Once in a great while I will review a non-fiction book in this space that I think is worth paying attention to if one is interested in engineering ethics. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin is a novel, published in 1983, and even now I can't say exactly why I think it should be more widely known among engineers and those interested in engineering. But it should be.
Every profession has a spirit: a bundle of intuitive and largely emotional feelings that go along with the objective knowledge and actions that constitute the profession. Among many other things, Winter's Tale captures the spirit of engineering better than any other fiction work I know. And for that reason alone, it deserves praise.
The book is hard to describe. There are some incontestable facts about it, so I'll start with those. It is set mainly in New York City, with excursions to an imaginary upstate region called Lake of the Coheeries, and side trips to San Francisco. It is not a realistic novel, in the sense that some characters in it live longer than normal lifespans, and various other meta-realistic things happen. There are more characters in it than you'd find in a typical nineteenth-century Russian novel. There is no single plot, but instead a complex tapestry that dashes back and forth in time like a squirrel crossing a street.
But all these matters are secondary. The novel's chief virtue is the creation of an atmosphere of hope and, not optimism, exactly—some truly terrible things happen to people in it—but a temperate yet powerful energy and drive shared by nearly all the characters, except for a few completely evil ones. And even the evil ones are interesting.
The fertility of Helprin's imagination is astounding, as he creates technical terms, flora and fauna, and other things that are, strictly speaking, imaginary yet somehow make sense within the story. One of the many recurring elements in the book is the appearance of a "cloud wall" which seems to be a kind of matrix of creation and time travel. Here is how Virginia, one of the principal characters, describes it to her son Martin:
". . . It swirls around the city in uneven cusps, sometimes dropping down like a tornado to spirit people away or deposit them there, sometimes opening white roads from the city, and sometimes resting out at sea while connections are made with other places. It is a benevolent storm, a place of refuge, the neutral flow in which we float. We wonder if there is anything beyond it, and we think that perhaps there is."
"Why?" Martin asked from within the covers.
"Because," said Virginia, "in those rare times when all things coalesce to serve beauty, symmetry, and justice, it becomes the color of gold—warm and smiling, as if God were reminded of the perfection and complexity of what He had long ago set to spinning, and long ago forgotten."
The whole novel is like that.
Although there is no preaching, no doctrine expounded, and very few explicitly religious characters such as ordained ministers, a thread of holiness, or at least awareness of life beyond this one, runs throughout the book. This is probably why I learned about it from a recommendation by the Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, who mentioned it in Doors in the Walls of the World.
The reason engineers might benefit from reading it is that machines and other engineered structures—steam engines, cranes, bridges, locomotives—and those who design, build, and tend them, are portrayed in a way that is both appealing and transcendent. At this moment I feel a frustration stemming from my inability to express what is so attractive about this book.
You may learn something from the fact that the reviews of it I could find fell into two camps. One camp loved it and wished it would go on forever. The other camp, of which I turned out to be a member, said that after a while they found the book annoying, and almost didn't finish it. I think one reason for the latter reaction is that structurally, it is all trees and very little forest.
The very fertility of Helprin's imagination leads him to introduce novel and fascinating creations, incidents, and characters every page or two, and the result is a loss of coherence in the overall story and sequence of events. A chart of every character and incident with lines drawn among them would look like the wiring diagram of a Boeing 747.
But every time I said to myself that I was going to stop reading it, I picked it up again, and finally chose one free day to finish the thing, all the time hoping that it would get to the point. There is no crashing finale in which everything is tied up neatly with a bow. There is, however, a climax of sorts, and toward the end events occur which have parallels in the New Testament. Farther than that I shouldn't go, for fear of spoiling the ending for anyone who wants to read it.
The only other novel I can think of that bears even a faint resemblance to Winter's Tale is G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. It is also a fantasy in the sense that unrealistic things happen, and it features characters who are what Kreeft calls archetypes, embodied representations of ideas. Not everyone likes or can even make sense of Chesterton's novel, and the same will undoubtedly be true of Winter's Tale.
For a fantasy, Helprin's book is rather earthy in spots, and for that reason I wouldn't recommend it for children. But the earthiness is not gratuitous, and rounds out the realism of his character portrayals. Many of the main actors behave courageously and even nobly, and would be good subjects for the exemplary mode of engineering ethics, in which one describes how engineering went right in a particular case with ethical implications.
If you pick up the book, you will know in the first few pages whether you can stand to read the rest. If you persist till the end, you will have experienced a world unlike our own in some ways, but very like what it could be if we heeded, in Lincoln's phrase, the better angels of our nature.
Sources: Winter's Tale was published in 1983 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Peter Kreeft's Doors in the Walls of the World was published in 2018 by Ignatius Press.
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