THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU
A True Account of Death Foretold
By Sam Knight
Illustrated. 249 pages. Penguin Press. $28.
Gabriel García Márquez would not sleep in a house if someone had died in it. Colette was passionate about dowsing. James Merrill had his Ouija board. Ted Hughes taught Sylvia Plath to read horoscopes. Robert Graves believed in ghosts. If Edmund Wilson had a dream about you, he’d call you to mull it over.
Most of us sense, at times, that there are parts of the electromagnetic spectrum not accessible with the tools at hand. Moments manifest as auguries, as kismet, as a sense that God has glanced at us or, conversely, that we have been silently brushed by demons.
Coincidence can provide shivers of this sort. G.K. Chesterton called coincidences “spiritual puns.” Don DeLillo, in “Libra,” wrote, “A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million.”
Intuitions collect intensely around disasters. Inevitably there is the man who slept late and missed the crashed jet, the woman who saw the tsunami coming in a dream or the teen who had an urge to hit the floor before the first rounds left the semiautomatic rifle. Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, spooked a generation by writing, shortly before Sept. 11, a song that included the lyrics “Tall buildings shake / Voices escape singing sad, sad songs.”
Sam Knight’s first book, “The Premonitions Bureau,” is about two eccentric Englishmen, a psychiatrist and a journalist, who in 1967 tried to harness the power of previously untapped forms of foresight. They put an ad in London’s Evening Standard, set up a small office and urged people to call in with their premonitions.
Theirs was a witchy, mini Bletchley Park. If foresight is as common as left-handedness, which they suspected it was, why not have a national early warning system? At minimum, the tips might help a clever man bet the ponies.
This is a rich, florid, funny history, with undertones of human grief. Knight plays it very straight. His prose is measured and measured again. It’s as if Strunk and White took the manuscript on vacation and made buffing it a competition.
Knight does seem to have his tongue in his cheek at moments, but that tongue is buried so deeply it would require an oral surgeon to locate and extract it.
Knight is a New Yorker staff writer, based in London. “The Premonitions Bureau” began its life as a 2019 article in that magazine. The good news is that Knight is shrewd and perceptive, and his book is as good as his article. The bad news is that his book is not a great deal better than his article. The short version was enough for me.
The book begins with an account of a mining disaster. In 1966, more than a hundred children died in Aberfan, a Welsh mining village, after an avalanche of coal waste slid down a rain-soaked mountainside and into the town.
John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital in Shrewsbury, England, arrived on the scene early and became convinced there had been otherworldly warning signs. He took his hunches to Peter Fairley, the science editor of the Evening Standard. Fairley persuaded the paper’s editor, Charles Wintour, to give the premonitions bureau a shot. The idea was inspired by the avalanche, but it was for any and all foreknowledge, to be tested against global events.
Wintour’s nickname, Knight reminds us, was “Chilly Charlie.” It didn’t take a seer to predict that when his daughter Anna became the editor of Vogue, she might someday be referred to as “Nuclear Wintour.”
Nothing flushes out the crackpots like an advertisement to send your inklings in to a newspaper. This book hums with them. Eerily, a handful of people were right more often than everyone else.
Knight’s portraits of Barker and Fairley are lively. Both men craved the spotlight and went on BBC television and radio as often as possible.
Barker is a poignant figure, a perpetual dweller on the threshold. He disliked his day job at the mental hospital; it felt like a grotto. He sensed he was destined for grander things. He liked to visit haunted houses for fun. He surfed.
Knight pushes his material into neurobiology, into the nature of placebos and expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies. “When we stop seeing where things are going, we cease to be ourselves,” he writes. “It is human to think ahead. Premonitions are tantalizing because they are simulacra of this essential mode of thinking.”
The author only rarely makes his own personality felt. In one aside, he says that when he and his pregnant wife saw three magpies in their garden, they knew they were having a girl. “We never asked for a test to confirm the sex of our daughter,” he writes, “because we felt we had already been informed.”
The actual premonitions bureau was a washout, though it’s fun to imagine that it succeeded all too well and is operating in a bunker on the Isle of Wight. The truth is surely out there.
Knight’s book is crisp, almost clinically so. It’s on the passionless side. The crooked timber of humanity is cut into two-by-fours. Photographs are employed to profound, poetic effect. The book takes place in London in 1967, but there is no sense of Swinging London. This magical mystery tour does not mention “Magical Mystery Tour.” It might as well be 1957.
The novelist Robert Stone was a student of paranoia, another sort of supernormal perception. He joked about setting up a premonitions bureau of his own. It would operate like Alcoholics Anonymous, with a buddy system. Knight’s book, at its best, can make you wish it existed.
“The idea was,” Stone wrote, “if you’re feeling paranoid, contact Paranoids Anonymous and they’ll send you another paranoid.”