Chaos and the tidy mind

In this book, Alexander Masters, the unusual biographer, is living in Cambridge, having written Stuart: A Life Backwards, the story of a homeless man with a disordered mind. Masters lives on the ground floor of a house on Jesus Green; below him, in the basement flat, is Simon Norton, who owns the building. Norton’s flat is so incredibly untidy, so absolutely revoltingly messy, that I can’t go into it now; I’ll spend a couple of paragraphs on it in due course. More importantly, Norton is one of the cleverest mathematicians in the world. Possibly the cleverest. So Masters decides to write his biography.

Stuart, who lived his life backwards, had a messy mind; Simon Norton has a messy flat. This flat, as Masters tells it, looks like a total disaster. Trying to get into it is difficult enough, because there are holes in the stairs, and no light switch to hand.