Tim Corballis: Measurement

By DAVID LARSEN

It was a difficult read, and I found myself focusing on sections of the text, trying to put them together into an overall understanding of the book, which I was determined to read through, from beginning to end ... "

This could be me, describing my trek through Corballis' challenging second novel, Measurement, but it is his narrator, Antony, talking about his obsession with an obscure philosophical text, Korngold's Measurement.

Antony's younger sister has died and his response has been to skip the funeral, abandon his wife and child, possibly for good, and set out hitch-hiking down the South Island with Korngold's book in his backpack.

If he can just grasp Korngold's ideas properly, he believes he will gain a perfect understanding of life, of death, of everything.

What are these ideas? As with much about the novel, this emerges slowly and indistinctly, which is appropriate because Korngold's fictitious work turns out to be about the impossibility of accurate knowledge.

Corballis tries to embody this concept in his prose, which you might expect would lead to an endless stream of nebulous metaphors and approximately appropriate verbs. Instead, it becomes by far the most impressive aspect of the book.

Antony describes the landscapes and towns he travels through with exacting precision, building hauntingly poetic images out of minutiae.

A scene framed just so, with such-and-such an angle of light producing exactly this depth and quality of shadow - it should read like the diary of an obsessive-compulsive nerd, but instead it serves as perfect proof that God is in the details.

But the precision breaks down. Everything Antony observes, and most especially everything he understands about the people around him, is equivocal.

Every time his detailed word pictures begin to build towards a larger understanding of his own life, they collapse again into uncertainty. Did she really mean that? Am I remembering correctly? Is it even possible to remember things correctly? Is it a mistake to think you know anything at all about anything?

It's easy - and tempting - to dismiss Antony's fixation on these ideas as sophomoric game-playing, the self-indulgent intellectual angst of someone who has yet to realise that the world has other people in it, and that abstract arguments can't justify hurting them.

But the tension between Antony's lucid, small-scale observations and his overall bewildered vagueness is so expertly maintained that I was able to accept his need for theory, for ideas that could make sense of it all.

If Corballis had kept this a novel of psychological realism, tracking a man's attempts to get out of the prison of his own skull, the result could easily have been a masterpiece.

But he doesn't. He abandons realism, allowing Antony's disconnection from any reliable understanding of other people to become so extreme that many sequences - notably a flashback in which Antony loses his way in the mountains - read like dreams.

Something is deranged here: it's either Antony, or the book. You must decide and are unable to decide whether you're reading surrealist fiction or whether Antony is mentally ill. It is an uninteresting question.

As a book about universals - about the extent to which humans can understand each other - this could have been profound. As the story of a possible madman, it's just an enigma, albeit a gloriously written one. Tim Corballis is a major talent, but Measurement falls maddeningly short of being a major novel.

VUP

$29.95

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.