The Anomaly: A Novel by Hervé Le Tellier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Cosmos As Divine Bon Mot

Hervé Le Tellier seems to give his game away when he describes his duplicated alter ego: “… he knows that it would take only one of his sentences being more intelligent than he is for this miracle to make a writer of him.” And this he pushes for most assiduously. Every page has an appropriate bon mot or droll aphorism. And they are mostly ostentatiously witty and almost always original. Occasionally he packs them together in a writerly flood of exuberant showmanship, as in:

“God, but stupidity oozes from every corner of a religious mind. Every conviction is a thorn in the side of intelligence. Believers lose their wits in their efforts to see death as just another misadventure. Doubt has made me an autodidact of life, and I have enjoyed every moment all the more for that. I am never overcome by mystical emotions, even when gazing at the glorious glittering around a cloud. On the brink of death by drowning, I try to swim, I cannot in all decency pray to Archimedes. And as I sink today, my eyes open onto an abyss where no theorem holds sway.”

But this rhetorical handiness is tongue-in-cheek and a smokescreen for some serious thought. The premise of people being replicated and their duplicates appearing with some delay is intriguing and as far as I know original. It provides a way to literally confront individuals with themselves (including their own dying as well as quirks and defects). The only difference between each pair is a three month gap in experience. Reactions between these clones vary from the murderous to an instantly created bond of intimacy, and from the instinctively selfish to the considered self-sacrificial. In almost all cases the knowledge that there is another who shares one’s memories and secrets is in some way liberating. Perhaps this is connected with the realisation that there has always been an experiential and a reflective self.

Also I think there is something other than psychology that Le Tellier is alluding to, namely an old philosophy that may be too heavy to make explicit in a novel but which seems to be particularly relevant to our age of information. This is the early 18th century philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, particularly his Monadology. The Monadology is a short piece on metaphysics. Like all metaphysics, it tries to fit what we know about the world into a consistent framework. This is precisely what the various scientific and religious experts must do in The Anomaly. Confronted by events that do not conform with existing conventions, they are forced to formulate what is essentially a new theory of existence.

In the judgement of Le Tellier’s pundits, the most likely metaphysical condition which explains the replicating bits of humanity is our existence as a virtual simulation. In principle such a cosmic simulation is possible, they conclude, and it could account for everything they were currently experiencing. The consensus is that whoever is running this simulation is conducting some sort of test. While it’s not clear what constitutes success in this test, results could be of utmost significance. As one of his characters suggests early on, “No one is safe from success,” especially if it defined badly. A conclusion is vaguely formulated:

“To take the idea further, it may be precisely because we can now envision the idea of being programs that the simulation is offering us this test. And we’d better get it right, or at least make something interesting of it.”
“Why’s that?” Silveria asks.
“Because if we fail, the entities running this simulation could just shut it down.”

Leibniz had a similar idea. For him, each of us is an independent intelligence but we are profoundly blind. His term for these virtual(!) substances was ‘monads.’ Each monad perceives other monads and their environment with varying degrees of distortion. Each is also programmed to act in a specified manner based on its perceptions. All monads constitute the thoughts of God, who is the Supreme Monad and who programmes the ensemble through “fulgurations,” that is, electrical impulses, thus assuring coordination of the whole. There is no real interaction among the monads, only the working out of a “pre-established harmony.” This is signalled by one of Le Tellier’s character when he says “Nobody lives long enough to know just how little interest anybody takes in anybody.”

Before the development of the language of cybernetics, therefore, Leibniz had described exactly the sort of cosmic simulation suggested by Le Tellier’s boffins. Like it or not, we are living an illusion - including, of course, the illusion of living an illusion. And before our age of conspiracy theories, it was probably necessary to tone down the rhetoric. As one of Le Tellier’s scientists asks, “… isn’t this bonkers hypothesis the most elaborate conspiracy theory devised by the most enormous imaginable conspiracy?” Indeed, and what are the odds, therefore, that The Anomaly starts a new internet cult?

Despite its oddness, the Monadology provides a solution to every educated Frenchman, the mind-body problem of Cartesian philosophy. How do these two ‘substances’ communicate? According to Leibniz, this problem doesn’t exist because the non-material soul and the material body interact according to the divine intention. And in any case, there is only one substance, the monad. ‘Do they have souls?’ is the first question directed to the assembled theologians in The Anomaly. The leaders of the various religions agree that the duplicates do have souls and must therefore be treated as human beings (except the Buddhists but they already accept that it’s all illusory anyhow).

But Leibniz did not dare to take the next speculative step suggested in The Anomaly. He should have done so given the biblical tales of creation and divine regrets about how things have worked out, but he didn’t have the language. The divine regrets and ‘restarts’ (in Christianity there have been at least three) are also confirmed in many other religious myths (the Aztecs are cited by Le Tellier but there are many others describing cycles of creation and destruction).

It is as if the divine programming were being tested and de-bugged. Leibniz’s claim about ‘the best of all possible worlds’ should have been modified to ‘the best programme God could write at the moment; but He’s improving.’ The test being run in The Anomaly is not of individuals or even of humanity as a whole. What is being tested is the programme itself. There is nothing we can do about it because we are part of it; we exist within it, we are it. So at a stroke Le Tellier satirises not only religion, science, and politics, but also the great Leibniz as well as himself. Le Tellier cites the ‘reserve’ evil contained in Pandora’s box, Elpis, or Hope, “the expectation of good… [which is] the most destructive of all evils.” Perhaps he’s right. There’s always a bug buried somewhere.

View all my reviews