Thirty Eight is the debut novel by Chris Perkes, published initially as an eBook.

Themes

The novel conjures with a number of themes contemporary with the year 1938 and their interplay with the anti-hero, George Bradfield. Amongst these themes are:

• The world situation including the Italian occupation of Abyssinia and the German invasion of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
• A ficticious "Goldsmith Process" and parallel advances in real world science by Lise Meitner
  Lise Meitner
  Lise Meitner FRS was an Austrian-born, later Swedish, physicist who worked on radioactivity and nuclear physics. Meitner was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, an achievement for which her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize...
  
  , Otto Hahn
  Otto Hahn
  Otto Hahn FRS was a German chemist and Nobel laureate, a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is regarded as "the father of nuclear chemistry". Hahn was a courageous opposer of Jewish persecution by the Nazis and after World War II he became a passionate campaigner...
  
   and others.
• An imagined group of English Dissenters called "The Night Watchman".
• A Liberal party in terminal decline after an unsatisfactory coalition with the Tories.
• Two talking cats alluding to comparison of the poems of John Milton and TS Elliot.

Style and Influence

The keywords upon publishing forums allude to the influence of Kafka and Pynchon.

Perkes has clearly been influenced by Kafka, not least in chapter 2 ("Evening Trials") where the interogation shares both the name and plot elements with The Trial

The Trial

The Trial is a novel by Franz Kafka, first published in 1925. One of Kafka's best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor the reader.Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was never...

. This influence is credited in the name of the senior police officer, Inspector Francis Kaye. Despite this, Thirty Eight cannot be described as "Kafkaesque", its outlook being essentially optimistic and its narrative conforming more to a traditional plot structure.

The Pynchon references are rather less clear. The chapter "Momenta" is an entertaining nonsense which makes an attempt at stream of consiousness without taking itself very seriously. In addition the character "Stickland", a mathematician and former sailor could be read as a nod to Pynchon.

Scientific Basis

Although slow to show its hand the novel has difficulty masking the fact that nuclear fission is the underpinning for "The Goldsmith Process".

The novel is short of quantitative details. Whilst water acts as an efficient neutron moderator, whether an aqueous solution of urainium salts could go critical accidentally is questionable. Calculations by Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics...

at the Oak Ridge facility during the '40's argue against.