The month in books

October brings books about madness, extinction, deceit, self-deception, viral storms and human nature. The last twinkle of summer is over. Now it’s the Thinking Season, the Hunker Down Brooding Season. But seriousness is no bad thing. Even sitting beside a swimming pool on holiday, we remember that this world contains attics and basements too. Yet these books have another, more disturbing quality: they approach their subjects too directly.

The latest from psychoanalyst Darian Leader is called What is Madness? (Hamish Hamilton, £20). I would like to know of course, but I don’t think I’ve ever asked the question in the form of the title. I might have asked: Am I going mad right now? Is she mad? Is she mad in the same way as me? Is she free on Thursday night? My questions differ from Leader’s leading question not only because, when it comes to the topic of madness, I want a novel to tell me about it, not a non-fiction/psychology, but also because I assume that what we think about madness changes from person to person, as well as over time. Ultimately, the book implies that Leader thinks the same, yet he begins with the general question, as if this is what his ambition requires him to do. Or perhaps it’s a sign of the season—story-telling and insight is too summery. October demands a thesis.

The major novel amid this month’s pile also has a big central idea. In The Marriage Plot (4th Estate, £20) Jeffrey Eugenides asks what marriage means today and whether the great 19th-century love stories are now dead. I think it’s no coincidence that the three main characters can be described, as the book blurb does very well, in a single phrase per person (1. “dutiful English major”; 2. “charismatic loner and college Darwinist”; 3. a man “reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange”). This is a novel that is uninterested in entertaining the common reader, it is for the journalist, or anyone else who is more interested in the zeitgeist than real people and their various loves and madnesses.

Within this sober Oktoberfest, I was delighted to find a book conceived, according to the author, after he was “especially intrigued” by some mathematical ideas in Dante. In Galileo’s Muse (Harvard University Press, £21.95) the American physics professor Mark Peterson doesn’t go crashing in to his topic, he finds it almost serendipitously and explores it carefully.

If the book were titled like the other October books, it would probably have to live up to a billing something like The Failure of Science and The Victory of Art. But Peterson is much more subtle than this. His central argument is that Galileo, an artist turned scientist, relied as much on his artistic and classical education to reach his famous insights as he did on scientific methodology. Peterson understands all too well that Galileo is now “not so much a historical person as he is a symbol… of an imagined conflict between science and religion, truth and authority, or almost, to put it baldly, right and wrong.” Peterson establishes pretty thoroughly that this caricature is a misrepresentation, yet in his conclusion he recognises that “a careful argument will never prevail over a simple and instantly understood caricature.”

Perhaps what we need to find are modern equivalents of Galileo, those who respond to what Peterson mischievously names the “Muse of Earthly Things,” a notion of science, he says, with “about the right mix of seriousness and lightness.”

Melanie Challenger’s On Extinction (Granta, £20) promises some of this Galilean spirit. A published poet, Challenger’s latest book arises from a fascination with extinct animals and flowers and the human activities that brought about their disappearance.

Alas her book fails to connect with either the poetic Muse or Peterson’s newly-dubbed one. What I find most disappointing about the book though is that there is precious little science in it. There is reporting about scientific insight, but Challenger doesn’t offer any insight of her own. That presumably is for scientists to do. As a consequence, her conclusions are insipid—for example, she suggests that children could learn more about nature at school. Where would we be if Galileo had stopped his scientific explorations with conclusions like this? Perhaps that is too high a standard by which to judge Challenger, but all I mean is that an author should spend some time learning the science of her chosen subject and, through that learning, she may even reach insights that may be as important as those found in the work of a biologist.

As the weather worsens and night draws in earlier, at least one can take cheer from new seasons at performing arts venues. Peter Conrad’s book Verdi And/Or Wagner (Thames & Hudson, £24.95) has done more than any actual production I’ve seen to make me excited about opera. In his comparison of the styles and ambitions of the two composers, Conrad has provided me with a means of accessing opera specifically, as well as a way of thinking about music in general. If I tire of reading this October, I’ll look for opera tickets.