Laurence Scott’s first book, The Four-Dimensional Human, zoomed straight on to the Samuel Johnson (now the Baillie Gifford) prize shortlist in 2015. In a crowded field of commentary on our lives with new technology, his first-hand reports on digital existence, narrated with blushes and allurements and a scholar’s grasp of intellectual history, were not like anyone else’s.
Picnic Comma Lightning brings us further meditations on what digital life is doing to the way we find meaning in the world. Here again, Scott ponders his world with a mix of delighted avidity, candour and melancholy. But this second book goes deeper, ranges even wider, and takes many different forms in the mind. It is a philosophical meditation on perceptions of reality, achieved by means of beguilingly playful moves from confession to anthropology to social analysis. It is also an elegy for two lost parents, who died in quick succession when the author was in his early 30s.
Scott holds these strands in delicate, elusive dialogue. What has death to do with Twitter? If grief is an “old-fashioned kind of augmented reality” how does it behave in modern times?
The title is from Nabokov’s Lolita. Humbert Humbert compresses the story of his mother’s death into two words and a comma, wedged between brackets that keep the cataclysm contained: “(picnic, lightning)”. Scott wants to say more than this about the departure of his own parents. He wants to say their names out loud (“David! Stella!”), he leaves the door of his new home ajar for the ghosts if they want to come in. But he understands the ruthless necessity of Humbert’s sub-clause, for “Where do we put our dearest dead in the story of our lives?”
The picnic and the lightning are two kinds of reality that keep repelling each other like magnets. Scott is deeply interested in the relationship between life’s ordinary picnics with rug and Thermos, and the lightning that forks into them. The nightie of a dying woman, for instance, belongs to distressingly overlaid realities: the tiny bow on the neckline and the “gentle pattern on the fabric” are brave, besieged fragments of prettiness in the midst of disaster.
Repeatedly, during Scott’s discussions of misleading data, emoticons, the mixed innocence and cunning of a typical selfie countenance, a vital signs trolley is wheeled into the narrative. It comes as if unbidden, insisting on the only measurements that finally matter. Though his book is often as free-wheelingly convivial as a conversation in a bar, Scott watches his own arguments to see how they might hold up through a night’s vigil in intensive care.
“That’s real,” we think, as Scott recalls the bare front room at home where the dying took place, an empty bottle of lavender water left on the radiator. We recognise the lavender bottle as one of the facts that become sacred. And yet memory makes fantastical collages more erratically hyperlinked than any website; it courts double exposures and enhancements. An odd phrase is like something your mother once said, there’s a fragment of her laugh from across the room, there’s her face smiling out from someone else’s.
I suspect Scott of having spent many nights reading John Donne. Certainly he feels with acuity the shaping power of a metaphorical conceit. So he recognises in his own body, settling to sleep, the curve of a bracket that answers the opposite curve of his sick father’s sleeping body across town. “What did we hold between us? Thirty-two years of togetherness?” By the end of the book you may be willing to think about a meme in the same ways as a metaphysical poem.
Scott attributes his own pattern-making impulse to his mother, who taught the family to find likenesses everywhere, “an alternative network of things”. Things, solid objects, are “networked” by an infinite filigree of connections. Things are familiar, or desired, or lost, or like something else we lost, they are in their places or out of them. Putting away the dishes after washing-up gives Scott “a pleasant, parental sensation” as he slides each item back into its accustomed home. The teaspoons clatter safely into their “narrow bunk” at the foot of the larger utensils.
The novelist Elizabeth Bowen found a language for the way furniture can seem to observe us, and hold us to certain standards. Now we have furnishings that really do listen and store our data in their silicon drawers: the remotely programmed fridge, the audio speaker that awaits instructions. Are they “real” like the kitchen table, these digital objects now lodging in our homes and laughing in the background?
The continuous shifting of the relationship between public and private is among the most baffling and fascinating aspects of the contemporary crystal maze. Whether we relish the communal glow of commenting, with 50 others, on the video of a colleague doing somersaults with his children or try to look the other way, we live in a society addicted to the sharing of private experience. Here again, Scott is not debating the ethics or doling out advice, but trying with all his might to articulate what it feels like to be given, daily, thousands of backstage passes into other people’s realities – passes which take us into further performances.
Scott muses over a memory from childhood. He had been off school for several weeks and a teacher brought homework round to the house. “I was awestruck to see her, in real life as it were.” There she was, on the sofa – translated from the official realm of the classroom to the sitting room and, with car keys in hand, showing every sign of having an extra-curricular existence to which she was about to return. We must all have some long-ago frisson like this to be called up from the silts of emotional memory and used as a landmark as we try to ask what has and hasn’t changed.
This tale from “a generation ago” is from a lost world of firmly demarcated public and private – or is it? Tiny echoes of that first awe can still recur when we see pictures of celebrities at home among their saucepans or toiletries (“That is the cream blind in Kim Kardashian’s bathroom!”). And as for a teacher on the sofa – that is still a sensation.
For novice technonauts who get easily lost in the seas of social media, Scott’s willingness to think about continuities with our old lives, and indeed with the dilemmas of centuries ago, is encouraging. If we can think about the different forms of attention elicited by a Holbein painting, for instance, it seems we can turn to Instagram with the same questions in mind.
In the tradition of Barthes’s mythographies of everyday life, Scott makes banal things shimmer with meaning. He finds, in Andy Murray’s grimace or in Nigella’s posts about filming Christmas dinner in July, signposts to the underlying structure of things. He operates on a dauntingly large conceptual scale, but there’s a sense of embrace in his cleverness. It’s not often that a highly ambitious work of social analysis speaks so determinedly to the heart.
• Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality is published by William Heinemann. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
