Wooden writing redeemed by originality and meticulous research.
One of the enduring legends of science is Raman's revelation about polarisation as he stared at the light sparkling off the Mediterranean on his first voyage to England. The insights of the "Raman effect" led to a fundamental breakthrough still relevant in modern fibreoptic and laser technology.
This book isn't about the science though. It's about the Tamil Brahmin scientist community. Iyer's fascinated by the amalgam of religious orthodoxy and mathematical competence, of stifling adherence to convention and soaring flights into abstraction. In this fictionalisation, she glances sideways at the milieu through a woman's eyes.
It's an interesting conceit. How did these men seem to the women who gave birth to them, married them, and were fathered by them? Iyer scans 70 years from CVR to Pokhran II and drowns us in detail from different feminine points of view. The writing's a little too wooden to satisfy but the book's redeemed by originality and meticulous research.