Deus in machina
Anita Brookner
ROGER'S VERSION by John Updike
Deutsch, 19.95
Nobody writes English like John Up- dike. Whether the subject is adultery in a small university town (as it usually is) or an attempt to reconcile explanations of God's divinity with the latest thing in information technology (as it is here), he proceeds with the stealthy scrupulous tread of a natural- ist: his euphoria resides in the naming of parts. In other respects he is not notably kind to his readers, whom he burdens with ideas above their station, crises of consci- ence, and the chasms of belief and unbelief which most people prefer not to examine, or at least not to examine at such length and under such meticulous scrutiny. Ro- ger's Version is a short course in computer programming, the writings of Tertullian (sometimes in the original Latin), and the Big Bang theory of the universe. Most of the explanatory passages relating to any or all of these subjects are incomprehensible. Yet through the swarms of words, all of them chosen with dazzling care, runs an amazing desire to expound, so that the anxious reader follows quite helplessly as the manic lesson unfolds. For rest and relaxation there is of course a story of adultery in a small university town, none the worse for having been told before, and possibly rather better.
Roger Lambert, the Roger of the title, is a professor of divinity at a New England college: 'there are more fraudulent ways to earn a living'. One of those assured charac- ters whom Updike likes to disrupt, he lectures on blasphemy and heresy, is mar- ried to a snappy wife, has a fine house, one son, and uneasy memories of a Cleveland childhood with an array of suffocating and disturbed relations. Into his office, with its suitably ecclesiastical window, comes a young and not very attractive student in search of a grant. There is nothing very unusual in this except that the young man, Dale Kohler, proposes, with the aid of computers, to prove the existence of God. The civilised Roger, admirer of the writ- ings of Karl Barth, expert on Tertullian, finds this project deeply reprehensible. If God were to be called to account, he reckons, the feat would have been man- aged long before the advent of the compu- ter, and anyway, surely God's entire posi- tion rests on His decision not to be called to account. There are many theories to justify and explain God's apparent and possibly even voluntary absence from the scene, and the whole basis of man's faith, if he has any, might be said to be all the better for being hedged with uncertainty. Not at all, says Dale Kohler. Once you programme all the available information you are bound to come up with some kind of evidence, or better still some kind of presence. God will be revealed as the ghost in the machine. Dale Kohler sees no reason why this should not be so.
It will now be intuited that this is an extremely grown-up novel, certainly streets ahead of what has appeared so far this year. But all is not information tech- nology, although a great deal of it is. The more random and unprogrammed nature of human affairs is represented by Roger's niece, Verna, the unmarried and generally stoned mother of a half black baby. Verna lives in one of those crumbling and shat- tered parts of town that American writers describe so well, and nothing can be done to redeem Verna, whose life is lived well below the level of thought, although she possesses and exhibits certain native re- sources. While Roger's wife, Esther, is busy having an affair with Dale, Roger is being tempted by Verna. The nature of Verna's life would challenge the most ardent believer in almost anything, yet she is rather good at telling the truth, or rather the truth as she myopically perceives it. Nobody else seems to be gifted in this particular way: deception or obfuscation are encountered on every page. Poor Dale, rendered almost comatose between his hours at the computer and his activities in the attic where Esther paints her abstracts, obtains his grant but loses his taste for the project. Tapping away after midnight, he is almost asleep when the very faint image of a face appears on the screen, followed by the even fainter image of a hand. The hand, or what can be seen of it, does not appear to bear stigmata. This is all the evidence that Dale comes up with, and it is introduced into the narrative almost accidentally, at the precise point at which the reader is beginning to suffer some of Dale's fatigue. The face and the hand prove almost too much for Dale to bear. He is last reported to be suffering some form of nervous breakdown. Roger per- suades him to go home, and to take Verna with him. Belief is successfully suspended once again.
The impression one receives from this novel is of being inside a box of dazzling tricks, in which the two cultures are eclipsed by many exotic varieties of in- formation, each of them rendered in a sequence of intricate codes. As an example of what can be done with language it is formidable. Humbled by the complexity of the codes, I was reassured to read the blurb, which is entirely free of the usual superlatives: an effect of nervousness is conveyed, a desire not to get it wrong. If clarity were all that were needed, John Updike could be cleared of the charge of allowing us to get it wrong. The trouble is that few of us will ever have made anything like the same effort to get it right. The amorous soup of his preoccupations (soup being a metaphor for most of the primal matter in this novel) in which adultery and theology turn out to have an alarmingly close bearing on one another, is beguiling and unusual. He is a writer of charm, as well as one possessed of staggering gifts.
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