I can remember very clearly the final pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I read at the age of sixteen. The character of Aureliano Buendia has discovered the ancient parchments of Melquiades, the far-seeing gypsy. The parchments are a chronicle of the Buendia family’s long history, a chronicle so rich and knowing, that Aureliano finally, dizzyingly, arrives at the moment in the story of his family in which he reads of himself reading the chronicle. Melquiades’ story, we realise, is itself alive and is gobbling up even the present, moment by moment.

Later, I would come across the term ‘metafiction’, but the word would never begin to do justice to the exhilarating experience of those final pages, to their innate breathlessness, and to my direct, if fleeting, experience of other worlds, or orders of reality, that seem to tremble, alive, within the reality we think so familiar.

It seems to me that any good story has a will of its own. No matter how sharp or sophisticated, it is essentially a primitive thing, something that makes demands; that gets greedy, like Melquiades’ all-consuming chronicle; something that gathers up everything in its path. At times, The Wave Theory of Angels has felt less like a novel-in-the-making than an irresistible glacier moving through the last several years of my life, claiming in its progress images I’ve hoarded, questions I’ve loved, apparently random facts, private memories, the unfolding present, news events, polysomnograph readings, the Latin mass, sub-atomic mysteries, TV trivia, chance encounters and copious notes: from cathedrals, coffee bars, physics labs, dreams and old haunts.

For me, art and literature is what happens when the pressures of some inner world or reality is brought to bear upon the external world we all generally know so well. So, as a writer, I’m interested above all in those landscapes or spaces or times where inner worlds might be found seeping into the outer…

The year 1284 was such a time. In 13th-century France, the field of metaphysics (or, questions about orders of reality) was also, simultaneously, physics (the study of nature and the material world). Both set out to define the dynamics of Creation, so an angel of the heavenly host was not merely a decorative messenger of divine will, but rather, an irreducible ‘atom’ of the universe. For us today, such a sweeping breadth of inquiry looks both suspect and wonderful, and it was this contradiction that drew me to this time and place. The more detail of the period I uncovered, the more I fell in love with its odd coupling of a new knowledge of the world with an age-old appetite for mystery.

I also found myself wondering if, against all expectation, we don’t find ourselves in an equally contrary place and time. I knew I wanted to explore where, if anywhere, the mysterious might lie for us, we denizens of this Information Age. In the welter of data these days, is it possible that, even as notions of mystery grow less visible, they grow more urgent – like anything else that gets pushed to the dim margins of our cultural unconscious?

Was it, for example, significant that many of our assurances about the physical world should begin to come undone in the field of physics itself, arguably the elite domain of 20th-century rational thinking? In the last century, of course, Newtonian physics made reluctant room for the unpredictable quark and lepton, and quantum inquiries have nudged us toward questions about the nature of a reality we had long assumed to be fixed, solid and knowable. Suddenly the world was, once again, much bigger than we were, and mystery surfaced once more, stubbornly alive and kicking. In the words of Sir James Jeans, one-time Secretary of the Royal Society, ‘[T]he universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.’ In The Wave Theory of Angels, physicist Giles Carver, struggles with his own incredulity.

All this said, The Wave Theory of Angels is, at its most vital, a story about our human passions. It begins one morning (in both 1284 and 2001) when Christina, a twenty-year-old girl, fails to wake up. Is she alive or dead? Aware or comatose? Blessed or damned? All we know (all I knew as she entered my mind for the first time) is that she has been overcome in some way by the demands of her own need for a passionate life.

Giles, her father, is driven in turn by his urgent need to understand, while Maggie, her sister, who is passionate about her family, is desperate not to lose the intimacy and closeness she has depended on since the death of her mother years before. What, I wondered, is passion, the fiercest of human energies? What are the risks one takes to be true to one’s passions? What, if anything, is the force of yearning as an energy in the world? In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, mortals and immortals spontaneously combust, mutate or take flight under the terrible pressure of their passions. As readers, we watch in wonder as their assorted longings bear down on them with an emotional g-force the physical world itself cannot resist.

And somewhere, in the midst of it all this ineluctable change, are the questions that pulled me forward as I wrote The Wave Theory: If the imagination is the organ of our desires, can it be a merely passive thing? Is it finally nothing more than a vent for our longings, dreams and fantasies? Or could it be an active faculty – a bridge of some kind between the inner force of our desire and the physical world itself? Might the imagination even be (as in Melquiades’ secret story of the Buendia family) a mysterious maker of new worlds?

Alison MacLeod
2005