Making ourselves up

• John Banville
• The Guardian, Saturday 30 September 2006

Buy The Human Touch at the Guardian bookshop

The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe
by Michael Frayn
704pp, Faber, £20

Writing some time in the spring of 1888, Nietzsche declared: "There exists neither 'spirit', nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use." No doubt the Great Nay-sayer - he was also, of course, the Great Yea-sayer - would have approved of The Human Touch, Michael Frayn's gigantic jeu d'esprit, if for nothing else than the insouciance with which it denies most of the so-called truths that common sense holds to be self-evident.

The book is something of a surprise, and something of a conundrum. Frayn, one of England's most popular and entertaining "literary" writers, displayed his interest in and knowledge of the arcana of 20th-century physics in his play Copenhagen, but who would have expected him to launch out on the vast journey of speculation which is The Human Touch? In his opening "Prospectus" he modestly insists that, although he has studied philosophy, his book is not an attempt to do philosophy - "I shouldn't have the courage to make any such claim" - but then goes on to take a sly dig at the extreme specialisation and technicality of much of modern-day philosophical research.

As Emerson observed, "it is the eye which makes the horizon"; similarly, Frayn's thesis is that, as he writes, "the world is unimaginable without the focus of a viewpoint", and that viewpoint is the human one.

The universe plainly exists independently of human consciousness; but what can ever be said about it that has not been mediated through that consciousness? What can ever be wordlessly seen of it that is not dependent upon the existence of a single viewpoint from which to see it? What can be understood of it without the scale and context of human purposes, or the instruments of human thought?

Frayn, like David Hume before him, is a thoroughgoing sceptic whose scepticism, however, seems unlikely to keep him awake at night or interfere with his digestion. From his acquaintance with philosophy and his readings in the work of physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr - the main characters in Copenhagen - he has got hold of a simple fact about the world, which is its indeterminacy. What you see is not what you get, and Frayn is here to tell us how it is not. One is reminded irresistibly of that sheep in the Gary Larson cartoon which has suddenly looked up in astonished realisation from among a herd of its fellows to cry out: "Wait, this is grass we're eating - this is grass!"

At the risk of falling into national stereotyping one might say that Frayn's is a particularly English form of humanism, in that he accepts human limitations without descending into existential despair. His dismissal of the assumptions of common sense, that most deceptive of our senses, is itself admirably commonsensical. Yet he is no Johnsonian stone-kicker; indeed, he is at pains, and great pains they are, to acknowledge the insubstantiality of a world - or "a creation", to use the term and indefinite form of the book's subtitle - which common sense insists is solid all the way down.

Again and again in The Human Touch he reminds us that the reason our foot does not go straight through the stone we have kicked is not that the stone is made of Democritan atoms, each unimaginably tiny one a piece of irrefrangible matter, but, on the contrary, that what resists the toe of our boot is an immensely intricate concatenation of atomic forces. What we at our Newtonian level of existence necessarily conceive of as a substantial reality is in fact - in fact! - a play of spume upon a roiling sea of particles. The chair you are sitting in, the book you are holding, are made of a mesh of probabilities in empty space. And yet the book subsists, the seat sustains.

But Frayn is concerned with far more than physics. In his vast overview of this anomalous universe in which we find ourselves thrown, he takes a good-humoured crack at a broad range of our certainties, from the laws of nature - or "the laws of nature" - through the chimera of free will, the dubious status of truth and the ambiguousness of language, to, at the close, the question of the self itself. The breadth of his reading is awesome and he is fearless in interpreting, and in some cases attacking, the philosophical or scientific dogmas of this or that revered savant. Everywhere he is eminently sensible, especially when he is making nonsense of our illusory certainties. He calls as witnesses the great figures of science such as Einstein and Heisenberg, Bohr and Planck, Popper and Feynman, the supposed guardians of nature's laws who, on examination, turn out to contradict each other and themselves with unnerving frequency and unwavering conviction.

As might be expected of such a subtle novelist and playwright, Frayn is particularly acute on the nature of poetic truth, and what such truth has to tell us about Truth. The chapter "Is It True About Lensky?" is a brilliant tour de force centring on a consideration of the difference between the statements "d'Anthès shot Pushkin" and "Onegin shot Lensky". Pushkin was indeed shot by the egregious d'Anthès, and Onegin did shoot Lensky, but since one duel took place in real life and the other in fiction, how can both statements be said to be true, and if they are true, what does being true mean?

The final chapter addresses the nature of the self, that perpetual pilot light we believe to be our individual soul but which, when we search for it, proves a will-o'-the-wisp. What Frayn seems to recognise, though he does not specifically say so - indeed, at one point he speaks of "the centrality of the self" - is that there is no essential self, a fact attested to surely by the incoherence of our dreams. What during the day we think we are falls apart at night; the singularity we imagine ourselves to be shatters into shards. The sleeping mind desperately seeks to reassert the semblance of order which during waking hours our will imposes on experience, with the result that we find ourselves, with imperturbable logic, flying trouserless over Buckingham Palace where the Queen can clearly be seen playing croquet and using a flamingo for a mallet.

Frayn is at one with Ficino in regarding man as the magnum miraculum, the figure occupying the controlling centre half-way between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between atoms and stars, the creature whose regard gives order and significance to the blind play of particles. He is cheerfully conscious of the largeness of his central argument, described as "anthropocentrism run amok" by Jonathan Bennett, his philosophy professor at Cambridge half a century ago, who is thanked in the Acknowledgments for his "help and support" over the years. Yet the book's subtitle should rather be, Our Part in the Maintenance of a Universe, for Frayn sees us not as Zeus the maker but Atlas the bearer: "This is what it comes down to in the end: the world has no form or substance without you and me to provide them, and you and I have no form or substance without the world to provide them in its turn. We are supporting the globe on our shoulders, like Atlas - and we are standing on the globe that we are supporting ..."

Frayn cites many authorities in his search for uncertainty - he has a particular admiration for William James, who is copiously and aptly quoted in the notes - and it may be appropriate to add to these testimonies the words of a poet. Rilke too was much concerned with the nature of the physical world and our place in it - it is things we must show to the Angel, he insisted - and like Frayn he saw the human task as the conferring of a vivifying significance upon what otherwise would be inert matter: "Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House, / Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window - / possibly: Pillar, Tower? ... but for saying, remember, / oh, for such saying as never the things themselves / hoped so intensely to be." Or, as Michael Frayn puts it, "The truly mystical thing ... is our consciousness, and the standing of the world in relation to it; and that is indissolubly a part of how things are in fact disposed."