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The End Of Mr. Y Paperback – October 2, 2006
by
Scarlett Thomas
(Author)
Purchase options and add-ons
A cursed book sends a young woman on a philosophical journey through an alternate dimension in this “stylish and dizzying” novel by the author of PopCo (New York Times).
Graduate student Ariel Manto has a fascination with nineteenth-century scientists—especially Thomas Lumas, the mysterious author of The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read. When she uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel goes down an interdimensional rabbit hole of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between. And to make matters worse, the CIA is onto her.
Following in Mr. Y’s footsteps, Ariel swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and is transported into the Troposphere: a wonderland where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. There she begins to understand all the mysteries surrounding the book, herself, and the universe. Or is it all just a hallucination?
Graduate student Ariel Manto has a fascination with nineteenth-century scientists—especially Thomas Lumas, the mysterious author of The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read. When she uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel goes down an interdimensional rabbit hole of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between. And to make matters worse, the CIA is onto her.
Following in Mr. Y’s footsteps, Ariel swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and is transported into the Troposphere: a wonderland where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. There she begins to understand all the mysteries surrounding the book, herself, and the universe. Or is it all just a hallucination?
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateOctober 2, 2006
- Dimensions1.02 x 5.31 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100156031612
- ISBN-13978-0156031615
- Lexile measure810L
An enthralling historical novel of a compassionate and relentless woman, a cutting-edge breakthrough in psychiatry, and a nightmare in the making. | Learn more
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Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of PhilosophyPaperback
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In Thomas's dense, freewheeling novel, Ariel Manto, an oversexed renegade academic, stumbles across a cursed text, which takes her into the Troposphere, a dimension where she can enter the consciousness, undetected, of other beings. Thomas first signals something is askew even in Ariel's everyday life when a university building collapses; soon after, Ariel discovers her intellectual holy grail at a used book shop: a rare book with the same title as the novel, written by an eccentric 19th-century writer interested in "experiments of the mind." The volume jump-starts her doctoral thesis, but her adviser disappears. And when Ariel follows a recipe in the book, she finds herself in deep trouble in the Troposphere. Her young ex-priest love interest may be too late to save her. Thomas blithely references popular physics, Aristotle, Derrida, Samuel Butler and video game shenanigans while yoking a Back to the Future–like conundrum to a gooey love story. The novel's academic banter runs the gamut from intellectually engaging to droning; this journey to the "edge of consciousness" is similarly playful but less accessible than its predecessor, PopCo. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
British author Thomas bites off a bit more than she can chew in this novel incorporating time travel, Derrida, and the dangers of sadistic trysts. Strange things keep happening to British university lecturer Ariel Manto. First her supervisor disappears; then she discovers the rarest of rare books, The End of Mr. Y, at a secondhand bookshop. The tome was penned by Thomas Lumas, a nineteenth-century scientist who, as luck would have it, is the subject of Ariel's dissertation. (The book tells the tale of a man who swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and winds up in a place called the Troposphere, where he travels space and time through others' minds.) Bored and befuddled by real life, Ariel mimics the author's eerie experiment, with mixed results. (On her first trip, she melds minds with a randy rodent and a psychotic cat.) Like her previous novel, PopCo (2005), Thomas' mildly amusing second offering aspires to be both wonky and hip: her protagonist obsesses over philosophical matters one moment, her lamentable love life the next. Chick lit for nerds. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
PRAISE FOR POPCO
"You might say that Thomas has redefined activism for the Digital Age. Inspired by a venerable tradition, she achieves here a scope and a passion to match the intelligence and empathy her fiction has always had."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Enough code-breaking tips, puzzles and graphs, charts, postscripts and appendixes to satisfy that other mathematician storyteller, Lewis Carroll. "–The New York Times Book Review "An exciting story with a fantastical twist, dive into the world of Ariel Manto and The End of Mr. Y." - armchairinterviews.com "Not only will you have a great time reading this book, but you will finish it a cleverer person." - Jonathan Coe "[A] journey of wonder and danger. Delicious cross-genre literay picnic, breezy and fiercely intelligent, reminiscent of Haruki Murakami." - Kirkus "A combination of postmodern philosophy and physics, spine-tingling science fiction, clever, unexpected narrative twists, and engaging characters." - Library Journal "[S]mart, stylish and dizzying... Consider 'The End of Mr. Y' an accomplished, impressive thought experiment for the 21st Century." - New York Times Book Review "Literary manna for would-be philosophy nerds. There are little, 100-percent-literary sugar plums to be found in its pages." - Salon.com "Exhilarating. A compulsively absorbing thriller. Mr. Y burorrws into the reader’s brain, stoking a desire for real-world exploration." - Time Out New York
—
From the Back Cover
"Ingenious and original. A cracking good yarn, fizzing with intelligence." -- Philip Pullman If you knew this book was cursed, would you read it?
