James Purdon

Code Read

Book of Numbers

By

Harvill Secker 580pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

What was the first great novel of the information age? It’s not a trick question exactly, but the answer depends on what you think ‘information’ is – and when its age began. There’s no reason to think the information age uniquely our own; no reason to assume – like those 20th-century avant-gardes who imagined themselves the first true moderns – that we’re the first ones on the scene. Even in 1853, an editorial in The Times could claim quite confidently that the world had entered ‘an age of information’; a hundred and sixty years later, as the flotsam of our old media sinks into a new wave of digital solvent, we’re still trying to figure out what that might have meant and what it might yet mean.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    Follow Us