Author Reif Larsen’s I Am Radar is a big, bold, exhilarating novel, packed with the unexpected and riddled with the mysterious.AFP / Getty Images
Reif Larsen's new novel opens in a birthing room in a New Jersey hospital in 1975, when an unexpected and curiously total failure of electrical power necessitates the premature delivery of a baby in a dark room. The child's parents, Charlene and Kermin Radmanovic, are Caucasians; mysteriously, their child has black skin. His name will be Radar, as in Radar O'Reilly, from the television show M*A*S*H. Kermin is a radio man himself, and a Vietnam vet, connected to other radio operators all over the globe. From the hospital he taps out a message on his telegraph key: "Like father, like son."
Many years later, the lights will once again go out in New Jersey, and Radar will learn some unexpected details about his past and his parents, and will make a crucial decision about his own future.
This is one of three narrative strands that comprise I Am Radar, Larsen's inventive and fascinating novel. His first book since his acclaimed 2009 debut, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, Larsen's sophomore effort brings the same willingness to test the boundaries of the form, but carries considerably more weight.
At the same time that Radar is growing up in New Jersey, Miroslav Danilovic is growing up in Bosnia. To the disappointment of his father, he's immersed in his own private world, first drawing, then creating, small representations of people and things. He learns how to manipulate them, how to make them move as if of their own free will – to make them seem real. Eventually, his creations grow ever more mystifying and inexplicable. As his homeland descends into sectarian antagonism and brutality, he becomes entirely estranged from his family. A bit of an offbeat celebrity in Belgrade because of his brash artistic talents, Miroslav ultimately travels to Sarajevo to participate in an art installation staged at the height of the conflict, in the middle of the combat zone.
The third narrative begins in Cambodia in 1953, when an unimaginably small and dehydrated child is discovered floating in a conical hat by a Khmer employee of a French plantation owner. Tucked fortuitously into a rather inaccessible stretch of the Mekong River, the plantation has survived the Japanese occupation intact. The owner, an eccentric with a deep interest in science, adopts the infant and names him Raksmey Raksmey. Furthermore, he states in writing his intention to turn the boy into "Cambodia's first native quantum physicist." When, in 1975, Raksmey returns to Cambodia from his lab in Switzerland upon his father's death, he is unable to leave the country – the Khmer Rouge shutters the airports, executes and/or relocates and forcibly re-educates the populace. Trapped in Cambodia, Raksmey is eventually a participant in a highly unusual performance-art installation that takes place in the Cambodian jungle near the border with Laos. It does not end well.
What unites these three storylines is a shadowy Norwegian group known as Kirkenesferda. Initially introduced as "a community of physicists and artists" who originally came together in order to rebel against Nazi control of education, Kirkenesferda also explores puppetry, both conceptually and physically. Though it seems to be more an idea than a physical entity, Kirkenesferda lays claim to quixotic art installations, some of which have already been mentioned here. The novel includes a chronicle of the group's history, but its veracity is disputed. There may or may not be a schism.
Attempts to summarize the events – or even the trajectory – of the book, however, could never do it justice.
I Am Radar is a big, bold, exhilarating novel, packed with the unexpected and riddled with the mysterious. Its scope is ambitious, its delivery assured. There is certainly sleight of hand here, and the occasional playful intervention, but this is a very serious book and many of the issues it contends with are, sadly, seemingly intractable and eternal. Larsen has obviously put a great deal of thought and work into it. Rare is the novel with a selected bibliography that runs four pages; rare is the novel that so smoothly negotiates the pernicious gravity of multigenerational history and the tingle of cutting-edge scientific speculation and unites them so deftly. An enormous amount of information is contained within the confines of the book, yet it moves forward with controlled velocity and great sensitivity. The novel is consistently surprising, the characters (and there are many) invigorating in their steadfast and unapologetically odd integrity. Conversations shine; many passages demand rereading. Randomly reopening the book is revelatory – the reader discovers sympathetic vibrations that bridge the separate stories; incidents whose significance was missed in the narrative rush of the first time through.
As is often the case with novels of this degree of ambition and weight, I Am Radar engages matters of great complexity and consequence, some common, some not. It does so with wit and wisdom. Larsen has written an admirable and impressive book; demanding and uncompromising in its sensitivity, I Am Radar may well be read for many years to come.
Ben McNally is a Toronto bookseller.