The Impossible Man by Patchen Barss: 4-star review

The mathematician and physicist Sir Roger Penrose was born in Colchester in 1931, two-and-a-half billion years after electromagnetic radiation first developed life on Earth, 250 years after an apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head, and just over 20 years after Einstein published his general theory of relativity. Penrose, whose singularity theorem proved the biggest advance in relativity since Einstein, and whose work on black holes won him a Nobel Prize in 2020, has always been more at ease in the eternal mysteries of the cosmos than the more perplexing realm of life on earth.

While there’s a great deal in The Impossible Man, Patchen Barss’s new biography of Penrose, about light cones, null infinity and spinor networks, the book is essentially about a human caught between clock time and time in the fourth dimension. It’s the story of a boy being shown a sundial by his father and learning how light, time, shape, shade and motion are connected; of a student inspired by Escher’s “impossible objects” to design the Penrose Triangle; and of an academic whose theorems are impossible for most of us to understand. It’s also about the impossibility of having a genius as a husband or father and, for the genius, the apparent impossibility of domestic obligations.

As a child, Roger was considered the runt of the litter. He was overshadowed by his brothers and controlled by his father Lionel, whose emotional repression Barss puts down to Quakerism. It seems more likely, however, that the stone-cold Lionel, who could only relate to his children through tetrahedrons, octahedrons and cubes, was “on the spectrum”. Before her marriage, Roger’s mother Margaret had studied medicine at Cambridge and had been friends with Sylvia Pankhurst. After her marriage, she was bullied by Lionel into a shadow life, which included renouncing her vocation.

Roger retreated into geometric patterns, Barss suggests, to block out his father’s cruelty to his mother. The boy obsessed with space-time became a man trapped in his own time warp: having feared his father, Roger replicated that behaviour to the finest detail, all the while identifying, as he repeatedly explained to Barss, with his mother as a victim of spousal abuse. One of Roger’s three sons calls the atmosphere at the Penrose home “a singular blackness. An emptiness. A nothingness.” A black hole, in other words.

Barss has had the cooperation of the now 93-year-old Penrose, who provided hours of interviews that contain not a jot of human insight. His life, Barss suggests, “just happened to Penrose – he discovered rather than created it”. His estranged sons, Penrose says, are a “non-presence”; to re-establish their relationship would “just [distract] from other things”. Barss’s sympathy lies with the family: Joan, Penrose’s first wife, who suffered from depression and to whom (two of their sons claim to Barss) Roger was violent; Vanessa, the 21-year-old PhD student who gave up her research and became his second wife; and the “muses” in between. Barss does nothing to disguise his dislike of Penrose or excuse his subject’s limitations.