Writing good popular science is a challenging task—to be able to communicate the nature of the subject, its beauty and consistency in an easy to understand way for the lay audience, without trivialising the subject or glossing over its intricacies, is difficult. And when the subject is mathematics, this is doubly so.
The novel chronicles the discovery a young man, himself fascinated by mathematics, makes about his mathematician grandfather being imprisoned for having blasphemous ideas. The grandson’s journey to uncover the true story about his grandfather weaves in the mathematics. And there is a lot of mathematics—from Euclidean geometry to number theory to Cantor’s Infinities to Gödel. And that is a problem—there is just too much mathematical ground to be covered. This makes the narrative jerky and tedious. And the language used in some places is clearly jarring—when did we hear an Indian mother tell her teenaged son, "We need to talk", a line more suitable for an American soap than the Indian milieu!
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A laudable effort but, unfortunately, a failed one. What we get is both a mediocre novel and mediocre pop math.
