The physicist and his posse of embittered women

A Game With Sharpened Knives by Neil Belton (Weidenfeld, Pounds 12.99) DANIEL JOHNSON NEIL Belton's first novel is an improbable masterpiece. It is improbable because it requires the reader to imagine what it is like to be a scientific genius. It is a masterpiece because he pulls it off.

The genius in question is Erwin Schrodinger, the Austrian physicist who in 1926 imposed a pattern on the chaos of particle physics with his discovery of wave mechanics, and who later helped to transform another science with his book What is Life?, which inspired Watson and Crick to discover the structure of DNA.

A Game With Sharpened Knives begins in 1938, at a low point in Schrodinger's life. The Nobel laureate has alienated both the Nazis, by going into voluntary exile in Oxford, and anti-Nazis, by returning to Austria and writing a grovelling apology.

His work has also ground to a halt: he cannot find the elusive equations that will enable him to combine his own theory with that of his friend Einstein.

The great man's private life is as complicated as his equations. He has had an "open" marriage for many years, though his wife, Anny, looks after him.

She has even befriended his mistress, Hilde, and her daughter by him. He also has a much younger lover, Hansi, yet even all these women cannot satisfy this emotional omnivore.

Then a solution presents itself.

Eamon de Valera, the Irish revolutionary-turned-reactionary leader, offers Schrodinger a refuge.

He accepts, and the rest of the novel is set in wartime Dublin.

There Schrodinger learns the hard way that sex, politics and physics don't mix. The powers of church and state threaten his bohemian lifestyle, and he has a series of sinister encounters with a mysterious German who calls himself Goltz. He takes a new lover, Sinead, with whom he enjoys fleeting bliss, but he cannot escape from his menage of depressed, embittered women.

Belton is aware that the difficulty with such a novel is how far to stick to the known facts. Sinead, for example, is based on a real person: Sheila May Greene, who, like her, was an actress and later mothered Schrodinger's child.

Belton, however, has deliberately renamed her to create an entirely different character. Goltz, similarly, is based on a Nazi spy who was protected by the IRA.

What makes this such an impressive first novel is the eloquence and energy of the prose.

Whether Belton is evoking the desolation of the landscapes, the frustrations of the intellectual life or the seediness of Dublin society, his writing is never less than enjoyable and convincing.

The entire novel is seen through Schrodinger's (somewhat myopic) eyes.

Belton is able to sustain a stream of consciousness over many pages, switching from one register to another, while weaving a complex plot and subtly sketching in minor details that later assume significance. It is not an easy thing to accomplish - the history of Irish fiction is littered with countless would-be James Joyces - but this novel is a quantum leap for its author.

Belton makes the occasional slip.

He misspells the name of the prewar chancellor of Austria Kurt Schuschnigg. He acknowledges a debt to Schrodinger's biographer, Walter Moore, which is indeed considerable. But if he had read Moore carefully he would not have depicted Anny as suicidal: she was a rock and it was in fact her husband, Schrodinger, who years later attempted suicide.

Still, Belton shows how Schrodinger's volatile character was the key to his charisma. His love affairs brought him close to catastrophe - he had a "Lolita complex" - but he was, as Einstein called him, "ein raffinierte Gaunerl" (a sophisticated rascal) and he got away with it. This is a sophisticated novel, too, and one thoroughly to be recommended.

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