Robert McLean
From the Hollow of a Sling: Between the wars with Karl Popper and Gershom Scholem by Paul Simei-Barton (Cinnamon Press, UK, 2025), 228pp, $38
As a philosopher, Karl Popper concerns himself with uncertainty: the motor of scientific discovery. Popper also worries about what happens when political movers and shakers truck out manufactured certainties en masse to ameliorate natural uncertainty. But in today’s world—where people are not voluntarily going to stop doing planet-destroying things, a situation that requires us being told what to do for anything to change—Popper’s drawn-out cry of angst seems decidedly retrograde.
Popper was born in Vienna in 1902. His Jewish parents had already chosen another faith by the time Karl came into their world—Lutheranism. His father, Simon Popper, a lawyer from Bohemia, was a progressive who gathered degrees, ideas, twelve thousand books. His mother, Jenny, played the piano with a grace that to some would suggest another life she might have lived. The family prospered in the liberal air of Vienna. Charmed lives and names touched their circle, chief amongst them Sigmund Freud. In his father’s house of books, Karl was precociously serious. He read everything, then questioned it all. At sixteen he left school and ghosted university, drawn to the logic of mathematics, the order of physics. For a time, he believed in Marx. His Marxist faith evaporated after an afternoon in Vienna in 1919 when police fired on an unarmed protest march where eight were killed.
Having walked away from Marx and all ideas of certainty, he worked with his hands. Later he taught children. He studied psychology and philosophy, pondering how to discriminate fact from faith and fiction. And in those years he met Josefine Henninger, who became his wife. They would have no children. The world, he thought, was too uncertain for that. He taught physics and mathematics, then philosophy, writing in the hours that remained. As Europe began marching towards the Second World War, he began writing what would become The Logic of Scientific Discovery, a work against the false certainties of his age, to which he opposed falsifiability: the idea that truth is glimpsable in its failures. In 1937 he left for New Zealand to lecture at Canterbury College. There, in exile, he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, a defence of reason against tyranny. After the war, he moved to England to become professor at the London School of Economics. He lived quietly in Buckinghamshire, later in Surrey. His wife fell ill; he took her back to Austria so she could die near home. He returned to England alone and died in 1994 in Kenley, at ninety-two. He is buried in Vienna, the city of his beginning.
Simei-Barton’s narrative, From the Hollow of a Sling, mixes fact and fiction. It begins in post-Great War Vienna, briefly sketching a city caught between collapse and radical promise, and then quickly zooming in on its protagonists. Karl Popper is earnest, politicised, seeking revolution. He immerses himself in Marxist circles, drawn by the promise of social transformation. But he withdraws, disillusioned after the June 1919 shootings. His sister Hanya joins a free-dance group; his friend Max—foil and shadow to himself—turns inward and drifts towards Kabbalism. (Max is based on Gershom Scholem, who became an authority on Jewish mysticism.) From the Hollow of a Sling traces the trajectories of these figures through the inter-war years, the rise of fascism and exile to New Zealand, the burden of idealism in a world teetering on the brink of another war. Hence the title: the sling as instrument, the hollow as potential, the throw as act of risk.
History and biography plot the book on its author’s behalf. Revolution falters; fascism rises. Karl Popper emigrates to Christchurch to become an academic, writes, struggles, resettles Jewish refugees, carries the weight of saving lives he cannot save, and earns the expected incomprehension of the locals. Karl is resolutely difficult. Simei-Barton constantly reminds the reader of his taciturnity, his lack of give and take, his lack of graciousness, his hard-nosed principles, his habit of speaking like an early twentieth-century political-economy textbook in translation. But this difficultness serves to amplify the expected struggles of refugees; he is—doubly—an outsider. Meantime, Hanya finds herself lost in Berlin’s riotous Weimar nightlife; Max’s esotericism turns into Zionism. Each represents a type set against the others: Karl an intellectual, Hanya a sensualist (a quality that Simei-Barton largely ascribes to women), Max a mystic. But antisemitism profoundly affects each of them.
