The wonder of knowledge

‘Transparency,’ remarks Eliade Jenks, narrator of Joanna Kavenna’s fourth novel, A Field Guide to Reality, ‘is an aspiration. But wouldn’t it be strange, if you could see all things clearly?’

It’s an apposite question. For a novel with illumination and the quest for knowledge at its heart, clarity is in beguilingly short supply. Set in a distorted contemporary Oxford smothered by an eldritch mist, peopled not only by modern-day academics but by the spectres of thinkers past, and illustrated in gloomy monochrome by Oly Ralfe, A Field Guide to Reality is a work of cunning misdirection and trickery — a mystery in thrall to mystery’s beauty.

When the scholar Solete dies, he leaves his friend Eliade a message. He has been studying the nature of light and perception. In a playful, perhaps slightly paranoid move, he has hidden his final, definitive work, the Field Guide of the title, and he wants Eliade to find it. After a gorgeous prologue in which Eliade projects herself into the minds of long-dead theorists bewitched by rainbows and sunbeams, a familiar but well-executed structure emerges. For each new chapter, a new expert, explaining to Eliade their theories in the hope that one of them can lead her to Solete’s book.

Requiring the reader to invest in a narrative device so plainly intended as little more than an intellectual vehicle could, in the wrong hands, result in a dry and rather infuriating novel. That it proves so entertaining is testament not only to Kavenna’s skill, but also to her enthusiasm. This is a novel charged with a vital and distinctly unfashionable faith in the wonder and plurality of knowledge itself; and with the conviction that insight comes to us in many forms: through equations, experiments, speculation, accident, and even, in one of the book’s finest passages, through the accidental consumption of hallucinogenic tea.