characters (not all of them human), and seemingly alters plotlines that have already been established in other chapters. What is love? What is real? What does it mean to be human? The more the story of the little family progresses, shifts and morphs, the more the topic of artificial intelligence takes center stage, questioning the nature of the future a.k.a. utopia/dystopia we are all approaching. The therapist smoothed down her wrap around dress. She wore the same style every week in different colours but the paisley one had not been worn since their first visit. Eliza wondered if there was a system.

If you are like me and enjoy subtle, sensitive literary fiction AND philosophical thought experiments as entertainment (along the lines of say, Ted Chiang's short stories) AND these two things combined in one novel sounds appealing, this book is for you. 4.5 stars. Where would that leave them? Would she be facing the future alone now? Of course not, Arthur would have been born regardless of an imagined insect bite. She shook her head, as though the idea of the ant in Rachel’s head had somehow affected her own. Maybe it had. Not the physical mind, but the other part. The part that wondered how all these things were connected. It’s definitely ants. The same ones that were on the sofa last summer. They got in through the gap in the window and now they’ve found a way in here. You couldn’t put a baby in a room with ants. Eliza?’ And yet at the same time all of this philosophical reflection and increasingly science-fiction writing is set against a really moving examination all the strands of a complex family unit – Rachel, Eliza, Hal, Greg, Arthur, Rachel’s mother Elizabeth.Eliza put the saucepan of spaghetti on the table and sat down. Images from the night before played on her mind. She had promised Rachel marriage and children but she saw their life together as a mirage, always ahead of them and just out of reach. The cup veered towards the fence and Eliza and Arthur both waved at a grinning Rachel who stood by the railings. ‘We’re going so fast.’ Eliza watched Arthur’s concentration return to the wheel as they spun away from Rachel. She looked up at the next teacup and saw the lone passenger inside, the pest man. There was no child beside him. No indication that anyone was waiting for him outside the ride.

They were too tired to wash the skirting board with peppermint oil. Rachel got into bed and glanced down at the floor. She caught Eliza’s eye when she looked up. Rachel lifted Arthur out of his chair. ‘I’m fine.’ She put the tip of her nose to their son’s. ‘Aren’t I?’

Success!

Eliza continued to see Sondra Marshall on her own. Once a week, she left Rachel and Arthur curled up together on the sofa and rode her bicycle to the house with the door on the side. Each time, while she waited for the therapist, she looked at the bell marked ‘House’ and thought of Rachel. There is so much more I could say about this both innovative and very enjoyable book – and it is definitely one that will I think repay a re-read. Indeed. this novel was key to Ward's PhD thesis at Goldsmiths, a thesis provisionally titled 'Imagine I Am, The Use of Narrative in Philosophical Thought Experiments' ( https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=7991 - I haven’t been able to confirm the final version). The boy wriggled from her lap and stood on the bench beside her, absorbed by the life of the park. Rachel took a deep breath, swept her newly grown hair behind her ear and smiled at Eliza.

She watched Arthur holding on to the wheel with all his might. Did he owe his life to an ant? she thought. She looked at his small hands, pink with the effort of turning the teacup round. Arthur and the ant, they were forever linked. She closed her eyes and the image of the ant flashed across her lids. The ant was not just in Rachel’s head, it was in her own. And whoever else knows, she thought, the ant will be with them too. I only have to tell this story and the ant will always be in their head.Short Stories. Individual stories “interconnected” feed into the love story and the thought experiments. This is very cleverly done, and at the individual level, a story at bedtime, some of these could be read and enjoyed by pretty well everybody, independently of the overall book. In Chapter 3, "Sunbed," Elizabeth and Nicholas Pryce attend a party. Throughout the night, Elizabeth is disgruntled. She cannot stop thinking about her daughter, Rachel. She does not approve of Rachel's public announcements about her sexuality. During the night, Elizabeth craves the attention of another attractive partygoer. She feels young again, thinking briefly of her youthful fling with Ali. When Rachel was born, she desperately hoped Nicholas did not notice she was not his daughter. If you think such a reality sounds farfetched, try googling Boltzmann brains, which are brains floating around in the universe with memories of a life that never happened. Under certain conditions it can be shown that we are statistically more likely to be Boltzmann brains than humans living on a planet called Earth. Mind-blowing, huh?

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