For all this novel’s compact length, it is remarkably ambitious in scope. It covers politics, philosophy of science, exile, sibling bonds, sexual freedom, intellectual conversion, the refugee question. History rather than subjective agency drives the characters along a familiar arc—from belief to crisis and into acceptance or transformation. A particular challenge with novels powered by historical determinism is that the reader more or less knows what is going to happen. Such enervating certainty is exacerbated when the central character is a real-life individual like Karl Popper, about whom we know so much. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for example, we know the outcome of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia; and we know, when contemplating the historical Kutuzov at Austerlitz, that he will move his troops from the Pratzen heights and the French will rout the Coalition forces. We don’t know, however, if the fictional Prince Andrei Bolkonsky will marry the fictional Natasha. Tolstoy tends to make his historical characters vehicles for his own ideas about history and philosophy. His fictional characters have far more subjective agency: their mistakes are moral ones; Napoleon’s errors come from textually embodying a false historical consciousness. Likewise, in Simei-Barton’s book, the less a character is known extra-fictionally, the more freedom they exercise; or, at least, their responses to known events are less predictable than the often automaton-adjacent Karl.
From the Hollow of a Sling shows us thinkers and refugees, siblings and mystics, dance and science, all intertwining and enduring during an all-engulfing catastrophe. Simei-Barton treats his characters with clarity and respect, sometimes so much so the book becomes a tableau of scrupulously rendered facts. The characters linger at the edge of full embodiment. The novel struggles to balance idea and character—and sometimes prioritises the movement of ideas or history over the interior life of its characters. Hanya, for instance, while given a dramatic arc—from Isadora-Duncan-style dancer in Vienna to Weimar Republic cabaret dancer in Berlin—has little texture of transformation. She is symbol as much as person. Max, too, risks being more emblematic than embodied. Popper, while arguably the most grounded character, is largely knowable through his suspiciously well-formed expositions. In serious historical fiction, the challenge is always to render ideas through character—as so artfully evident in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series—rather than to render character through ideas; here, Simei-Barton heavily leans the other way.
So Simei-Barton’s characters don’t really seem believable. Their workaday reality is opaque while their motivations are transparent. No one really speaks spontaneously or outside of type; they always seem to form complete sentences and seldom get interrupted. Towards the end of the book, when the narration tells us that ‘newspapers [are] filled [with] hysterical commentaries on Chamberlain’s dismal failure’ and that New Zealanders are nursing the prospect that ‘the Kiwi boys will give Hitler a bloody good hiding’, Karl unleashes the following:
If the Party has decided class interests are best served by an alliance with Hitler there is nothing in Marx or Lenin to refute the claim. The iron laws of history and dialectical analysis mean whatever Stalin wants them to mean. But the trick only works so long as you are prepared to surrender your own critical abilities and bow to the wisdom of the collective.
Karl delivers this boilerplate statement to three ‘communist students’ in ‘one of the town’s milk-bars, which are New Zealand’s equivalent of the Viennese coffee houses’. Disclosure seldom gets deferred; the author registers detail rather than the characters; his stick-figures stagger under the weight of grand themes he imposes on them. And so we always know more about what is going on than they do. We wait for them to catch up.
There is, too, very little of that pesky middle-ground that is difficult for novels to register well. We are either breathing down the necks of characters or hearing tell of great events or ideas as if shouted at us from a great distance. Everyone apart from the protagonists is essentially wallpaper. There is only inside and outside and nothing in between. This hollowing-out is common in novels driven by ideas. Books only spring to life when authors let characters off conceptual leashes: then they can contradict themselves, tell lies, get sick and miss appointments, have mood swings, act like real people. Most importantly, they draw other potentially decisive characters into their personal orbits—grocers, bus drivers, fellow parishioners—the kinds of people who are harder to peg to philosophies, the kinds of people who come and go but who can throw curious spanners into otherwise predictable narrative engines. From the Hollow of a Sling is like a play written by the satirist Thomas Love Peacock: theatrical scene-setting followed by lengthy expositions where po-faced representatives debate Great Ideas of the Day. This novel is too doggedly committed to its determinist template to allow the unexpected any entry and thereby give it some wild energy.
