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Art versus science. One of the age-old conflicts, they say. I believe it's true that some scientists don't think the arts are much use, and quite a few artists hold scientists in low regard, and it's certainly the case that the sciences and the arts compete for the resources of public funding and willing novices; however, I don't quite see the art/science divide reaching the degree of ferocity hinted at by Charles L Harness's classic work, ‘The Rose’, published in magazine form in 1953.

The fifties were at the head of the atomic age. People remembered how nuclear power had been used to end the Second World War, and was beginning to be used for peaceful purposes as well. Military funding of science was beginning to reach proportions that the ‘back-room boys’ of previous weapon development could not have imagined, and brought new opportunities and new dilemmas for civilian scientists. Against a background of rising McCarthyism, it worried many. Blish's ‘They Shall Have Stars’, written in 1956 and later to become the first book of ‘Cities in Flight’, is a supreme example of what people thought a militarised, scientific society would entail. Elsewhere, sf writers and authors of mainstream thrillers were flocking to produce stories of mad scientists with terrible weapons. In the arts, too, it was a time of upheaval. Modernism had run its course, and its practitioners were splitting into schools of thought almost as fast as the atomic nuclei of the scientists were splitting into lighter elements. In such a time, with such outrageousness in fiction, Harness's small story of a death struggle between science and art seems modest.

Harness makes the conflict larger than life by projecting it onto a smaller, domestic stage. Martha Jacques is one of the government's top scientists. She is working on the Jacques Rosette — a formula for Sciomnia, which takes the form of a red rose and can be used as a new power source, or an all-powerful weapon. With all the hatred that the feminine mind can summon, she loathes her estranged husband, Ruy Jacques. He is an artist in the abstract: he dabbles in painting, sculpture, and music. He sees the coming of a renaissance, led by artists, or at least by the Bohemian types who like to think of themselves as artists. He lives in the Via Rosa, the local cultural centre. As an intermediary, we have Anna van Tuyl, a leading psychiatrist who falls in love with Ruy Jacques while investigating his unique disorder. van Tuyl also seeks the red rose: she is desperately trying to finish her ballet of Oscar Wilde's short story, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (1891), but cannot compose the ending.

Harness's characters are often poets of dialogue, investing such meaning into tone of voice or exact choice of words that it takes a paragraph of explanation to reveal their full content to the reader. This parallels Harness's own writing style. His prose is deftly written in a way that few writers can manage: it is lavish without the overblown flamboyance of Bester's, and gives intricate details without being as dry as Clarke's. Like many writers, he flavours his text with a sprinkling of detail from contemporary science and philosophy: he doesn't just describe events in the plot, but gives an account of why they must be as he describes.

These baroque features of his writing and narrative structure are present in this book too. It aesthetically draws the reader from page to page, following his presentation as a river follows its course. They make the work a pleasure to read, not a long haul like many of the harder sf tomes. Its length, at a mere 90 pages, contributes to this lightness, by stopping the book being either drawn-out or rushed.

And so, as reading the book gives such joy, it is a disappointment to know its shortcomings. The two Jacques argue intermittently over the primacy of art or of science, but the arguments they present are so facile and so trivially falsifiable that one begins to think the main characters are fools not to notice. Ruy Jacques is obviously playing the long game throughout, and Martha Jacques is blinded by her irrational hatred, so they do have excuses, but Harness doesn't, for fobbing us off with half-formed debating points. As with his presentation of Toynbee in ‘The Paradox Men’, the gaps in the written debate highlight the gaps in his philosophical reasoning and his knowledge of the issues he tries to describe. Because of this, I would not say that this is a book that should be read by everybody; rather, it is a very dangerous book, that may lead unwary readers into believing untruths.

Harness exercises himself mostly with the idea that the arts inform the sciences: in the way that painters gained insight into how vision works before cognitive science was even considered, or in the way that architects discovered the utility of the arch before physicists thought to examine the nature of forces. But to go further and to say that science consistently lags art, as Ruy Jacques does with impunity, is to ignore the distinction between observing the flight of a projectile and calculating the thrust needed to put a satellite into orbit.

This idea as a whole, of the experiments performed by artists later being “rediscovered”, or revisited, in mathematical form by scientists is mirrored by the work itself, in a ploy so subtle that I can't decide whether it was deliberate. This science-fictional story explicitly references Wilde's artistic short, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, mentioned above, which is in its own way a treatise on the same subject: a tragic story of a scientist blinded by emotion, facing a brilliant songbird who alone understands the nature of love. Both nightingales are transfigured during the course of their plots, with sad consequences. Both works are dominated by the fulfilment, and the non-fulfilment, of desires made clear early on; and each is notable for its careful prose, though Wilde's is more self-indulgent, with the aesthetic balance wrangled by the crude repetitions characteristic of mediocre children's authors.

One other parallel not commented on by Wilde but carefully expanded on by Harness is that of music as a form of communication. The plot is, in part, founded on the unfinished ballet, with its message of love and death; at several other points, translation of non-musical messages to musical form proves important. In fact, many of the events in ‘The Rose’ can be seen as being about the search for music, as much as the plot as a whole is about the search for the red rose. All the characters are looking for a piece of music that they already possess but cannot yet access.

Michael Moorcock calls ‘The Rose’ “one of the five best sf novels ever”. If it weren't for the clumsiness of its main argument, I might agree with him; despite this failing, Harness makes a good effort at selling the arts to the scientists and wannabe scientists who constitute the bulk of his audience, and does so in a readable and lively way.