—Her father had made his cream sauce and was assembling the salad he had dreamed up of endive and grapefruit and avocado.
He was moving frantically now and she knew that talking to him would be a mistake. His hands were trembling slightly as he worked. He wanted it all to be simultaneously precise and beautiful. He wanted it all to work. “What am I forgetting,” he said to Ada tensely.
In the Unseen World Liz Moore offers us a multilayered ideal of a gifted child Ada brought up in the eighties in Boston by her brilliant father who spiritually nurtured her in a home educated environment, taking her regularly into his laboratory at the BIT (Boston Institute of Technology) where she would converse with her father’s research students and in the evening help her father organise his elaborate dinner parties for his laboratory members. An idyllic world narrated by Ada herself. Until little clues such as the opening quote leads us towards the implosion of the idyll and of Ada’s certainties as her father who has educated Ada to have an ingrained mistrust of government, and police slowly slips into Altzeimer’s disease.
The description of the slow deterioration of his mind in this book seems remarkably close to reality. Ada who cannot imagine life without her father does her best to minimise the effects of this illness to the outside world, this illness which has descended prematurely upon David as she calls her father, until one day when David goes missing and after searching for him all day and all night with Liston her neighbour, David’s senior laboratory researcher, they finish by calling the police thus slowly beginning the inevitable march towards David’s hospitalisation.
The hospitalisation of David is then the real start to the book, Liston volunteers to adopt Ada only to discover that David was not the person he claimed to be, no person by that name had obtained his first degree and in several layers, flashbacks to his tragic youth and to the events that caused him to need to change his identity, up to how he had been able to be employed by the BIT, David’s Background is explained to us.
David’s life work had been on artificial Intelligence, working on a computer code called Elixir which was capable of interacting with people (mostly David and his lab assistants as well as Ada. David had left the information about his past with three sources, two of which died prematurely and Elixir for which he left a disc with a code to Ada who did not crack the code for many years when she herself was working in a laboratory on virtual reality.
The future development of David’s Elixir and Ada’s work would lead to “The Unseen World”. The UW where when Ada is able to travel into it Elixir is present but has taken David’s form.
And of course the only person with the access to all the information in the book to be able to write it wasn’t a person at all.
First published in English as ‘The Unseen World’ by Windmill books in 2016
South of Paris books 