Book review - Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland
★★★★
When I think of Victorian literature, the first that comes to mind are Dickensian novels and Tennyson’s verse. The second thing that comes to mind is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Today’s book is a truly germane contemporary of the latter, sharing its wit, whimsy, and fascination with number, order, and logical play. It shares a streak of social satire too, although in this case, it connects not just to Carroll’s childlike surrealism but also to an older, sharper tradition that harks back to Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne. At the same time, it gestures forward toward the no-nonsense, scientifically grounded storytelling that would characterize 1950s Hard Science Fiction.
Flatland is a very short book (you can read it in a single sitting if you have a few free hours), and it tells the tale of A. Square, a respectable citizen of a two-dimensional world. Most of the book is occupied with an extended and increasingly elaborate account of how such a space would work, both in terms of physics and society. We are guided through Flatland’s classes and social customs: the priestly and dogmatic Circles at the top of the hierarchy, the aristocratic Polygons just below them, the respectable Squares and Pentagons of the gentry, and then further down to the plebeian Triangles -all the way to the lowest and most despised creatures of all: the straight Lines, who are women, regarded as emotional, irrational, and dangerously sharp. In this world, social status is determined by the number of one’s sides, and irregularity (deviation from geometrical perfection) is considered a crime of the gravest kind, punishable by execution or life imprisonment. It is a rigid and stifling social order, a proper mirror to Victorian society and its prejudices, and one that strives above all to keep the base Isosceles Triangles in their place. A few excursions into Flatland’s past are included, including the colorful (and swiftly suppressed) Color Revolution.
The heart of the book is a visitation scene, not unlike the moment of awakening in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. One day, A. Square is visited by a mysterious being: a Sphere from the Third Dimension. This sphere attempts to teach him the gospel of a higher spatial reality—one beyond the comprehension of ordinary Flatlanders. Through a combination of dreams, analogies, and firsthand experiences, the Square is taken on a conceptual journey: first into Lineland, a one-dimensional world inhabited by linear minds incapable of grasping his two-dimensional perspective; then into Pointland, the realm of pure solipsism where a single, dimensionless being mistakes itself for the entirety of existence; and finally into the wondrous space of the Third Dimension itself. There, A. Square is temporarily enlightened, but only to ruin the moment by speculating that, if three dimensions are possible, then surely four, five, or six must be as well. His mentor, the Sphere, is scandalized by this impertinent burst of mathematical imagination and promptly ejects him back into Flatland. After a series of failed attempts to proselytize this new gospel of spatial transcendence, A. Square is imprisoned for heresy, condemned to solitary confinement. How he manages to write this very book while locked in a cell is left as an open question.
The book, as stated, is both fun and illustrative, pedagogical in the best sense of the word, in the way old books so often were. It offers clever visualizations of how life in other dimensions might function, and it wields its satire deftly, criticizing the prejudices of the author's own time while also targeting a more universal flaw: the failure to imagine realities beyond one’s own. I am sure the book would be both enjoyable and valuable for children and teenagers, especially those with a taste for logic, geometry, or sly social critique. If the author had had more space and the inclination, he could easily have expanded his ingenious creation into the realms of fiction and storytelling, developing its terse, didactic charm into something richer and more narratively elaborate. Still, as it stands, Flatland remains a delightful and thought-provoking work, one I can only recommend wholeheartedly.
