There is a Faustian quality about this clever, taut quest novel of sorts which explores the themes of pride and failure through a plot shaped by various mysteries. The Petros of the title is an elderly Greek man, known to the narrator for much of his early life as merely the black sheep of his father's family. While his two younger brothers took their place in their father's business, Petros the distant first-born was allowed to pursue his academic research. The narrator grew up well used to his father's habitual refrain "that no-good brother of mine, Petros, is one of life's failures". The young boy became increasingly interested in the mystery apparently surrounding the benign bachelor uncle who tended his garden and played chess at a high level.
The missing facts about his kindly relative's current plight as an outsider begin to obsess his nephew, who recalls, "In vain did I observe Uncle Petros during our annual visit, seeking in his appearance or behaviour signs of dissoluteness, indolence or other characteristics of the reprobate. On the contrary, any comparison weighed unquestionably in his favour: the younger brothers were short-tempered and often outright rude in their dealings with people while Uncle Petros was tactful and considerate . . . my curiosity increased with each passing year."
As is obvious from the title, this is a book about mathematics as well as character - and as its author, Apostolos Doxiadis, was a child mathematics prodigy, one can expect that while many beauties of maths feature, so, too, do compulsion, heartbreak and frustration. Research is far lonelier and a lot less protected than might be suspected. Goldbach's Conjecture is the hypothesis that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes or prime numbers. This Everest of maths theories, known to everyone who has ever battled the glories of maths, is the work of the great German mathematician Christian Goldbach (16901764), and some 258 years later it has yet to be proved. Doxiadis has taken this theory and ingeniously placed it at the centre of the tragedy of Uncle Petros.
Initially, of course, none of this is known to the young narrator. His fascination with the uncle grows, but no answers are forthcoming. A chance phone call, however, sets him on the trail of his uncle's past. His first piece of detective work - which reveals that Petros was a maths professor - earns him a severe reprimand. When he decides to become a mathematician himself, he expects Uncle Petros to be overjoyed; instead the old man, who had first taken to chess as light relief from mathematical research, gives him a problem to solve, explaining that should he fail, he has no right to make maths his life.
Although the boy spends his summer working on it, he fails to find the answer. Off he goes to university. There, he resumes his investigations when his room-mate informs him that the problem he had been trying to solve was none other than Goldbach's Conjecture, "one of the most notoriously difficult unsolved problems in the whole of mathematics".
On one level it could be argued that the central character of this novel is mathematics itself. Doxiadis knows his subject and the detail never burdens the narrative, it enhances it. Yet the book also succeeds through the unexpected depth of characterisation; the characters, even the most minor, assume a strong sense of personality. The author's prose has an old-world grace and the tone is formal without concealing either the narrator's curiosity or exasperation. The novel also goes a long way towards demystifying maths without diminishing its mythic status as a pursuit engaged with searching for truth and beauty.
In one of several twists, the narrative shifts and becomes a book within a book.
Petros's story unfolds, from his early promise and his first and only doomed romance on, gradually, to the way in which a gift becomes an obsession and finally a destructive force. His academic career is ruined rather than advanced by his determination to become famous. Running parallel to his experiences are the sad lives of other real-life mathematicians, misfits and suicides, who discovered to their cost that maths is a young man's arena.
Petros emerges less as a kindly victim and more as a rampaging, secretive egoist who regards himself as unlucky, not a failure. When asked why he has not decided to enter chess competitions, Petros replies, "why should I strive to become a mediocre professional when I can bask in my status as an exceptional amateur?"
Despite the narrator's urgency, the plot develops with careful deliberation and only begins to race near the end. Anyone with a love for the mysteries and demands of maths, a ruthless, often cruel art of the abstract, will love this highly cerebral, atmospheric book. Yet Doxiadis is ultimately concerned with character; and his daring Faustian investigation skilfully reveals itself as more cautionary parable than intellectual jaunt.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist.
