This routine is interrupted when they are unexpectedly joined by Elster's daughter, Jessie, who is no less odd than her father (there's an "eerie depth in every stray remark she made"). French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point is "a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe appears to be evolving".įinley's film never gets made and the pair fall into a quiet but intense routine punctuated by pronouncements from Elster, which tend towards the incomprehensible ("the mind transcends all direction inward"). The cosmic overtones of this movement of simultaneous contraction and expansion are reinforced by the novel's title. Protracted time seems to contract meaning, or at least the possibility of meaning. In the desert – as in the equally austere, if chillier, gallery – time seems to slow down. Elster, though unconvinced, invites Finley to join him at his home in the desert and it is here that most of the action (if that's the right word) takes place. Jim Finley, an idealistic young director, wants to make a film of Elster talking uninterruptedly about his work ("no plush armchair with warm lighting and books on a shelf in the background. Richard Elster, an ageing "defence intellectual", advised the Pentagon over Iraq. It's a pair the narrator spots in the gallery, and wrongly assumes to be a film professor and student, who turn out to be the protagonists. But the narrator turns out to be a cipher: this whole first section merely a prologue, as its title, "Anonymity", suggests. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at." It's a neat description of the novelist's task, too – to scrutinise those things that "shallow habits" overlook. The piece is being intensely watched by an unnamed narrator who observes: "It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you.
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