Maxwell’s demon by steven hall

the times literary supplement 18 june 2021

Steven Hall’s first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, became a cult hit when it was published in 2007. It has certainly matured with age: if its postmodernism looked a bit effortful fourteen years ago, in today’s climate of endlessly auto-fictive selves, it now seems rather charming.

Hall’s new novel, Maxwell’s Demon, is another unabashed piece of metafiction, which both draws attention to itself and to the act of reading it. “The writer divides and sorts, the reader divides and sorts”, we are told – a task that can feel onerous, given that among the novel’s subjects are the true form of angels and the origins of the alphabet; there are pages of text arranged in the shape of leaves. But Hall takes great pleasure in his half of the job and leads us playfully through the book’s various twists and turns, which makes our task feel less daunting.

His protagonist Thomas Quinn is an unsuccessful novelist and also the son of a great writer, now dead. Shortly before he died, Quinn’s father endorsed a novel by his protégé Andrew Black called Cupid’s Dream. Black has since disappeared, however, having told his publisher that he would only fulfil his contract if they agreed not to publish any ebooks ever again. This commentary within the novel on how literary culture is changing is reminiscent of Nicola Barker’s I Am Sovereign (2019), and – as in Barker’s book – there is much poignancy amid the playfulness.

Quinn receives a teasing letter that appears to be from Black and, in spite of being warned that “he’s dancing you like a puppet off the edge of a fucking cliff” by the agent they both share, sets out to discover what happened to him. Unfortunately, Quinn’s wife Imogen is not there to talk sense into him: she has been on a research trip on Easter Island for six months, investigating the exact spot where the final tree on this now treeless island was chopped down. Quinn is so devoted that he has not touched her mug (“I ♥ tea”) which she placed by the kettle before she left. When he is burgled, the first thing he checks is that the mug is undisturbed.

Aside from occasional phone calls, the only contact between Quinn and Imogen is via the webcam in the research facility – over which he watches her sleep and get dressed. The webcam is on a time-lag and can also, apparently, be watched by other people, although it does not record sound. Quinn explains simply, “Because this was the twenty-first century, the research facility had webcams”. But we can infer that the webcam has not been placed there merely to record Imogen asleep. This is a novel that requires patience, but the sheer jouissance of Hall’s writing means that that patience, by and large, will not go unrewarded.

This review first appeared in The Times Literary Supplement