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Snakes and Ladders by Penelope Farmer, Little, Brown, pp 480, £15.99

The fact merchant is usually male – an uncle, or a friend’s father.
He informs you that a ‘kazatzka’ is a Slavonik folk dance performed by a
man and woman, that the precise origins of the Basque language are as yet
unknown. A new fact every day. That’s his motto. Facts, new ones, learn
’em, and spread the news.

Science, unfortunately, is fed into our culture in a similar way – fact
by fact. It rarely seems part of a story, or of human affairs – it hardly
ever seems connected to what we do and feel. The media, uncle-like, squeeze
out information in perforated snippets – ‘ŮÉúСÊÓƵs believe they have made
a breakthrough in . . . ‘ ‘New research seems to show that . . .’ and so
on. So scientific knowledge, which has become extremely specialised, can
seem isolated, a vast pile of to-be-distributed-later, sawn-off facts. In
the great two cultures, science versus art debate, it is rarely recognised
that one of literature’s roles could be to reintegrate science into normal
human relations, removing the Gradgrind element. Penelope Farmer’s novel
of love, life and science does just that.

Snakes and Ladders is about the ins, outs, ups, downs, spins and backflips
of a pharmaceuticals company’s research into epilepsy in the Third World.
Its heroine is Anna Kern, sociologist, and wife to a neurologist David.
Both of them are requisitioned by the feverish, charismatic but slightly
straying Canadian drug executive Carter Jacoman. Field studies located in
Kenya and Ecuador are set up to prove Jacoman’s commercial hypothesis that
there is an untapped market for epilepsy drugs in Third World countries,
when industry wisdom has it that the very poor won’t pay for them. The
research will compare two drugs, Phenobarbitone and Lenytole, the latter
made by Jacoman’s multinational employers, Bader-Kleitz. Everyone knows
before the studies begin that Lenytole is more effective.

Part of what Farmer achieves is simply to show how mucky, complex and
intricate is much of science’s work. The research is littered with happenstance,
arguments and at least one major cock-up: in Ecuador, principal investigator
Dr Virgilio Aguadiente fails to ensure that his peasant volunteers had the
correct drugs and were taking them, thus almost invalidating the entire
scheme. But, within this, we also get a full sociology-of-science work.
Anna is employed to record the effects and social implications of epilepsy
treatment on the thousands of villagers who are the tests’ subjects. But
she also (not unlike Farmer, of course) has a wider, private brief to write
a study of the entire project, from village dinner to multinational office
meeting.

Crucially, Snakes and Ladders enters an area where the ideas of science
are not usually embraced, narrative literature. With its complex account
of the internal lives of its main protagonists, the book shows how such
lives affect, fractionally or seriously, the science work and its eventual
uses. Jacoman’s estrangement from his life, or his meeting and marrying
Anna’s best friend, the Walter Benjamin-quoting novelist Nicci, is shown
to be a kind of private-life enactment of his professional strengths and
shortcomings, tactical and moral. But these episodes also impinge upon the
very science he is trying to do. (Indeed, Jacoman, part brilliant maverick
scientists, part ambitious company exec, part incompetent, embodies the
different threads that Farmer is arguing make up the work of science.)

Farmer is not so much showing how private lives affect the professional
work we do, as how what we are characterises and colours the things we create
and set in motion, even science. She certainly never implies that science
is the same as or arises only out of such interpersonal subjectivity. The
central discussion here is perhaps, as Anna asks, ‘to what extent can an
individual influence society, to what extent is an individual wholly driven,
not to say enabled, by it?

Snakes and Ladders is too long, not as moving as it might have been,
and towards the end lapses into divisions it had otherwise done much to
heal: ’emotional’ Anna argues with ‘overrational’ David. But Farmer has
offered what seems like a surprisingly easy path through the art/science
divide. Crammed with theories, statistics, definitions (maybe not high science,
but certainly a good deal of hard, factual stuff) as the book is, nothing
is lost or diminished in any way by being integrated into a gripping, ever
melodramatic tale of relationships and personalities. Instead, the reader
receives a panoramic human picture of science. Though Snakes and Ladders
might lack the radical insight of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which
it in some ways resembles, its canny reintegration of scientific knowledge
into art and life ably demonstrates the difference between defining a ‘metaxa’
and dancing it.

Andrew Clifford is a science writer.