The book’s believability deficit is also a problem of style. This passage typifies Simei-Barton’s prose:
They meet Josephine at Nussdorf and after a brisk walk through the woods arrive at a charming little inn with outdoor tables beneath a chestnut tree. Karl takes charge of ordering and Hanya is surprised to see her little brother is not entirely devoid of social graces. Scrutinising the menu card as if it were a philosophical treatise, he engages the waiter in friendly banter and attentively elicits preferences before selecting a fruity dry wine, chicken fried in breadcrumbs for the ladies and Viennese sausage for himself.
A self-conscious formality hovers over the gathering and the unstated purpose of the meeting weighs on Josephine …
Call it a careful but awkward way with words, a delicate mincing done without irony; one that seems most inhibited when trying to be most expansive. Jarring moments occur through over-prioritising local variation, such as the clash of hovering formality and stale literary tropes in the extract above. Examples of elegantly turned phrases are rarities; instead, everything clunks and clanks. ‘Devoid’ and ‘elicits’ are Latinate indulgences; that the inn was charming and little—and who thought it was? a guidebook?—adds nothing but obviously rendered quaintness. The author fusses too heavily over his puppet theatre, lending the whole a stifling portentousness.
By this stage in the book, asking readers to see Karl ‘scrutinising the menu card as if it were a philosophical treatise’ stretches attention to the point of exasperation—we got it a long time ago: he’s that kind of guy. And while I really like a good literary list, the sensuous itemisations are too frequent and do nothing aside from obviously contrasting with Karl’s hard-won mental hygiene. Simei-Barton’s writing is curiously dated: it reads as if modernism never happened, which means his book must make do without a broad range of ways to get at reality. Ford Madox Ford’s novels The Good Soldier and Parade’s End would provide useful models for turning the world inside out or seeing it from a different angle. But where From the Hollow of a Sling ought to have been prismatic and refractive to revivify its characters, it relies on personified dialectics—though even here Simei-Barton’s method withholds the implied synthesis: presumably, a whole integrated human subject.
Yet despite the book’s narrative limitations and stylistic failings, I am sympathetic to Simei-Barton’s commitment to his cause. From the Hollow of a Sling is gentle, sympathetic and artful, all of which it needs to be with the giant figure of Karl Popper striding its stage. But it is not the right kind of book for the job. One could imagine a book about Popper that would use his ideas to examine his life, or vice versa, or imagine the dying philosopher remembering and forgetting, a compromised philosophical warrior akin to Rebecca West’s shell-shocked martial one in The Return of the Soldier. It might have been fruitful to write each chapter from a different perspective—to see Popper’s significance change depending on context. It needed something that would add uncertainty and ambiguity, from which comes surprise. Most obviously, why not a novel about an imaginary Jewish-Austrian philosopher? Simei-Barton’s adherence to fact is morally admirable but aesthetically and imaginatively restrictive.
I suspect that Simei-Barton’s skills might better equip him for personal non-fiction, such as an account of his grandmother Bida and the Jewish settlement of Zichron Yaakov, which the present book mentions in the author’s biographical note. I would certainly read it; its subject would be elusive, energising and demanding, and Simei-Barton could write to his strengths by shucking the third-person omniscience and the narratological determinism that enervate From the Hollow of a Sling. After all, the central preoccupation of the book is Jewishness: what it means and why it matters. Discovery would create an uncertain story that would ask many of the same questions this novel does but more openly; and provisionally answering them would make for a far riskier and so potentially more rewarding book. It could ask why nationalism is acceptable and self-determination is a human right for everyone except for Jews; it could ask what good nationalism and self-determination are for anyone anywhere at any time. Judaism’s eschatology and belief in the messianic world-to-come are fundamental to the vision and reality of Israel, but they are frustratingly submerged in Simei-Barton’s novel.
ROBERT McLEAN is a poet, critic, editor and doctoral student at Massey University. His collected poems were published in 2020 by Cold Hub Press. He lives in Lyttelton and works in Wellington for the New Zealand government.
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