When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookstore, she can’t believe her eyes. Copies are exceedingly rare, and everyone who has ever read it—including its author, Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas-- has disappeared.
Ariel can’t resist the promise in the book’s history and its pages, and so steps into a thrilling adventure of time, space, love, death, and everything in between. "Smart [and] stylish." -- International Herald Tribune
"Enormously ambitious and satisfying. It overflows with love for books not just as beautiful artefacts and repositories of secret knowledge, but as gateways into parallel universes." -- Time Out London
When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookstore, she can’t believe her eyes. Copies are exceedingly rare, and everyone who has ever read it—including its author, Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas-- has disappeared.
Ariel can’t resist the promise in the book’s history and its pages, and so steps into a thrilling adventure of time, space, love, death, and everything in between. "Smart [and] stylish." -- International Herald Tribune
"Enormously ambitious and satisfying. It overflows with love for books not just as beautiful artefacts and repositories of secret knowledge, but as gateways into parallel universes." -- Time Out London
Scarlett Thomas is the author of Bright Young Things, Going Out, PopCo, and Our Tragic Universe. ------ ORIGINAL 2006 EDITION If you knew this book were cursed, would you read it?
Ariel Manto has a fascination with The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read—maybe because it's cursed and everyone related to it (the author; various book collectors; Ariel’s doctoral advisor, Saul Burlem) disappears. But suddenly she discovers a rare copy in a used bookstore. Following in Mr. Y’s footsteps, she falls into a trance and steps into the Troposphere—a wonderland of an alternate dimension where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. And so Ariel launches into a heart-racing, brain-teasing, time-twisting adventure of science, faith, consciousness, death, and everything in between.
But what about the curse? Did Burlem read Mr. Y just before he vanished? Did these scary men in gray suits have anything to do with it? And now that Ariel understands the Troposphere--and her place in it—will she be able to save the world and still go back to it?
SCARLETT THOMAS is the author of PopCo. She was named one of the twenty best young British writers by the Independent on Sunday in 2001 and Writer of the Year at the 2002 Elle Style Awards. She teaches writing at the University of Kent and lives in Canterbury.
About the Author
SCARLETT THOMAS is the author of PopCo and The End of Mr. Y. She has been nominated for the Orange Prize and named Writer of the Year by Elle UK, one of the twenty best young writers by the Independent, and one of the Telegraph’s 20 best writers under 40.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
You now have one choice.
You . . . I’m hanging out of the window of my office, sneaking a cigarette and trying to read Margins in the dull winter light, when there’s a noise I haven’t heard before. All right, the noise—crash, bang, etc—I probably have heard before, but it’s coming from underneath me, which isn’t right. There shouldn’t be anything underneath me: I’m on the bottom floor. But the ground shakes, as if something’s trying to push up from below, and I think about other people’s mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time; then I think, Fucking hell, it’s an earthquake, and I drop my cigarette and run out of my office at roughly the same time that the alarm starts sounding.
When alarms sound I don’t always run immediately. Who does? Usually an alarm is just an empty sign: a drill; a practice. As I’m on my way to the side door out of the building the shaking stops. Shall I go back to my office? But it’s impossible to stay in this building when this alarm goes off. It’s too loud; it wails inside your head. As I leave the building I walk past the Health and Safety notice board, which has pictures of injured people on it. The pictures blur as I go past: A man who has back pain is also having a heart attack, and various hologram people are trying to revive him. I was supposed to go to some Health and Safety training last year, but didn’t.
