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Hinton
Howard Hinton and his family are living in Japan, escaping from a scandal. Hinton's obsession is his work, his voyages into mathematical pure space, into the fourth dimension, but also his wife and sons, each of whom are entangled in the strange and unknown landscapes of Hinton's science fictions.
In a bravura and startling meeting of real and philosophical elements, Mark Blacklock has created a ravishing period piece of late-Victorian social, scientific and domestic life. Hinton is about extraordinary discoveries, and terrible choices. It is about people who discover and map other realms, and what the implications might be for those of us left behind.
In a bravura and startling meeting of real and philosophical elements, Mark Blacklock has created a ravishing period piece of late-Victorian social, scientific and domestic life. Hinton is about extraordinary discoveries, and terrible choices. It is about people who discover and map other realms, and what the implications might be for those of us left behind.
291 pages, Paperback
First published April 2, 2020
11 people are currently reading
215 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 16, 2020
Look, I'm not going to pretend that I understood a lot of what I was reading but holy hell this was an intellectual tour de force, wrapped in a really beautiful (and, at times quirky and funny) family story. The ways Blacklock folded the narrative in/across/around/through itself was quite something to behold and, while I'll never be any good at maths or physics or anything of the kind, I came out of this with a smug sense of having grown as a thinker. A very challenging read but an endlessly satisfying one.
January 10, 2022
I read the timeline, tried to follow the book but the math and all I just didn't understand. Sadly this is a dnf for me. I wanted to like it. I just couldn't understand it. 🤷
did-not-finish
July 16, 2021DNF at 50% The book includes arcane mathematical concepts, most of which went over my head. I got to the point where I had no idea what was going on and even less interest in finding out.
June 6, 2021
Hesitating between 3 and 4 stars. It is quite a unique book in terms of content and form. I would definitely recommend it to readers that can appreciate a sense of abstract and esoteric thinking, yet it also casts light on the turn of the 19 to 20th century and British and American societal morals.
Where my reading and inquiring heart remains unfulfilled, and perhaps consciously aimed to arrive there by the author, is the question where factional history ends and fictional history starts. What are historical speculations, fitting in the story's zeitgeist, and where has the author taken a creative turn in decorating the story with personal and metaphysical drama? I am left wondering and with a fueled curiosity into the realms of the/a fourth dimension.
Where my reading and inquiring heart remains unfulfilled, and perhaps consciously aimed to arrive there by the author, is the question where factional history ends and fictional history starts. What are historical speculations, fitting in the story's zeitgeist, and where has the author taken a creative turn in decorating the story with personal and metaphysical drama? I am left wondering and with a fueled curiosity into the realms of the/a fourth dimension.
April 29, 2021
Reading this was a journey. I found myself instantly taken with it, followed very quickly by an overwhelming sense of boredom at its self-indulgence, ending finally with the impression that the novel was just... okay. I oftentimes found myself wondering what could have possibly attracted the author to have written about Charles Hinton, a man who both invented the baseball cannon and, more importantly I guess, explored the concept of what is known as "the tesseract." The events around the scandal surrounding his bygamy which are (briefly) explored in the second-half of the novel are the most interesting and engaging parts of the book, but like the rest of the novel, it's presented in fragments, at arm's length, unfocused. Charles Hinton himself is the least interesting of everyone in the novel, which for someone who is at the center of both scandal and an intellectual frontier, seems like quite a failing, and it was during these moments of the novel which I was most disengaged. Hinton's visualizations of the physical properties of objects in motion explained in text just felt like someone had taken a course in 3d animation and was trying to fit what they had learned into a story where they describe the physical properties of momentum, while very rarely was there ever an opportunity to truly explore the limits of what Hinton's ideas of a fourth dimension to be on a narrative level. All in all it feels like a disappointing exercise in creative writing, and it's a shame there wasn't a little more focus to the whole thing.
January 23, 2022
Mark Blacklock's novel on Howard Hinton is a historical faction tale published in 2020, about a real figure, the somewhat famous British mathematician who was disgraced when his bigamy was discovered, which saw him tried and convicted and blackballed from British academic and social society leading him and one of his families to emigrate to first Japan and then the USA where he became associated with various institutions.
