- Published: 02/04/2020
- ISBN: 9781783785209
- Granta Books
- 304 pages
Hinton
Mark Blacklock
Howard Hinton and his family are living in Japan, escaping from a scandal. Hinton’s obsession is his work, his voyages into mathematical pure space, into the fourth dimension, but also his wife and sons, each of whom are entangled in the strange and unknown landscapes of Hinton’s science fictions.
In a bravura and startling meeting of real and philosophical elements, Mark Blacklock has created a ravishing period piece of late-Victorian social, scientific and domestic life. Hinton is about extraordinary discoveries, and terrible choices. It is about people who discover and map other realms, and what the implications might be for those of us left behind.
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A brilliant resurrectionist raid on the past as it should have unfolded. Mark Blacklock breathes new life into the tropes of detective fiction, occult mathematics and forensic science. He makes new mysteries out of re-forgotten enigmas
Iain Sinclair
I found this a dazzling display of extraordinary ideas and strange historical facts brought together in a technique that disrupts ordinary notions of time, space, and causality. And that is appropriate to its subject which is the relation between the outer reaches of mathematical (actually, geometrical) speculation and mystical or theosophical ideas current around the end of the nineteenth century. Though it's a subject far beyond my expertise, I took from the novel the idea that this was the intellectual background in which Einstein was about to discover a baffling new theory about the relation of space and time. The ruling metaphor is the search for the unknown, the exotic, and the hidden: Europeans in Meiji Japan, prospecting for minerals in the Americas, the truth about a father's scandalous past, etc. The many threads of narrative from different times and places are woven together in such a way that the reader is impelled by the same curiosity that drives the principal characters. It is an extraordinary achievement
Charles Palliser
Somewhere between detective novel, philosophical head-scratcher and historical page-turner, Hinton is a chimerical treat
Tatler
From the Same Author
I'm Jack
Mark Blacklock
In this provocative novel Mark Blacklock portrays the true and complex history of John Humble, aka Wearside Jack, the Ripper Hoaxer, a timewaster and criminal, sympathetic and revolting, the man hidden by a wall of words, a fiction-spinner worthy of textual analysis. In this remarkable work, John Humble leads the reader into an allusive, elusive labyrinth of interpretations, simultaneously hoodwinking and revealing.
I’m Jack is a riveting novel about truth, lies, prison and shame. It is also a profound and furious love letter to Sunderland. It is a puzzle, a hoax, a multi-voice portrait and a virtuoso assemblage of textual elements. I’m Jack announces the arrival of a radically talented and innovative novelist.
Mark Blacklock on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
The Paternoster: A Requiem
Mark Blacklock
‘To step into a paternoster lift is to step into the circulatory system of a building, to become a part of its very structure.’
Fiction | Granta Books
Line A—B
Mark Blacklock
‘Never was a man so deep in thought.’
An extract from Mark Blacklock’s new novel.
