Alaska Employment Law

I am not, as a general rule, a fan of historical novels, but I recently finished The Indian Clerk, by David Leavitt, and I am almost done with The Given Day, Dennis Lehane’s new novel.  What these books have in common is that they are full of real historical characters doing imagined things.

In The Indian Clerk, which begins as World War I is about to break out, the English mathematician G. H. Hardy (who really existed) receives a letter from one S. Ramanujan, an impoverished clerk working in India.  Ramanujan (likewise a real historical figure) is a brilliant and self-taught mathematical genius who believes he can prove the Riemann hypothesis, an exceedingly difficult problem about prime numbers.  (A note here – non-mathematicians should have no fear of reading this book.  While you might miss a little of the theoretical by-play, I promise it’s a negligible amount, and not important to your understanding of the story.)

Hardy invites Ramanujan to come to Cambridge for further study; the War prevents Ramanujan from returning to India for five years.  The portraits of Hardy and Ramanujan are keenly drawn:  Hardy in particular is a complex mixture of arrogance, insecurity, braveness, and cowardice, who feels but cannot admit to himself, I think, a deep cultural guilt about the political subjugation of India.  Ramanujan, lonely, homesick, not well able to maintain a vegetarian diet in England, sickens.  Hardy’s circle includes other great figures then at Cambridge, including John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, G. E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell, all of whom become alive on the pages of this very fine novel. The Indian Clerk, its post-Edwardian characters wrestling with class, cultural, racial, and sexual issues, really inhabits the past.

P.S.  Mr. Lehane’s book, which I will also recommend, is about the Boston police strike in 1919.  I’ll review it some day.