"Maxwell's Demon" by Steven Hall (2021)

WOW! Simply… WOW!

 

Just finished it and my mind right now is suffering from a hangover plucking myself from the immaterial world of the book back to the physical world I’m currently occupying.

‘Is the world you inhabit right now made more from rocks and grass and trees, or from bank statements, articles, certificates, records, files and letters?’

 

It’s innovative, puzzling, mind-shattering, and everything I couldn’t have imagined on a piece of paper. After like fourteen years since the publication of The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall has returned with papyrus bagful of surprises and is ready to blow minds with this one. It’s Inception meets The Trauman Show meets Being John Malkovich … but at the same time, not being any of them.

 

Briefly, Maxwell’s Demon is about Thomas Quinn, son of the renowned Stanley Quinn in the literary world, a struggling drowned-in-debts-and-bailiffs writer who becomes obsessed (like Ahab and his whale) in chasing after Andrew Black—who had been his father’s protégé—and Black’s book of Cupid’s Engine.

 

To describe my thoughts and feelings about this title, I can safely divide it into three parts:

1) The first part was a hook as the character Sophie described it. From the very first pages, I knew I was onto something monumental and full of wonders.

2) The second relied on exposition and deep musings concerning big ideas like entropy, mathematical manifolds, thermodynamics, the lost gospel of Q, etc. I was surprisingly intrigued by the science, but the biblical stuff and the exhaustive digging around for symbols and finding meaning behind them, well, I wasn’t a fan. This part was a bit of a drag and confusing in a manner that left me disoriented wandering where the plot was. Luckily, these issues didn’t pull me away from the book. In fact, they stimulated me to want more of it.

3) The last third was the grand finale, a garden of thorns full of twists and turns and mind-boggling revelations.

 

This book is so meta like Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nightmare (talking within the book about the book of The Arabian Nightmare), like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (talking about the book of House of Leaves in chapter XX)… and here we are reading Hall’s Maxwell’s Demon (talking about Andrew Black’s Maxwell's Demon). It’s self-referential like the Liar Paradox, when a book contains itself within itself… and that’s where it shines when it highlights the importance of the physicality of books and the creative process of writing them.

 

Good stories are the ones that trigger, invoke, and propel readers to talk and analyze and write wordy reviews about them. Personally, this book is an insta classic that, I believe, it has cocooned itself in amber for future generations to appreciate what a good story looks and feels like. It has rewound time for me back to when I was in my twenties, a time when I was truly savouring the act of reading and imagining.

   

Summary:

Maxwell’s Demon is not a love letter to the written word. It’s an obituary to the dying physicality of the business of paperbacks as it struggles to be relevant in a fast-changing world that cherishes ones and zeros. It’s a Rubik’s box of a novel, a machine, an intricate, wind-up, tick-tock-ing machine about grief, loss, identity, the breaking down of character archetypes and the form of the novel… about the creative process of writing books and how consuming it is.

It might not be everyone’s cup of tea. There’s a chiaroscuro, a contrast, in readers’ impressions regarding it. It’s an either-love-it-or-hate-it sort of a book. The best way to approach it is to take your time reading it. It’s heavy and dense and populated with loads and loads of concepts that may pull readers away. Read small chunks of passages, contemplate on them, and if necessary, reread them, and I’m sure, you’ll find the process highly rewarding.