Neither challenges the caste system, colluding instead with the fear of uppity Untouchables. It also insists on timeless forces: the “Love Laws” that lay down “who should be loved, and how. And how much”; and “the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred”.The pages bristle with ironic stabs at social hierarchy – in its genteel and savage forms – made sharper by the children’s bright ingenuousness (they object that a hotel bellboy “wasn’t a boy and hadn’t a bell”). Her children, scorned as “Half-Hindu Hybrids”, are left vulnerable by her “wretched, Man-less” status – as is intuited by the “Orangedrink Lemondrink Man” who sexually abuses Estha at a screening of The Sound of Music. Velutha, meanwhile, bucks his status as a Paravan, or palm-tapper, by crafting Bauhaus furniture.The novel’s strength lies partly in revealing the larger forces unleashed to crush their trespass, from the Christianity that seeped into Kerala “like tea from a teabag” to the local Communist cocktail: “a heady mix of eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy”. Yet what unspools as “the Terror” is seen not with a faux-naive eye but in the light of adult trauma. Estha is left mute; Rahel drifts into marriage “as a passenger drifts towards an empty seat in an airport lounge”.

This prism creates an atmosphere of foreboding, as innocence carries premonitions of its loss, or childish bafflement is overlayed with adult knowledge of betrayals.
The forbidden affair is delicately portrayed as one of rebellious outcasts. Ammu, though privileged, is spurned in her closed Syrian Christian community as “the divorced daughter of an intercommunity love marriage”. “Two-egg twins” prone to reading backwards and “blowing spit-bubbles”, they share a “single Siamese soul”; one can wake giggling over the other’s dreams. The twins become implicated in the accidental drowning of their half-English cousin Sophie Moll, and unwitting accomplices in a doomed passion between their divorced mother Ammu and an Untouchable man, Velutha. As accounts of childhood go, this is touching but unsentimental.

It has a child’s obsessiveness with small things – from purple earthworms to a tangerine-shaped transistor radio. Events unfold largely over two weeks in 1969, in the lives of the seven-year-old “Stick Insect” Rahel and her brother Estha, with his “Elvis puff”. While Indian fiction in English increasingly reflects urban, cosmopolitan life, this novel dwells in a different landscape. Set vividly in a rural backwater in India’s deep south, on the banks of a “hot, grey-green river” in Kerala, it tells the tragedy of a pickle factory-owning family and the man they “love to death”. Surveying the shelf-loads of rubbish which have propounded this notion, Gell-Mann must rue his sense of humour.Crease and Mann, too, foresee a possible end of physics in the quagmire of grandiose but untestable theories – superstrings, super symmetry and whatnot.

The goal of a unified field theory might yet be achieved, but it is equally possible that – as Kant argued in the Critique of Pure Reason – some aspects of reality might remain forever beyond our ability to know them. What Popper proudly read out to John Horgan, by the way, was this: “In our infinite ignorance we are all equal”.. Murray Gell-Mann famously borrowed the word “quark” from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; what was new to me was the discovery that he appropriated the phrase “the eightfold way” from the teachings of the Buddha to describe his model of particle physics. This joke, the authors note, “has fed the notion that quantum physics has something to do with the mysteries of Eastern mysticism”. The authors argue that since the solitary breakthroughs of Maxwell and Einstein, physics has become an increasingly collegiate activity “which recalls the effort that produced the great Gothic cathedrals”.This is a necessarily difficult book about a difficult subject, but there are plenty of good sidelights. This doesn’t really get us anywhere with understanding their ideas.”People still have an Einstein complex,” remarks the physicist Howard Georgi in Robert Crease and Charles Mann’s magisterial history of 20th- century physics, but there are few other indications of Bloomian angst.