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Catherine Shaw's THE THREE BODY PROBLEM is an intelligent and clever debut novel. A maths problem, presented to the international academic community by the King of Sweden is the hottest topic of conversation among the mathematicians at Cambridge -- until they start mysteriously dying. Fastidious unmarried schoolteacher Vanessa Duncan is horrified, especially after her upstairs neighbour, bachelor mathematician Mr Weatherburn, is charged with the crimes. Vanessa knows from the get-go that mild-mannered, gentlemanly Weatherburn must be innocent, and sets out to prove it. Of course, she falls in love with him, as he is with her, though her Victorian upbringing forbids her from admitting, or even recognising that until some time after the reader must. As our amateur sleuth searches for a solution to Weatherburn's problem, the tactics of sleuths and mathematicians come to appear remarkably similar. Shaw subtly chides academics for their intense attention to petty problems whilst more urgent ones demand resolution. Shaw's plot is engagingly convoluted without being at all implausible. The cleverness shows through in games Shaw plays that do not add to the development of plot or character: an evening of riddles, laboriously played out and then explained in a solutions page at the end; making the mathematicians' last names begin with A, B, and C; and a great deal of name-dropping of obvious Victorian Oxbridge glitterati. Rather than create a vivid Victorian world, this last tactic tends to highlight the abyss that stretches between Vanessa's time and our own. Lewis Carroll makes many appearances; Oscar Wilde and Amy Levy make one each. The former two figures are much more familiar to the Cambridge dons than Levy, which is odd given that she had recently attended their own university, a fact they do not recognise. Shaw's decision to present the entire novel in an epistolary format also seems a bit contrived and lacks a clear purpose. Vanessa spins her story out in a series of letters to her twin sister, Dora, who plays absolutely no role in the plot. We know little about Dora's character except that she is the sister who stays home and gets married, whereas Vanessa is the one who goes away to teach. They are the angel in the house and the spinster schoolmarm, respectively. How they came to choose these contrasting roles and what they were like before they distinguished themselves thus from each other is barely explored. This novel is an experiment, and an ambitious one. Shaw intimates that her heroine's adventures will continue beyond THE THREE BODY PROBLEM. I hope that, in the next instalment of her 'Cambridge Mysteries' series, Shaw will iron out some of the snags of THE THREE BODY PROBLEM while retaining that book's intelligence, originality and whimsy.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, April 2005
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