All of this should signal that this is a book with serious ambitions. It’s not navel-gazing, it’s not particularly comforting, and it takes its role as a novel quite seriously indeed. Many readers will see in it a less Byzantine Pynchon novel, and that wouldn’t be far from the truth. It’s about the things that are happening around us, it has a perspective on what that means, it has a sense of what it values and what might be lost to time. These are the kind of things novel used to aspire to do, and it’s exciting to see this happening again. And perhaps, if you’re like me, it made you want to put the phone down just long enough to read the works of a Medieval mystic, and wonder what it might be like to search again for the numinous.