The book opens with the Hinton family about to leave Japan for the USA. His wife Mary seems somewhat distant and estranged. There are four children all boys, Sebastian the youngest and favoured son of the mother having been fathered around the time of Hinton's affair and bigamy. The early writing has the flavour of Victoriana to get into the time frame and there is a strong sense of Hinton being the eccentric. Hinton encourages the scientific and the mathematical in his family. Even his wife Mary née Boole sews mathematically. We learn that this eccentricity has followed Hinton from his father who had embarked on an affair with Hinton's wife's mother.
What comes out of the early and middle parts of the book is the desire to know less about Hinton and far more about his wife. Hinton himself is effectively barred from return to England because of his bigamy and disgrace. Lurking all above that is an almost prurient interest in sex and sensuality which is laced through the book - never really explicitly until the actual affair with his co-bigamist is written up - but is a flavour throughout. Mary is far more circumspect but tries to conform to the role of woman and mother in the face of Howard's eccentricity and freely admitted bigamy and fathering of twins on his co-correspondee. Mary's poetry is infused with Zen absorbed from her time in Japan and that too carries through the book. The mysterious Fourth Dimension which is Howard’s major work also gives an element with strands of story and viewpoints and time frames interwoven. There is also a lot of mystical mumbo jumbo which generally can be ignored but which the writer had to include to give the flavour of time and place. We do get to know Mary better after Howard’s death and her own suicide when her journal is discovered in a Japanese lacquer puzzle box. Through this passage we sense her estrangement, pain and hurt on discovery of the bigamy. How it has impacted on her life to have changed her to something that she was not before the discovery. It becomes a reflection on that pain and resignation, confined anger which must be repressed and cannot be expressed against the passion, carnality and freedom that Howard has exercised. Over all of them – the husband, wife, sons and acquaintances – hangs the taint of bigamy and implied sex and sensuality, an expression of repressive Victorian society.
This is an interesting book both in structure and content which opens up like the tesseract of the four-dimensional cube. I enjoyed it and found it insightful into attitudes with a very decent balance between the characters and the narrative.
The book opens with the Hinton family about to leave Japan for the USA. His wife Mary seems somewhat distant and estranged. There are four children all boys, Sebastian the youngest and favoured son of the mother having been fathered around the time of Hinton's affair and bigamy. The early writing has the flavour of Victoriana to get into the time frame and there is a strong sense of Hinton being the eccentric. Hinton encourages the scientific and the mathematical in his family. Even his wife Mary née Boole sews mathematically. We learn that this eccentricity has followed Hinton from his father who had embarked on an affair with Hinton's wife's mother.
What comes out of the early and middle parts of the book is the desire to know less about Hinton and far more about his wife. Hinton himself is effectively barred from return to England because of his bigamy and disgrace. Lurking all above that is an almost prurient interest in sex and sensuality which is laced through the book - never really explicitly until the actual affair with his co-bigamist is written up - but is a flavour throughout. Mary is far more circumspect but tries to conform to the role of woman and mother in the face of Howard's eccentricity and freely admitted bigamy and fathering of twins on his co-correspondee. Mary's poetry is infused with Zen absorbed from her time in Japan and that too carries through the book. The mysterious Fourth Dimension which is Howard’s major work also gives an element with strands of story and viewpoints and time frames interwoven. There is also a lot of mystical mumbo jumbo which generally can be ignored but which the writer had to include to give the flavour of time and place. We do get to know Mary better after Howard’s death and her own suicide when her journal is discovered in a Japanese lacquer puzzle box. Through this passage we sense her estrangement, pain and hurt on discovery of the bigamy. How it has impacted on her life to have changed her to something that she was not before the discovery. It becomes a reflection on that pain and resignation, confined anger which must be repressed and cannot be expressed against the passion, carnality and freedom that Howard has exercised. Over all of them – the husband, wife, sons and acquaintances – hangs the taint of bigamy and implied sex and sensuality, an expression of repressive Victorian society.
This is an interesting book both in structure and content which opens up like the tesseract of the four-dimensional cube. I enjoyed it and found it insightful into attitudes with a very decent balance between the characters and the narrative.
