Book Review: The Irrationalist

Title: The Irrationalist

Author: Andrew Pessin

Date: 2017

Publisher: Open Books

ISBN:978-0998427447

Length: 508 pages

Quote: “For a moment the two men glared at each other, their breath steaming in the air. From the side, from a certain angle perhaps, they almost resembled each other...”

The Irrationalist by Andrew Pessin (Kindle Locations 24-25).

And neither of the poor fellows, one of whom was to become known as René Descartes, was much to look at. The short pudgy guy with the sneery face at the right side of the red-draped table, in the jacket drawing? People who drew or painted Descartes’ face agreed that he really did look like that, or sort of. As this novel suggests, the facial expression may have been produced by scarring. 

Of the things for which Descartes is remembered, a mysterious death isn’t one. He wrote brilliant late-Renaissance-to-early-modern works of scientific philosophy, was famous, invited to teach in all the best universities but attacked by would-be rivals at each of them, and died middle-aged, possibly from pneumonia or tuberculosis. He was the first of many authors to use the phrase “Cogito ergo sum,” or “I think, therefore I am,” in a book. He wrote that dogs had no consciousness and couldn’t feel pain, but he lived with a dog and was accused of making a ridiculous fuss over it, pampering it in its old age, probably having some sort of sick and perverted relationship with the animal...in the seventeenth century fear of “witches” and “wizards” whose religious cults allegedly worshipped animals ran high, and it was a dangerous time for anyone, however devout a member of the church, to have a pet. During his carnivorous phases Descartes ate some remarkably disgusting meals (Pessin relishes the yucky seventeenth century recipes), coughed a lot, and was believed to be unhealthy. During vegetarian phases he apparently felt better. He outlived many people of his own age.He was a Catholic school product and, though not a priest himself, never married; he was the quintessential nerd-who-never-outgrows-it.

But could he have been murdered? His contemporaries didn’t think so, but who knows? Apart from a facial expression he may have been unable to help, how obnoxious was Descartes? He had enough enemies to generate an intriguing murder mystery with a heart. Pessin invents a young ministerial student, troubled with nightmares and lost memories, who discovers his own courage and maturity in the process of trying to solve the mystery of Descartes’ death. (The fictional student Baillet shares the name of a real Adrien Baillet who wrote a biography of Descartes, but the real Baillet was born much later than the fictional one.)

A good detective story should keep readers guessing. I congratulate Pessin on that. Although I guessed part of the ending after reading the prologue, I didn’t guess the other part up to the end.

What I didn't like (and the only thing I didn't like) was the polite, but trite, presentation of Christina of Sweden (Descartes' last employer). Male historians always tend to focus on her sexuality rather than her achievements of the young Queen Christina of Sweden. Like other ruling queens of her era, Christina was sometimes titled "king" (in some languages "she-king"), described as "manly," and generally conceded the benefits of being an honorary man. Unlike some other ruling queens of this era, Christina at least didn’t develop a reputation for flirting with or sleeping with other people’s husbands, and it just tears some male readers up to imagine that she might really have been capable of self-control. What options did she have? Well, Elizabeth of England wasn’t very kind to other women, ordering her male "Peers" to report to court and leave their wives at home, and was vindictively accused both of being male and of having secretly disposed of unwanted babies. Catherine of Russia spared her court ladies’ reputations by overtly using men as sex objects. Nzinga of Angola officially married wives and, as tradition required, claimed paternity of some of their babies, too. (Angolans, at least, apparently managed not to laugh.) Christina summoned men to her court as counsellors and teachers and, apparently, resisted all of their charms, or at least avoided pregnancy, though some of her court gentlemen had to have been more attractive than Descartes--in their day fifty really was old. Christina slept with other women for security, and possibly for other reasons; she called Ebba Sparre "Beauty," but I've seen no other writer claim that they smooched in public.

But The Irrationalist generally steers clear of graphic sex, apart from noting the number of seventeenth-century working women who didn’t own rental property, were barred from most legitimate jobs, and therefore earned their livings as legal or semilegal prostitutes. Descartes at least tried to appear to be chaste; Pessin’s fictional detective really is chaste. Instead the lives of real and fictional characters are fleshed out with lots of historical details...and with murders. This is a murder mystery after all. There are fights, some of which are kept miraculously bloodless, some of which are not, and there are freshly and not so freshly killed bodies.

There are moments when I’m aware of the presence in the novel of a narrator from my own time: people protested Christina’s edict changing her legal gender, we’re told, until she “nipped them [the protests] in the bud by nipping a few of their [the commoners’] heads in the bud.” And there are a few computer-editor typos: a “pour hound,” and a priest wearing a nice “cossack.” (Cossacks, or Kazakhs, were not Catholics, and the possible ways a Catholic priest might have been described as wearing one--or maybe just the fur hat?--beguiled me for a few seconds before the thought “Cassock, of course” came to mind.) And then there are the flashes of genuine wit that a novel about seventeenth century writers needs. Their own sense of wit could be dry, obscure, longwinded and sometimes rather horrible (among the attractions of a “Gala” is a fight staged for a buffalo, a lion, and a bear), but at their best people like Descartes could be as funny as Shakespeare. Witty epigrams were much admired, and definitely belong in this novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Irrationalist and imagine a lot of people in cyberspace will, too. What U.S. students read of European history tends to fixate on England and France, probably due to the idea that foreign history is more palatable if your own personal ancestors are mentioned in it. (This is true, but a lot of people's ancestors did not come from England or France.) Dutch and Swedish history is fresher. Descartes is part of both, and Pessin sketches lively, plausible pictures of both of those countries in this novel. If you like armchair tourism, buy The Irrationalist now. It's long enough that your eyes will thank you for buying the printed book, although I received a review copy via Kindle and can report that, yes, Kindle was able to handle its length, sacrificing only page numbering.