Getting even with a genius
Patrick Skene Catling
MRS EINSTEIN by Anna McGrail Doubleday, .E15.99, pp. 333 Anna McGrail's second novel (her first was called Blood Sisters) is an ingeniously speculative story about the most consequential mathematical equation of the 20th century, E=mc2 .
It is a matter of recorded fact that Albert Einstein committed an indiscretion when he was a student in Zurich in 1887 which might have changed the course of history. He impregnated a fellow student, Mileva Marie, before she became his first wife. A scandal might have interfered with his ambition to become a physicist, so he sent Mileva to have the baby in her native Hun- gary. There Liserl Marie Einstein was given for adoption, and Albert never saw her. That's where the record ends.
Anna McGrail summarises the known factual background in an interesting five- page appendix. There are love letters in the Einstein archives. The novel is an equally interesting account of what she imagines could have happened next. She conceives that Liserl was hurt and indignant when she learned that her father disowned her and she vowed to get her revenge. McGrail's writing is so persuasively reason- able and vividly realistic that her bizarre plot never teeters over the edge of plausi- bility.
How, the author wonders, can Liserl cause her pacifist father to suffer the most pain? She must make sure that the end product of his Special Theory of Relativity, the technology to release atomic energy, the E of his equation, will forever associate his name with the most terrible weapon the world has ever know. Not a bad plan for a young woman who was brought up on a simple Serbian farm.
In order to be able to bring her scheme to fruition Liserl has to become significant- ly more inspired mathematically than her genius father. With remarkable cleverness and a certain amount of sly humour, McGrail renders this unlikely achievement believable. Just. . . Einstein wasn't so hot when he came to consider quantum mechanics. During his years at Princeton, he was never able to combine the very big and the very small in a workable, unified field theory.
Liserl's mother, evidently remorseful, sends money for tuition in music and Ger- man. Liserl's foster mother keeps the music money to buy a tractor but regularly hands over the money for German lessons.
The tutor is an exceptionally attractive German woman who uses language lessons as a cover for a busy career as a hooker. When not servicing young alleged students upstairs, she helps Liserl learn German, especially scientific German. The two women become so fond of each other that they remain close companions for the rest of the book, and the German's knack of earning a lot of money in a hurry is repeat- edly useful. Sexual arrangements are limned with subtle delicacy.
Although Liserl is Jewish and marries a Jew in Nazi Germany, her brilliance as an atomic physicist saves her from the Holo- caust. Her family are arrested, but she is employed in Germany's effort to develop the Bomb. She knows enough to succeed in this research, but fortunately it is sabo- taged by a senior scientist who doesn't want his country to win the second world war.
Having survived extraordinary vicissi- tudes, Liserl and her companion manage to get to Los Alamos in time to ensure by secret means that the Manhattan Project is completed with the least possible delay. McGrail lends necessary verisimilitude to this climactic part of her story by having her heroine work as a secretarial assistant to Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize- winning physicist who was really there in New Mexico during the war.
By that stage of the novel, with the author's cunning help, I had succeeded in suspending the last vestige of disbelief. I enjoyed Liserl's final confrontation with her father.
Previous page
