Новая книга Адриана Дункана «Мысль без столкновения» исследует жизнь гениальной девочки и её учителя

We present an excerpt from A Thought Without Collision, the new novel by Adrian Duncan, author of Love Notes from a German Building Site (winner of the John McGahern Book Prize), A Sabbatical in Leipzig (shortlisted for the Kerry Novel of the Year) and The Geometer Lobachevsky. Summer, 1923. Six-year-old Catherine Carolan grows restless on her parents' farm. It's already clear that her intellect will soon outgrow the two-room schoolhouse across the fields. Summer, 1951. To ease him through his final days, Dr. Josef Alois calls for someone from his past. Enter Catherine Carolan, now an Oxford professor. A novel in two strands, A Thought without Collision is a meditation on how we construct our relationship to the world around us. In the bright country schoolhouse, young Catherine Carolan peers at the blackboard before her onto which Master Francis has just chalked five rows of numbers. Two blond-haired children, a barefoot boy and a girl, of five and six, sit alongside her. Behind her, two eight-year-old boys sit at their benches, their heads recently shorn for lice, and behind them sit three eleven-year-old girls. The three most junior children are writing two-digit numerals with their pencils into their copybooks. Catherine, however, has long mastered the counting, to ten thousand. When she first encountered the numbers eleven to fourteen, her small heart raced at this sudden strange straying from pattern, but then she quickly saw the pattern of zero to one to nine to a multiple of one and ten re-establish, and she felt she could then count forever. The earlier pages in her copybook are filled with shapes of simple kinds, and over them she has written in shaky script the words to which these shapes relate: rectangle, triangle, circle, square … Her mother, in the evenings, rehearses with her daughter everything Catherine has encountered with Master Francis in school that day. This is how her mother learned her words and numbers too, and it is this she often tells her daughter, by way of encouragement, as they crouch over a book in front of a candle and the cooling fire. Then, the following day at school, Master Francis often has to take Catherine aside and correct these strange pronunciations she has developed overnight from repeating these words after her mother – who says the word 'circle 'in her cockney ‘say-kuwl’, and ‘square ’as ‘skway-ah’, and, so as to rectify these strange variations, Master Francis asks young Catherine Carolan to repeat aloud after him the sounds:‘surkul ’and ‘skwayre’. The two other children beside Catherine are bright, and this leads at times to gentle shows of competition between them. Master Francis then, at other times, allows the youngest three to play with multicoloured plastic sticks and bindings to the rear of the classroom. He asks them to construct these things called ‘skyscrapers’. After they are done, he looks on at their unsteady and slender constructions, and this ignites in him a long-felt desire to up and emigrate to the city of Chicago. Each evening, when he pedals back to the small labourers’ cottage he rents five miles outside the town of B_, he imagines himself in the middle of the metropolis of Chicago, looking on at the magical glassy high-rises emerging either side of him as he whizzes along a boulevard, cars passing, well-dressed men smoking cigarettes while strolling, buses thundering by, the metro coursing in labyrinths beneath his bicycle wheels, which descend a dip and screech to a halt, whereupon Master Francis sees before him, across the bog, the shores then the great impassive body of wind-blown Lake Michigan. He is very fond of Catherine, who he thinks is a kind and generous girl. He has seen how she shares her food and how,one day, she took a cloth band from her hair and passed it to the girl behind, a few years her senior, who had begun, frustrated at her inability to conjugate a verb, to cry. Master Francis could tell that Catherine had seen this kind of comforting gesture a number of times before. He asked himself, is she then from a sad or even a melancholic household? ‘Catherine, ’he said at the time, ‘it’s of course kind to offer Marie your band, but it won’t, in the long run, be effective. It would be far more effective if Marie were to learn her irregular verbs, and then there’d be no need for such tears or for such ribbons to stem them.’ Catherine looked up at him, unsure if she had angered him, and she took her balled-up band from Marie and pushed it into her dress pocket. More recently, Master Francis has become aware of Catherine’s growing capabilities with numbers. Oftentimes, when he is teaching long division to the ten- and eleven- year-olds, he sees Catherine Carolan peering over at the blackboard as if in a trance, while he demonstrates the movement of numbers up and down and over and back, and how to carry remainders from a division over to the next numeral – disintegrating one number into another, as it were. A few times, he has asked to see her copybook after one of these demonstrations and he has found the series of long divisions written in her shaky script, but otherwise all perfectly copied out inside her book. He’s not yet sure if she is merely collecting his demonstrations or if she has knowledge of what he is doing. He asks himself this question often in the evenings: when does collecting of this patterned kind bend itself into knowledge, and what does that moment feel or look like, and is this departing from pattern memorable … ? And he often wonders, too, does an equalising of the distance between what the teacher knows and what the student knows lead to progress? Or is it necessary to retain these distances, these differences, and is that what truly gives teaching its potential? Sometimes he wonders more deeply if he is not merely some hired magician, tricking these children into a useful form of agreement that they can carry forth unthinkingly into their lives. In the last few months, this Catherine Carolan has uttered the strangest of things to him. One day, while they were compiling a school dictionary of common words, he held a drawing of a tulip before his chest and said to the youngest children, ‘This is a tulip, ’to which Catherine put up her hand and, when he bade her speak, she said, ‘No, it’s not, sir; it’s a picture of a tulip on a piece of paper. ’He can already see a certain cleanliness of mind in her and at the same time no awareness of this cleanliness and how it marks her out from the other children, who vary from average of mind to at times slovenly. Or perhaps – he sometimes wonders to himself in his quietest moments – it is as if she can see through, with a naive, almost pre-linguistic clarity, the conceits he must employ to produce this kind of learning. He has mentioned Catherine and her strange abilities to the headmaster, an impatient boor called Foynes, who has merely said, ‘Best to keep an eye on her, so.’ A Thought Without Collision is published by Tuskar Rock Press