Is there such a thing as Box Philosophy? Was the Etruscan god of wine called Fufluns? Does Greek Orthodox Saint Fanourios preside over lost things, and is his saint’s day celebrated with a cake? Does Crete contain a Cave of the Cyclops? It’s hard to suppress the urge to search online for the answers while navigating Joanna Kavenna’s latest mind-bending novel Seven. Clearly, however, there is no such board game as the one that gives the book its title, its competitions watched avidly, its grandmasters revered, its controversies passionately discussed. If it existed we’d surely have heard of undisputed world champion Ashok Deo and his regular crushing of the unlucky underdog Indrek Laar.
None of those references is random; all are firmly tied into not so much a plot as an intellectual playpen. It begins with an unnamed and ungendered narrator who is working in Oslo with Alda Jónsdóttir, one of the world’s foremost Box thinkers, on a forthcoming philosophical blockbuster called Thinking Outside the Box About Thinking Outside the Box, or TOTBATOTB. The assistant is quickly fired for being too polite, but in any case the project is terminally stalled by Alda’s inability to complete the final chapter, since it concerns establishing whether the universe itself is a box or not, ie finite or infinite.
The game of Seven is also a kind of box, ancient examples of which occasionally turn up to general mystification. One is found at Gordion in Turkey, famous in history as the site of the undisentangleable Gordian knot, slashed by an impatient Alexander the Great. Archaic Seven boxes contain play pieces, and the board, in the shape of a coiled labyrinth, forms the lid. In modern times a set of rules were conjectured for the game, which involves each player aiming to get all seven of their counters to the centre spot. The first one to do so wins. The board is thus a vortex, a black hole (astronomy and questions about the nature of time and space are also functions of the novel).