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Bloomsbury USA
April 2013
On Sale: April 16, 2013
Featuring: Thayer
224 pages
ISBN: 1620400065
EAN: 9781620400067
Kindle: B009SJZWAM
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life | Historical
Equilateral is an intellectual comedy set just before
the turn of the century in Egypt. A British astronomer,
Thayer, high on Darwin and other progressive scientists of
the age, has come to believe that beings more highly evolved
than us are alive on Mars (he has evidence) and that there
will be a perfect moment in which we can signal to them that
we are here too. He gets the support and funding for a
massive project to build the Equilateral, a triangle with
sides hundreds of miles long, in the desert of Egypt in time
for that perfect window. But as work progresses, the
Egyptian workers, less evolved than the British, are also
less than cooperative, and a bout of malaria that seems to
activate at the worst moments makes it all much more
confusing and complex than Thayer ever imagined. We see
Thayer also through the eyes of two women--a triangle of
another sort--a romantic one that involves a secretary who
looks after Thayer but doesn't suffer fools, and Binta, a
houseservant he covets but can't communicate with--and
through them we catch sight of the depth of self-delusion
and the folly of the enterprise. Equilateral is written with a subtle, sly humor, but
it's also a model of reserve and historical accuracy; it's
about many things, including Empire and colonization and
exploration; it's about "the other" and who that other might
be. We would like to talk to the stars, and yet we can
barely talk to each other.
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