THE PREMONITATION OFFICE
A true story of the predicted death
By Sam Knight
Illustrated. 249 pages. Penguin press. $28.
Gabriel García Márquez wouldn’t 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 would call you to think about it.
Most of us sometimes feel that there are parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that are inaccessible with the tools at hand. Moments manifest as omens, as kismet, as a sense that God has watched us or, conversely, that we have been quietly besieged by demons.
Coincidence can cause these kinds of shivers. GK Chesterton called coincidences “spiritual puns.” Don DeLillo wrote in “Libra”: “A cunning person would one day start a religion by chance, if he hasn’t already, and make a million.”
Intuition gathers intensely around disasters. Inevitably there is the man who slept late and missed the crashed plane, the woman who saw the tsunami coming in a dream or the teenager who had a tendency to hit the ground before the first shots left the semi-automatic rifle. Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco, shocked a generation by writing a song shortly before September 11 that read “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 placed an ad in London’s Evening Standard, set up a small office and urged people to come forward with their premonitions.
Theirs was a witchy, mini Bletchley Park. If foresight is as common as left-handedness, which they suspected was, why not a national early warning system? The tips can at least help a smart man to bet the ponies.
This is a rich, flowery, funny story, with undertones of human sadness. Knight plays it very fair. His prose is measured and measured again. It’s as if Strunk and White took the manuscript on vacation and turned it into a competition.
Knight sometimes seems to have his tongue in his cheek, but that tongue is buried so deep that an oral surgeon would have to locate and remove it.
Knight is a staff writer for New Yorker based in London. “The Premonitions Bureau” began life as a 2019 article in that magazine. The good news is that Knight is cunning and astute, and his book is just as good as his article. The bad news is that his book doesn’t 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 100 children died in Aberfan, a mining village in Wales, after an avalanche of coal waste slid down a rain-soaked mountainside into the town.
John Barker, a psychiatrist at Shelton Hospital in Shrewsbury, England, arrived early and became convinced there had been alien warning signs. He presented his suspicions to Peter Fairley, the science editor of the Evening Standard. Fairley persuaded the paper’s editor, Charles Wintour, to give the Premonition Bureau a shot. The idea was inspired by the avalanche, but it was meant to test all prior knowledge 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 one day be referred to as “Nuclear Wintour.”
Nothing flushes out the crackpots like an ad to send your suspicions to a newspaper. This book hums along with them. Strangely enough, a handful of people were more likely to be right than everyone else.
Knight’s portraits of Barker and Fairley are vibrant. Both men craved the limelight and appeared on BBC television and radio as often as possible.
Barker is a poignant figure, an eternal resident on the doorstep. He hated his day job in the mental hospital; it felt like a cave. He felt he was destined for greater 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. “If we don’t see where things are going, we are no longer ourselves,” he writes. “It is human to think ahead. Premonitions are tantalizing because they are simulacra of this essential way of thinking.”
Only rarely does the author let his own personality feel. In one aside, he says that when he and his pregnant wife saw three magpies in their yard, they knew they were having a girl. “We never asked for a test to confirm our daughter’s gender,” he writes, “because we felt we were already informed.”
The actual hunch office was a sham, though it’s fun to imagine it’s all too successful, operating in a bunker on the Isle of Wight. The truth is certainly out there.
Knight’s book is clear, almost clinically so. It’s on the passionless side. The crooked wood of humanity is cut in half by four. Photos are used with a deep, poetic effect. The book is set in London in 1967, but there is no sense of Swinging London. This magical mystery tour makes no mention of “Magical Mystery Tour”. It might as well be 1957.
The novelist Robert Stone was a student of paranoia, another kind of supernormal perception. He joked about setting up his own premonition bureau. It would work like Alcoholics Anonymous, with a buddy system. Knight’s book can at best make you wish it existed.
“The idea was,” Stone wrote, “if you’re paranoid, contact Paranoids Anonymous and they’ll send you another paranoid.”