August 9, 2023
This is a valiant attempt to keep alive a story about an eccentric Victorian character whose thinking on time and space and the fourth dimension sort of dovetailed with the psychic movement that existed at the end of the 19th century, think seance, Conan Doyle, ghosts etc. Not that Hinton appeared to buy into the latter. He appears to have been so convinced he was onto something he has drawn in followers looking for answers. But he is a man and he is dabbling in philosophy as well as the fourth dimension so when the question of fidelity arise maybe it is convenient to view the soul as something other than earthly and thus confined to a monogamous existance. The book suggests but doesn't quite nail the idea that Hinton was a bohemian with groupies. At times the narrative is complex and it strays, perhaps in keeping with multiple stories in multiple dimensions. There is a tragedy of sorts in his bigamous relationship, though we have to assume his entire family have vast wealth because he publishes so few books, so it is hard to feel sorry for them or him. I thought I would struggle to finish but there was enough to keep me on board and while I wasn't exactly enamoured of the style and delivery I couldn't argue that the author was dealing with some difficult concepts while attempting to record Hinton's life as well as the impact he had on his families. Quite possibly there were two books here. One a rollicking fiction based on fact that exposed a charlatan, the other a dedicated biography. The most telling letter, presumed as fact, is the letter from Hinton's father to Hinton that is a sort of death bed apology, warning his son off from ungodly ideas, the last act of the unbeliever who seeks entry into heaven. Certainly thought provoking and challenging.
May 4, 2024
This was a challenging book to finish. Personally, I do not resonate with Mark's prose style. I find it tries too hard to use mathematical concepts - more precisely geometrical ones - as a narrative device. The most interesting passages are the ones where none of that is applied and the reader can focus on the consequences of Howard Hinton's infidelity.
My assumption is that the application of such device was to give an aura of intelligence to Hinton - since his name fell into obscurity after the bigamy. However, there are much more interesting figures at play than someone who romanticized his own infidelity - real people that Mark could have better explored in his fictional history: Mary and Maud, the two wives of Hinton, his sons and even his mother and father - which, by the end of the book, we find that James Hinton philosophy would had some influence over Howard.
It is only past the “Tesseract” section that I have truly enjoyed the book. And it is clever how Mark sectioned the book - the reasoning is made explicit by then. From my perspective, the use of higher-dimensions as a narrative device was way less alienating - despite its complexity - then the onomatopeia and the use of geometry to depict sexual relationships. The success of this application, I have granted to be, due to its sporadic use without removing the reader’s agency in understanding the story arc - unlike the other applications.
Overall, as the Guardian stated, it is a book that demands the reader's full collaboration. There are layers and layers, interpretation having to be applied many times to enable one to construct sense of what is read. My only wish was to be able to sit with the author and ask him why he has opted for a style which makes most people to not be able to finish it - making what would had been a very good book inaccessible.
For a more thorough critique, I recommend reading the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n...
My assumption is that the application of such device was to give an aura of intelligence to Hinton - since his name fell into obscurity after the bigamy. However, there are much more interesting figures at play than someone who romanticized his own infidelity - real people that Mark could have better explored in his fictional history: Mary and Maud, the two wives of Hinton, his sons and even his mother and father - which, by the end of the book, we find that James Hinton philosophy would had some influence over Howard.
It is only past the “Tesseract” section that I have truly enjoyed the book. And it is clever how Mark sectioned the book - the reasoning is made explicit by then. From my perspective, the use of higher-dimensions as a narrative device was way less alienating - despite its complexity - then the onomatopeia and the use of geometry to depict sexual relationships. The success of this application, I have granted to be, due to its sporadic use without removing the reader’s agency in understanding the story arc - unlike the other applications.
Overall, as the Guardian stated, it is a book that demands the reader's full collaboration. There are layers and layers, interpretation having to be applied many times to enable one to construct sense of what is read. My only wish was to be able to sit with the author and ask him why he has opted for a style which makes most people to not be able to finish it - making what would had been a very good book inaccessible.
For a more thorough critique, I recommend reading the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n...
October 11, 2023
Sum of its parts
I took 18 months to read this book. The first half was read in a dreary fog of non-comprehension and easy distraction. The physical explanations were explicable but not totally satisfying. The author seem to be teasing us with ideas about Physics and its place in our lives and how this can consume anyone. The problem is Hinton is not an engaging character.
