Chris Else
August, by Bernard Beckett (Text Publishing, 2011, $30.00)
August, by Bernard Beckett (Text Publishing, 2011, $30.00)
A book that is billed as ‘a philosophical thriller’ poses unusual questions. We don’t judge science fiction by the accuracy of its science. Nor do we require historical novels to adhere strictly to the facts. In both cases, perhaps, we would want the writer to be aware of the accepted consensus and to take account of it but the whole point of fiction is that it involves an invented reality. Shadbolt’s Season of the Jew, for example, is a novel first and history second. How then should we approach a fiction that is centred round a philosophical problem? Does it really matter if the analysis of that problem is unsound or incomplete? Should one forget the philosophy and talk about the fiction or should one criticise the philosophy and the fiction? The answer, I suppose, is that it depends on the book.
In Tim Corballis’s Measurement the protagonist goes through a rite of passage that involves a confrontation with a philosophical text. To the initiated, the text described is a thinly disguised version of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. To the uninitiated this barely matters. The novel is not about whether Wittgenstein is right or wrong but about a particular character for whom the fictional text, with its pseudo-Wittgensteinian theses, is a reflection of a personal life view.
Beckett does not operate in quite this way. At the centre of his earlier novel, Genesis, is the question of whether or not computers could ever be considered conscious beings. Characters and plot are subservient to or aspects of the argument around this question, which involves the nature of mind and the relationship of mind and body. Beckett makes a fair fist of weighing up the standard theories as to whether or not the mind is anything other than the brain and he provides a clever twist towards the end that not only turns one of the reader’s key assumptions on its head but also nudges the argument towards a conclusion. Genesis was labelled as a young adult novel and it gave me the sense that Beckett, a secondary school teacher, was driven to write it by motives that were partly pedagogical. Such a book invites or even demands that its argument be a major focus of a critical response.
August takes a similar approach. This time the question is whether or not human beings have free will. Generally, philosophical questions resolve themselves into opposing positions. Cast them in fictional form, and this tendency results in some sort of contest or trial. In Genesis, the main protagonist is subject to examination by a tribunal. In August, there are two confrontations. In the narrative present, the hero, Tristan, is trapped in a wrecked car with Grace, a girl he is in love with despite having met her only once before. They recount their stories to one another: parallel and contrasting tales that offer reflections on the central argument. Grace has been brought up in a convent where strict conformity to a set of rules has governed her life, and from which she has been expelled because her feelings for her fellow human beings have led her into disobedience.
Tristan, whose story is more central to the book, has been cloistered in a school devoted to scholastic reasoning around the work of St Augustine. Here the second confrontation takes place, between Tristan and the Rector – the mentor and father figure who teaches, tempts and tests. Central to the discussion is a religious paradox. If God is omniscient then he knows the future. If he knows the future, a person’s actions are determined. But if behaviour is determined, people do not have free will and therefore God cannot hold them responsible for their actions.
In one sense, as Grace points out, this question has no bearing on a moral life. Whether or not actions are predetermined is irrelevant to the business of deciding what to do. Tristan and the Rector move beyond this point, however, and agree on a test: can the Rector predict what Tristan will do in a complex game that involves interaction with two other people and seems to offer a vast range of possible outcomes? Tristan, who believes that he has free will, bets that he cannot. The Rector believes otherwise. Tristan fails and discovers that, against all his expectations, prior to the contest, the Rector has written down a precise description of his actions.
The first observation that this scene suggests is that, if Tristan’s actions are predetermined so is the Rector’s prediction. To the extent that Tristan was not free, the Rector was not right. A second observation is that neither the Rector nor Tristan had any choice in what they did because they are the way Beckett wrote them. In a work of fiction the free will of all of the characters is, well, a fiction. This might suggest that a novel is a particularly unsuitable vehicle for exploring such philosophical terrain. Only real life is meaningful when it comes to questions of free will. If Beckett had taken the opposite course and written the scene so that the Rector failed, then the action, determined by the author, would have proved that Tristan had free will.
The question of free will versus determinism divides the world into two classes of people, the observers and the observed. From the point of view of the observer, the observed may or may not have free will. It is arguable that they don’t, at least to the extent that behaviour is initiated by neurological processes that can be observed in the brain before the person whose brain it is becomes conscious of them. From a scientific perspective, one that focuses on physical explanations, human behaviour is, in principle, reducible to processes that are either random or caused. If they are caused, then they are, again in principle, predictable. If they are random, they aren’t. Free will, on the other hand, operates within a point of view where thoughts are thought and decisions are made. Thus, no matter what conclusions we draw about the observed person, the observer always has free will. The behaviour of the characters is determined by the free will of the author. There are metafictional opportunities here that Beckett does not take up. Instead, he limits himself by continuing to work within the classical frame of the argument.
Tristan is crippled by the thought that he does not have free will and the cunning twist at the end turns on his last desperate attempt to prove his freedom. The relationship between the various layers of the plot is subtle and carefully worked. The various storylines are skilfully handled and offer a series of surprises as the reader gradually discovers that not only the characters themselves but also the whole world of the novel is not what it seems. In the end I felt disappointed that writing of this quality was devoted to such a limited exposition of the philosophical question. August, I felt, was a better novel than Genesis but poorer philosophy.
CHRIS ELSE is a novelist, and a partner in TFS Literary Agency and Assessment Service. He lives in Wellington.
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