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Joanna Kavenna’s two decades as a writer have seen her beat a gorgeously unconventional path through a plethora of subjects and genres, from polar exploration to motherhood to economic inequality, and from travelogue to academic satire to technological dystopia. “I like genre,” Kavenna said in a 2020 interview, “because there’s a narrative and you can kind of work against it, test it.” That being said, her seventh published book, Seven, is a curiously uncategorisable, protean thing: a slim, absurdist novel, but chunky with ideas.
Of all the genres Kavenna has worked within – or, more accurately, vexed the boundaries of – Seven (Or, How to Play a Game Without Rules) is probably closest to an academic satire. We first encounter the novel’s thoroughly anonymised first-person narrator in Oslo in the summer of 2007, where he or she or they are employed as a research assistant to a renowned Icelandic philosopher named Alda Jónsdóttir. Jónsdóttir is described as “eminent, tall, strong and terrifying”, and likes to host dinner parties for her histrionic institutional peers. The hapless narrator’s job is to help facilitate her work in “box philosophy”: “the study of categories, the ways we organise reality into groups and sets […] the ways we end up thinking inside the box, even when we are trying to think outside the box”.
The action truly begins when Jónsdóttir sends the narrator off to the Greek island of Hydra to meet Theódoros Apostolakis, a dentist/poet/mystic and devotee of Seven, an (entirely fictitious) board game once “played across the ancient world from Greece to Asia Minor”, for which the narrator happens to share a particular passion. Apostolakis is also the keeper of the Fanouropiton, or “Catalogue of Lost Things” – “like a steampunk Book of Kells”, in which an index of lost items are recorded on “carefully illuminated” pages.
What follows is a peripatetic romp through a range of scenic locations across Europe, under parabolic skies and over silvery seas, in which our narrator encounters a madcap cast of thinkers, gamers, artists and some extremely hateful “incoherent rich people”, all of whom demonstrate, in their own way, our adorably human desire to define, categorise and “box” reality even as it slips from our intellectual grasp. Along the way we cover the mythical King Minos and his labyrinth, Alexander the Great and the Gordion knot, the tender lyricism of musician Steve Harley and the Nazi occupation of Crete. If that precis left you feeling a little overwhelmed, then this dense and abstruse novel may not be for you. Nevertheless, I – kind of a dummy, quite honestly – found an awful lot to enjoy about it.
It helps that Kavenna’s philosophical rigour is leavened throughout by a generous sense of humour. Her characters are pleasingly outrageous and her jokes consistently good as the circumstances through which our hapless narrator moves grow increasingly absurd. (To wit: “He comes to ruin art, wearing a cravat! It’s too much!” cries Apostolakis, while attending an auction of paintings for the purposes of sabotaging the plan of some overprivileged wannabe artist-iconoclasts to draw a cock on a Goya sketch of a horse. “It’s reassuring when people maintain high levels of consistency through time,” the narrator observes, at one point. “You don’t want vampiric or Dorian Gray levels,” they concede, “but other levels up to that are reassuring.”)
When the novel presents the theories of the 20th-century Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, that our aptitude for play and a sense of “positive ludicrousness” demonstrate that human lives necessarily exceed “the rational, logical order of things”, this could perhaps be read as an indication of Kavenna’s artistic intent. Seven is not so much a novel about philosophy as it is a novel about philosophy’s limits – its structure is episodic, and across its length a recurrent contrast develops between the over-refined abstraction of the discourses our narrator is subjected to and the cosmic sublimity of the natural world that they move through and experience. As a highly symbolic controversy involving an AI platform unfolds in the world of professional Seven play, the narrator awakes on an idyllic island in the Sea of Marmara in Turkey, “to the scent of mimosa trees and the sound of waves, pigeons cooing on the veranda”. “It was so peaceful, as if the cybertangle wasn’t even real. If you closed the laptop, it was unimaginable …” Seven’s knottiness therefore often feels, in the end, like a bit of a red herring, or so much imposture.
I’m sure there will be plenty of readers with whom Kavenna’s elliptical style will disagree, and for whom the rewards of this weird little book won’t be worth the wade through the weeds. But personally, once I stopped trying so desperately to understand it all, Seven became a very pleasing read: an invitation to enjoy the formless delights of a universe “hanging out with itself”, where galaxies spiral in on themselves, and everything – “games, boxes, words, symbols, even the stars” – exists in a state of constant flux.
