Word vomit book, read at your own risk.

Pitched somewhere between a Shakespeare comedy and a Michael Frayn farce, Double Blind is a rompy send-up of scientific chutzpah and the excesses of venture capitalism. It centres on two thirtysomething Oxford graduates, Lucy and Olivia, who are reunited when Lucy returns from the US to work (and fall in love) with Hunter, a fast-living virtual reality tycoon funding pioneering brain research. Olivia, who has recently coupled up with Francis, a botanist rewilding a remote Sussex estate, is an academic building a career out of debunking neuroscience, in one of the novel’s typically calculated asymmetries.

Rarely have I had the displeasure of reading something so pretentious and pompous by an author who seemed to be admired by a lot of people. There are a few characters but none are remarkable except a biologist who suffers from ADHD and possibly Autism as well as the inability to use paragraphs. He muses, he ponders and he lets it rip with a deluge of thoughts which would have better be written in essays rather than in a book.

Of course, while he was counting the amphibians and reptiles he might find today he would be calculating, but the calculation was only an expression of the basic awareness, a wave on the water, not made of anything different from the rest of the sea, but taking on a particular and transient shape. Just as the American citizen’s famous entitlement to the ‘pursuit of happiness’ was in fact a guarantee of unhappiness, since a person can only pursue something that is missing, so he needed to rest in awareness, like a man lying on the grass, rather than pursue it, like a man getting up from the grass in order to search for somewhere to lie down. Nor did he have to think about awareness, it was the nature of his mind to be aware; to imagine that he was depriving himself of awareness because he stopped contemplating it as a precious object was like imagining that putting on a glove would rob him of his hand. As long as he recognised what he was doing while he was doing it, he could pay attention to where he was stepping, record the absence of any animals under the first shelter, and still be completely reconciled with the content of his own mind. Not that there was anything, strictly speaking, to be reconciled with, just a natural state to recognise; and yet a huge amount of work was needed before that naturalness seemed like anything but a dogma or an abstraction. His particular sensibility continually generated metaphors to remind himself of a natural state that should have come, well, more naturally, but in his case, came with a caravan of similes and arguments. As he walked to the next corrugated cover, he pictured a great sphere of stable and constant awareness surrounding the immediate scene, the world, and the universe, but then he abolished the image, since a sphere must have a centre and an edge, and awareness was limitless and centreless. Did the extravagance of that claim make him a panpsychist? Maybe, but at the moment he had no interest in placing himself on the troubled spectrum of consciousness studies, just in the bare fact that he was resting on the ground of consciousness, rather than impaled on its conceptual summit. He refreshed his attitude by remembering that the relationship of everything to everything else was constantly changing, as an earthworm in the ground beneath him digested another grain of soil, or he moved his hand to lift another cover, and that each reconfiguration was occurring for the first time. As he thought of this continuous arising of novelty out of the bedrock of habit, he immediately pictured heat waves shimmering on a desert road. Still, in the end, there was no need to cancel that image, it didn’t matter whether his mind was busy or relatively restful, it was the act of recognition that constituted the resting and generated a spontaneous sense of the weightlessness of the sensations and thoughts and metaphors and arguments, a sense of the ‘mirror-like nature of the mind’, its ability to reflect everything without the mirror itself being stained or cracked by the reflection. The ‘mirror’ in that comparison was, of course, another metaphor, but a self-cancelling one: in the ‘mirror’ of the mind the metaphor of the mirror didn’t stick or stay any more than anything else, although it could be gazed at credulously for as long as anyone chose to, like any other object. The point was not to assert beliefs, but to remove the rubble of delusion that constituted almost all beliefs. It was true that he had to start with the confidence that the mind, in its natural state, was clear and had no need to ‘believe in’ anything at all, since all knowledge was inferred from that clarity. What was unknowable fell away into irrelevance, or into ‘noble silence’, to put it more traditionally and politely, and what was known, in that clarity, could do without the cheerleaders of belief to kick and spin it into a frenzy of assertion. Lifting the second cover he found two slow worms, legless lizards with tiny eyes often mistaken for snakes. There was also one of the less and less common examples of ‘The Common Toad’ sitting, with warty imperturbability, under the same refugium. Just as it was almost irresistible to test an infant’s grip by gently holding its tiny hand, it was tempting to lift up one of the slow worms from the ground, knowing that it would coil itself around his finger in a series of tight rings, allowing him to form a momentary connection with another way of being and another set of instincts, but he left the slow worms undisturbed; he was connected to them enough already.

I read this to my partner and they sighed. This was only chapter 8 and I had many in front of me, stretching like an infinity of waves of words. Why can’t the Conceptual Shark from The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall come here and eat a little of this meat?

As a code word for the inscrutability of origins, ‘God’ at least had the advantage of brevity, rather than rambling on for six syllables, like the equally mysterious ‘Initial Conditions’. According to Occam’s Razor, the minimalist aesthetic that was supposed to adjudicate over intellectual life for the rest of time, like a fashion editor in a black pencil skirt who simply refuses to retire, decade after decade, despite the screams of protest from an art department longing for a little moment of Baroque excess and a splash of colour, the parsimony of that single syllable should have won the day. How an opaque giant like Complexity was supposed to sit comfortably on Occam’s Razor was another question.

The plot is hectic, the millionaire is doped out on Xanax, there’s some sex while the wife is pregnant and there’s some humour but, for me, it was all destroyed by the schizophrenic rambles of the botanist.