The Explosionist
Page 31
Why had Mr. Petersen been so cagey about the curious technical drawing that appeared over the pantelegraph, and had it anything to do with Nobel’s missing plans?
What had really happened to Sophie’s parents? Would Nobel be able to fill in the story for her, or would she have to live with the gaps?
She was surprised how little it took to reconcile herself to missing the exams. The thing that really gave her a pang, strange to say, was the thought of missing the appointment with Mr. Braid the following week. What a pity! She was curious, most curious, to know what her second self had written under hypnosis. Would the doctor keep the pages quite safe until she could come back and find him again?
Though it was galling not to know the answers to any of these questions, there was still something comforting about having questions one cared enough to ask. Surely everything would come right in the end. If only she could know in advance that Jean and Priscilla and Nan would be safe….
“Sophie!” Mikael said, breaking into her thoughts. “Do you want to come out on deck with me now? Surely the fresh air will do you good.”
Sophie’s legs felt like cotton wool, and Mikael had to drag her up several steep staircases, but she was glad she’d come. The haar had cleared a little, and they could just about make out the shore.
As they watched, the foghorn blew and the crew lifted anchor. The ship began to make its way down the Firth of Forth to the open sea.
Though the ship was really moving away from shore, it looked as though the land was receding from the ship. The country vanished in a mist that made it hard to believe Scotland even existed, as if all life up till now had been a dream, and this the awakening to a new day.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN in love with the idea of north. In the summer of 2000, I took a long-awaited trip to St. Petersburg and found myself absolutely in thrall to the sheer beauty of that northern landscape, the magic of Russia’s imperial past, and the heartbreakingly shabby grandeur of the present-day city’s buildings and parks. I was surprised, though, by how much St. Petersburg reminded me of Edinburgh, a city I visited regularly as a child, since my Scottish grandparents lived just a few miles outside of it in a town called North Berwick. The similarities between the styles of building and ways of living, the visual quality of those long evenings of summer light, the closeness to the water, and the lingering Enlightenment presence: all these things made me feel as though I had entered a strange secret northern world with the feel of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.
Over the next few years, I went to Tallinn (in Estonia) and Stockholm, then to Copenhagen (or København, as it is spelled by the Danish), and I began to dream about what it would be like to live in an alternate universe in which these northern cities, so strongly united by culture and geography, were also politically connected. What if the medieval northern European trade alliance, called the Hanseatic League, had found a second life in the modern era, due to calamitous developments in European politics? This world would have split off from our own when Napoleon beat Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815.
What would it be like, I asked myself, to be a fifteen-year-old girl growing up in a Hanseatic-identified Scotland that was still being run along the principles of the eighteenth-century period known as the Enlightenment, with its passion for rationality and science? At a time when the world—as it did in our own version of 1938—seemed to stand on the brink of total war?
As in our own world, the 1910s in Sophie’s world saw a Great War; here, though, it lingered on into the 1920s and ended with England falling to Europe. Now the countries in the Hanseatic League, including Scotland, are able to hold out against the Europeans only because they also happen to be the world’s premier suppliers of top-quality munitions, which Europe needs. This is the legacy of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist and industrialist whose invention of dynamite in 1867 changed the landscape of The Explosionist’s Europe even more decisively than it changed our own. (The real Alfred Nobel lived from 1833 to 1896—assuming he was born in the same year in this world, he would be almost ninety-five years old, though the old lady at the factory hints to Sophie that Nobel only survives as what she calls “a brain in a jar.”)
Nobel’s name is best known today for the awards he funded, including prizes in Physics, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace, for one of the paradoxes of the dynamiteur’s life was that he was also a devoted pacifist. The Nobel factory at Ardeer where the novel’s final showdown takes place really existed, and the abandoned buildings of the dynamite factory can be visited to this day.
The world I imagined comes out of real places and real history but also out of fairy tales and counterfactual paths not taken. The people in this world are preoccupied with technology (everything from electric cookers to high explosives) but also with spiritualism, a movement our own world largely abandoned in the early twentieth century. Sigmund Freud is a radio talk-show crank, cars run on hydrogen, and the most prominent scientists experiment with new ways of contacting the dead.
Some of the same figures are prominent in this world’s history as in our own, in many cases for roughly the same reasons (the scientists Kelvin and Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell are mentioned, for instance, as are the psychologists Pavlov and William James). But in this world, Wittgenstein is a physicist rather than a philosopher, and Harry Houdini (born in 1874) is still alive—in fact, he’s the real owner of the trunk used in Sophie’s escape.
In general, I have relied very extensively on actual historical sources. In our world, we can’t talk to spirits—but some of the most respected scientists of the late nineteenth century devoted a great deal of energy to trying to show that we could. Most valuable of all to me were memoirs of Scottish life in the 1920s and 1930s, including Muriel Spark’s autobiography Curriculum Vitae and her brilliant novel of education The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Technology developed quite differently in this world than in our own. The fuel cells that Sophie learns about during her driving lesson would have been unobtainable in the real-world 1930s. On a more peripheral note, the transistor technology that’s alluded to several times was only invented in our own world in 1947–48 but seems to have been discovered here in the early 1930s, perhaps because the continual threat of war proved such an effective spur to scientific inventiveness. Transistor technology is also required for the aerial assault drone to which Great-aunt Tabitha is likened—a point first noted by my father, whose background as a native Scot with an engineering degree has made his advice particularly indispensable to me while writing The Explosionist.
My enormous outright breach of the unofficial rules governing alternate history concerns Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both writers were born in Edinburgh—Stevenson in 1850 and Conan Doyle in 1859. It has often been observed that Stevenson’s tale of double selves, though it is set in London, casts more light on Edinburgh. Meanwhile, though Sherlock Holmes also resides in London, Conan Doyle based his most famous character on Dr. Joseph Bell, one of his medical school professors at the University of Edinburgh. The story of The Explosionist is so deeply indebted to these tales that it seemed to me they had to have shaped the imagination of my fictional characters as well as my own.
About the Author
JENNY DAVIDSON is a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. She has written an adult novel and several books of nonfiction. THE EXPLOSIONIST is her first novel for teens. She lives in New York City.
You can visit her online at www.jennydavidson.blogspot.com.
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Credits
Jacket art © 2008 by Mark Tucker/MergeLeft Reps
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Copyright
THE EXPLOSIONIST. Copyright © 2008 by Jenny Davidson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyr
ight Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition DECEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061972560
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