For a book, based on quite difficult concepts of time and space, there was scant time and space for characters. I didn’t know anyone better than when I started the novel. I think the author knew that there was a wellspring of energy missing and tried to inject with character decisions, to keep us alert but it failed for me.
I will end this review with a uptick: when I read the second half, I plugged in because I understood that there was a serious attempt to deal with the nature of obsession, now it freezes genuine emotion, subsuming everyone to its own needs. It’s a nobel about abandonment: of belief, morality and ideas. On that level, it worked admirably.
I took 18 months to read this book. The first half was read in a dreary fog of non-comprehension and easy distraction. The physical explanations were explicable but not totally satisfying. The author seem to be teasing us with ideas about Physics and its place in our lives and how this can consume anyone. The problem is Hinton is not an engaging character.
For a book, based on quite difficult concepts of time and space, there was scant time and space for characters. I didn’t know anyone better than when I started the novel. I think the author knew that there was a wellspring of energy missing and tried to inject with character decisions, to keep us alert but it failed for me.
I will end this review with a uptick: when I read the second half, I plugged in because I understood that there was a serious attempt to deal with the nature of obsession, now it freezes genuine emotion, subsuming everyone to its own needs. It’s a nobel about abandonment: of belief, morality and ideas. On that level, it worked admirably.
January 2, 2021
Mark Blacklock presents this social history in a very interesting narrative style. He unearths the buried history of Charles Howard Hinton (possibly a brilliant mathematician) and even his father, the doctor James Hinton. Howard Hinton courted the intellectual circles of late Victorian London that includes Havelock Ellis and others of the Fabian society fame. Hinton seems to have been condemned to obscurity for his views on sexual freedom and the crime of ‘bigamy’. It will be very interesting to to see how the Hintons, Ellis and others influenced each others’ views of human sexuality and led to Western society moving away from oppressive Victorian ideas. Sexuality is not the only theme of the book, thought it was what drew me most to it.
October 8, 2020
A superb and challenging read - this is one of the most original and dazzling novels I have read in a long time. Beautifully written. I learned a lot from this book and it really made me think - about history and literature and the nature of truth. Fantastic
April 28, 2021
I listened to the audio book. Nicely read, but I think, for me it would have been better if I had read it on paper. Bit hard to follow.
June 21, 2022
DNF
not my kind of book
not my kind of book
September 17, 2022
The four-dimensional failure. One star for sporadic wonderful prose.
September 8, 2025
girl what is this
Obvi for the sake of my few braincells I dnf'ed this book. Just mumbo-jumbo on paper. What the fuck
Obvi for the sake of my few braincells I dnf'ed this book. Just mumbo-jumbo on paper. What the fuck
July 4, 2025
If you'd ask me what the purpose of this book was, I'd come up blank. But if you'd ask me what I have learnt from it, I'd be able to make a list of many things. Two primary being:
1) The 19th century English-speaking academics. Their correspondences; in talking and writing, the language used, the respect and formality it contained. Their cultural values; family orientation, friendships, the importance of socialising, the importance of education and the horrors of bigamy. And their difficulty in travelling during that time, and subsequently keeping in touch, even through letters, because of the said travelling.
2) And the importance and relevance of geometry. How it's present in everything and everywhere, you just need the eye to seek. How math is so, so interesting only if you start doing it with wonder and curiosity. How it hones your mind. Opens it up to new possibilities. Makes you more spatially aware.
Now if you'd ask the author, I'm sure he'd tell you these reasons were the farthest from his mind when writing this. But that's what you get when your book has travelled far and wide to the shores of Karachi, Pakistan, and picked up by a reader at a fair only because it was cheap and they liked the cover and the prospect of some math talk.
Now I'm not saying this book doesn't deliver on what it promises, just that I didn't take away from it what the author intended. Because it does deliver exactly what it says: Hinton. The legacy? The personal life? The philosophies and theories? A little bit of everything attached to the name. So it wouldn't be fair for anyone to say they didn't expect it be the way it is.
And it did more than that for me actually, it 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘦𝘥 me to the Hinton name, albeit confusingly; to somone who had never heard of it and would never had done so if it weren't for this book. And I think, although this may not be the main purpose of this book, the author may be much more happier that it turned out to be.
