The World As I Found It represents one of the hardest and most slippery of literary undertakings. It is far from unusual
in that it embarks on a fictional - or at least fictive - reconstruction of the lives of real, historical personages over several decades during the first half of the twentieth-century. The twist Duffy offers is the three main characters happened to be famous dead white male philosophers: celebrated principally for their abstractions rather than their actions. Further, whilst the book concerns itself - lengthily and
occasionally windily - with the loves, sufferings, career trajectories and incidental music of his protaganists' biographies, the author does not shirk to tackle their
ideas in the contexts of their lived experience. The result is a dense and ambitious sprawl of a first novel, that is at times as demanding on the reader as it is well-researched.
The trio in question are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. Duffy takes his title from Wittgenstein's observation in the
Tractatus to the effect that any book thus named must 'in an important sense' lack a subject - since (or so I take his meaning) the notion of the world as found implicitly problematises the borders and identity of the 'I' that does the finding. This in itself is a profound and sticky riddle from which to launch a fictional exposition, let alone an intellectual biography. But Duffy for the most part succeeds I feel in tackling this theme dextrously negotiating the gap between the two via an imaginative fleshing out of an only very slightly tweaked historical record. He is particularly strong in a demonstration of the connections between 'his' Ludwig's suffocatingly privileged family background and his contorted, sometimes violent attempts to deploy
philosophical thinking as an urgent desperate therapy.
Wittgenstein - or 'Wittgenstein', and the debate I was left with in my head between the two alternatives formed finally the novel's chief provocative merit at the same time as bequeathing an enduring sense of distaste and perplexity - emerges as a haunting, haunted imago of self, often unlikeable, never less than disturbing. As novelist rather than biographer, Duffy makes free with moving in and out from behind his eyelids. He riffles effectively between him and the other members of the triad to bring out his exceptionality in the eyes of others. By deploying a complex and frequently baffling chronology, complete with flashbacks and fast forward he weaves links between a troubled 'private' realm and public events, including two world wars.
Duffy's Russell and Moore, whilst fascinating creations in their own right, are I felt less successful. Although many and sometimes entertaining pages are devoted to their own trajectories, especially the former's gradual regression from brilliant philosopher to sad and obsessive philanderer, I found myself sensing that their presence other than as foils crowded out attention to Wittgenstein and his family circle, material enough for a dozen tragedies. The quality of writing itself is another casualty of the sheer length of the book. It becomes crudely repetitive, very occasionally blatantly slapdash and inattentive to detail. Meanwhile, incidental lessons in political and intellectual history tend to be needlessly overdone. A beginner's vice, perhaps: Duffy has simply tried to stuff too much into one volume.
One's left overall applauding his ambition, stamina, eloquence and scope, however. Most of all one is marked by the spiky, worrying, paradoxical factional/ fictional figure of Wittgenstein, whom in the novel as in reality exits the world he frequently found near intolerable by requesting his last carer to 'tell everyone I've had a wonderful life'. Its a road already trodden: I could not but help contrasting Duffy's treatment with the sparser, harsher but indelibly masterful portrayal of 'Roithamer' in Thomas Bernhard's
Correction. Yet if nothing else, Duffy prompted me to return once more to my half-read copy
of Philosophical Investigations, and even, more fleetingly and less securely, to lay my hands on Moore's never-read
Principia Ethica. This cannot be a bad thing, and for someone with even more superficial knowledge than I of the lives on which this fiction is based, it may well perform the service of a prompt for historical curiosity as well as a stimulant for imagination.