The novel “The Jonah Kit” by Ian Watson was published for the first time in 1975. It won the BSFA award for best novel of the year.
The Soviets conduct a series of experiments to imprint a mind on human beings but also on whales. Those are top-secret experiments but a child disappears from the lab and pops up in Tokyo stating that his mind is that of a dead cosmonaut revealing what happened to him.
Paul Hammond has already won a Nobel Prize but believes he has evidence of a theory that would totally upset human beings’s concept of the cosmos. The scientist thinks he can prove that the universe we perceive is actually just a kind of shadow of the real one and that God has forsaken it after creating it.
The second novel written by Ian Watson combines scientific elements with other philosophical and even religious ones developed in different subplots that start independently. Experiments conducted by the Soviets lead to the subplots about the child who claims he has the mind of a cosmonaut and to the one about the whales while a cosmological research is developed in another subplot.
“The Jonah Kit” was written during the Cold War and this affects in particular the subplot concerning the Soviet experiments and their consequences. All in all, today things haven’t changed so much so secret research that also aim to exploit certain resources and suspicions about the activities of other nations remained more or less the same.
The science fiction element of the possibility of imprinting a mind on other humans and even on animals determines the development of a part of the novel. When a child who claims he has the mind of a Soviet cosmonaut appears in Tokyo, the people charged with checking him must decide whether this is a real case or something else.
This subplot is the one in which you have the greatest feeling of the Cold War’s atmosphere. The story is close to an espionage one with secret activities and suspicions of deception. Is it some twisted plan of the Soviets with mysterious goals? Is it possible that the Soviets have invented a technology to imprint the mind of a person on another?
The subplot concerning the whales is in some ways the simplest, if a narrative element in “The Jonah Kit” can be defined simple. The whale on which a human mind was imprented swims in the ocean’s depth but has human memories. It’s only the starting point in its story.
These ideas would be more than enough for most novels and even for a series of novels but in “The Jonah Kit” Ian Watson also adds the cosmological subplot. The author starts from some astrophysical concepts to develop philosophical and religious speculations around a scientist who claims he has made a sensational discovery.
Ian Watson is really a volcano of ideas and the plot of “The Jonah Kit” often ends up being mostly an excuse to explain them. The novel has a length within the standards in the British market of the ’70s os is rather short. The consequence is that it’s developed largely through dialogues between characters with just a few major events.
The story ends up being a bit sacrificed to the explanation of ideas through the characters leaping here and there around the world as the characters are far away from each other. The protagonists still have some development and it’s curious that typically have various negative personality traits. Communication problems are a common point of all the subplots.
The result is somewhat chaotic, what I might call a fantastic book but an almost unreadable novel. “The Jonah Kit” is above all an idea-oriented novel with a lot of speculations about them, if you’re interested in this type of work you might find it really intriguing.