And although I didn't leave this to be much interested in continuing my Hinton research like the author would've liked, maybe the whole reason I got this rarity in my possession (that too, through cosmic intervention, I believe) is to pass it forward, to someone I know who would appreciate it much more than I have.
Edit: After rereading the blurb and other reviews, I think my takeaways from the book are exactly what the author intended. Wouldn't blame myself for being confused. The purpose really is unclear.
Edit II: Updating the rating from 3 to 4 stars because after falling down the Hinton-Boole rabbit hole, I realised just how much the name carries and how its legacy is everywhere with us in the modern world.
EDIT III (after nearly a year): Updating again from 4 stars to 3 because even though the legacy is memorable- the book, I fear, is not.
1) The 19th century English-speaking academics. Their correspondences; in talking and writing, the language used, the respect and formality it contained. Their cultural values; family orientation, friendships, the importance of socialising, the importance of education and the horrors of bigamy. And their difficulty in travelling during that time, and subsequently keeping in touch, even through letters, because of the said travelling.
2) And the importance and relevance of geometry. How it's present in everything and everywhere, you just need the eye to seek. How math is so, so interesting only if you start doing it with wonder and curiosity. How it hones your mind. Opens it up to new possibilities. Makes you more spatially aware.
Now if you'd ask the author, I'm sure he'd tell you these reasons were the farthest from his mind when writing this. But that's what you get when your book has travelled far and wide to the shores of Karachi, Pakistan, and picked up by a reader at a fair only because it was cheap and they liked the cover and the prospect of some math talk.
Now I'm not saying this book doesn't deliver on what it promises, just that I didn't take away from it what the author intended. Because it does deliver exactly what it says: Hinton. The legacy? The personal life? The philosophies and theories? A little bit of everything attached to the name. So it wouldn't be fair for anyone to say they didn't expect it be the way it is.
And it did more than that for me actually, it 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘦𝘥 me to the Hinton name, albeit confusingly; to somone who had never heard of it and would never had done so if it weren't for this book. And I think, although this may not be the main purpose of this book, the author may be much more happier that it turned out to be.
And although I didn't leave this to be much interested in continuing my Hinton research like the author would've liked, maybe the whole reason I got this rarity in my possession (that too, through cosmic intervention, I believe) is to pass it forward, to someone I know who would appreciate it much more than I have.
Edit: After rereading the blurb and other reviews, I think my takeaways from the book are exactly what the author intended. Wouldn't blame myself for being confused. The purpose really is unclear.
Edit II: Updating the rating from 3 to 4 stars because after falling down the Hinton-Boole rabbit hole, I realised just how much the name carries and how its legacy is everywhere with us in the modern world.
EDIT III (after nearly a year): Updating again from 4 stars to 3 because even though the legacy is memorable- the book, I fear, is not.
September 16, 2023
Niente da fare, l'ho lasciato a pagina 100
Conoscevo già la storia di Hinton e dei suoi tentativi di visualizzare la quarta dimensione in modo non proprio ortodosso: ma comunque viene raccontata nella parte introduttiva del libro. Sapevo anche che questo è un romanzo e non un saggio. Però non ce l'ho proprio fatta a terminare di leggerlo. Sono arrivato a prezzo di enormi sforzi a pagina 80 senza capire esattamente dove Blacklock volesse andare a parare: anche il punto meno noioso per me, quello delle varie mappe del percorso in mare, era piuttosto oscuro. Alla fine ho deciso di esercitare il diritto sovrano del lettore: tanto libri da leggere ne ho finché voglio.
Conoscevo già la storia di Hinton e dei suoi tentativi di visualizzare la quarta dimensione in modo non proprio ortodosso: ma comunque viene raccontata nella parte introduttiva del libro. Sapevo anche che questo è un romanzo e non un saggio. Però non ce l'ho proprio fatta a terminare di leggerlo. Sono arrivato a prezzo di enormi sforzi a pagina 80 senza capire esattamente dove Blacklock volesse andare a parare: anche il punto meno noioso per me, quello delle varie mappe del percorso in mare, era piuttosto oscuro. Alla fine ho deciso di esercitare il diritto sovrano del lettore: tanto libri da leggere ne ho finché voglio.
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