The mathematics of unbelonging

Late in his life, the renowned British mathematician G H Hardy was asked what he considered his biggest contribution to the field. Hardy had certainly done enough in his own right to be able to give an answer that would reflect credit directly on himself, but his response belied this.

"The discovery of Ramanujan," he said immediately, a reference to the Madras-based clerk for whom he secured a Cambridge scholarship in 1913 and with whom he collaborated during the years of the Great War. "My association with Ramanujan was the single romantic incident in my life," Hardy wrote on another occasion.

It's easy to see why the word "romantic" could be applied to the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a figure familiar even to Indians who don't particularly care for math. His years at Cambridge exemplify the boyhood fantasy of a raw, untrained genius confounding and then gaining the respect of men who had far greater advantages: despite not having studied math with the formal rigour of Hardy and his colleagues (or in accordance with Western methods), Ramanujan proved himself to be one of the greatest mathematicians of the past few centuries.

And yet, he might quite easily have remained in obscurity if Hardy had not recognised his raw genius after receiving a letter from him that claimed breakthroughs in prime numbers. As if this weren't enough, he died aged just 32, shortly after returning to India. And he maintained that his mathematical discoveries were not the product of his own effort but of the goddess Namagiri inscribing them on his tongue while he slept.

However, Ramanujan is not the central figure in David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk, a historical fiction based on the unusual relationship between the two men. He makes his appearance only around halfway into the book, and even then remains a nebulous figure, seen mostly through other people's eyes.

Despite its title, The Indian Clerk is really Hardy's story. The most moving sections of the book are the interludes where Leavitt lets Hardy speak in his own voice, share his innermost thoughts directly with the reader (via an "imaginary lecture" that runs alongside the real one he gave at Harvard in 1936).

Here we get a sense of a conflicted man, even if he doesn't always admit it to himself. He is confused about matters of faith, discomfited by the fact that his discipline doesn't always conform to the order expected of a science ("Once again, mathematics had tantalized us with a pattern, only to snatch it away. Really, it was rather like dealing with God"), somewhat embarrassed about his sexuality ("a non-practising homosexual", a colleague once called him), and guilt-ridden about his sister (whose eye he damaged in an accident when they were children) and a former lover who committed suicide (and whose ghost occasionally visits him). That's more than enough demons for one lifetime.

With the advent of Ramanujan, Hardy finds himself in a quiet, unacknowledged tussle with Alice Neville (the wife of a colleague who helped persuade Ramanujan to come to England) for rights to the "Hindoo calculator".

Looking at Ramanujan through the prism of his own worldviews, he believes that the Indian is a rationalist at heart; that even his vegetarianism derives not from religious strictures but personal revulsion for meat.

Alice, on the other hand, having spent time in India, has a better understanding of Ramanujan's background and moral conditioning (she recognises the significance of the little Ganesha statue he has brought with him to England as "the god of success and education, of new enterprises and auspicious starts, of literature", whereas when Hardy enters Ramanujan's room late in the book, we immediately sense the cultural distance: "From the hearth an elephant-headed figure gazes at him. He has four arms. A rat sits at his feet"). But even she tries, unsuccessfully, to use him to fill the empty spaces in her own life.

The Indian Clerk is a story about different kinds of loneliness, with the focus on two troubled men: one who struggles with social mores, dietary taboos and the climate in a foreign country, and another who feels out of place even in his own skin. Where the book occasionally threatens to fall apart is in its refusal to consistently stay with Hardy and Ramanujan.

There are whole chapters filtered through the viewpoint of characters such as Hardy's sister Gertrude, burdened with the responsibility of looking after their ailing mother and intermittently escaping to a rented flat in London; his collaborator Littlewood, caught in a difficult affair with a married woman; and Alice, equally trapped by "the dull repetitiveness" of her marriage.

Seen out of context, most of these personal struggles and frustrations are well handled, and each of them tells us something about the milieu these people live in. But they would probably have been better suited to a larger novel, one that clearly spelt out its intention to be a sprawling sociological work.

The Indian Clerk also meanders because of the many asides about Hardy's colleagues, the Cambridge secret society known as the Apostles, which included such intellectuals of the time as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Leavitt gives too much space to Russell's run-ins with the authorities (his pacifism landed him in trouble at a time when the government was trying to sell the British people fantasies about soldiers living in underground bunkers that resembled holiday camps) and while all this is undoubtedly interesting in its own right, one doesn't quite get the sense that it belongs in this book.

That Leavitt's book still works as well as it does is testament to his ability to bring the period alive and to make us feel for his principal characters, when he does stick with them.

At its best The Indian Clerk showcases the advantages of a good historical fiction over conventional biography "" the reaching of deeper, poetic truths rather than being constrained by the merely factual.