As I open the side door I can see people leaving the Russell Building and walking, or running, past our block and up the gray concrete steps in the direction of the Newton Building and the library. I cut around the right-hand side of the building and bound up the concrete steps, two at a time. The sky is gray, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it’s been freeze-framed. Sometimes, on these January afternoons, the sun squats low in the sky like an orange-robed Buddha in a documentary about the meaning of life. Today there is no sun. I come to the edge of the large crowd that has formed, and I stop running. Everyone is looking at the same thing, gasping and making firework-display noises.
It’s the Newton Building.
It’s falling down.
I think of this toy—have I seen it on someone’s desk recently?—which is a little horse mounted on a wooden button. When you press the button from underneath, the horse collapses to its knees. That’s what the Newton Building looks like now. It’s sinking into the ground, but in a lopsided way; one corner is now gone, now two, now . . . Now it stops. It creaks, and it stops. A window on the third floor flaps open, and a computer monitor falls out and smashes onto what’s left of the concrete courtyard below. Four men with hard hats and fluorescent jackets slowly approach the broken-up courtyard; then another man comes, says something to them, and they all move away again.
Two men in gray suits are standing next to me.
“Déjà vu,” one of them says to the other.
I look around for someone I know. There’s Mary Robinson, the head of department, talking to Lisa Hobbes. I can’t see many other people from the English Department. But I can see Max Truman standing on his own, smoking a roll-up. He’ll know what’s going on.
“Hello, Ariel,” he mumbles when I walk over and stand next to him.
Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he’s telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you’d have to pay to rig a horse race. Does he like me? I don’t think he trusts me. But why would he? I’m comparatively young, relatively new to the department, and I probably seem ambitious, even though I’m not. I also have long red hair and people say I look intimidating (because of the hair? Something else?). People who don’t say I look intimidating sometimes say I look “dodgy,” or “odd.” One of my ex-housemates said he wouldn’t like to be stuck on a desert island with me but didn’t say why.
“Hi, Max,” I say. Then: “Wow.”
“You probably don’t know about the tunnel, do you?” he says. I shake my head. “There’s a railway tunnel that runs under here,” he says, pointing downwards with his eyes. He sucks on his roll-up, but nothing seems to happen, so he takes it out of his mouth and uses it to point around the campus. “It runs under Russell over there, and Newton, over there. Goes—or used to go—from the town to the coast. It hasn’t been used in a hundred years or so. This is the second time it’s collapsed and taken Newton with it. They were supposed to fill it with concrete after last time,” he adds.
I look at where Max just pointed, and start mentally drawing straight lines connecting Newton with Russell, imagining the tunnel underneath the line. Whichever way you do it, the English and American Studies Building is on the line, too.
“Everyone’s all right, at least,” he says. “Maintenance saw a crack in the wall this morning and evacuated them all.”
Lisa shivers. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she says, looking over at the Newton Building. The gray sky has darkened and the rain is now falling more heavily. The Newton Building looks strange with no lights on: It’s as if it has been stubbed out.
“I can’t either,” I say.
For the next three or four minutes we all stand and stare in silence at the building; then a man with a megaphone comes around and tells us all to go home immediately without going back to our offices. I feel like crying. There’s something so sad about broken concrete.
I don’t know about everyone else, but it’s not that easy for me just to go home. I only have one set of keys to my flat, and that set is in my office, along with my coat, my scarf, my gloves, my hat, and my rucksack. There’s a security guard trying to stop people going in through the main entrance, so I go down the steps and in the side way. My name isn’t on my office door. Instead, it bears only the name of the official occupier of the room: my supervisor, Professor Saul Burlem. I met Burlem twice before I came here: once at a conference in Greenwich, and once at my interview. He disappeared just over a week after I arrived. I remember coming into the office on a Thursday morning and noticing that it was different. The first thing was that the blinds and the curtains were closed: Burlem always closed his blinds at the end of every day, but neither of us ever touched the horrible thin gray curtains. And the room smelled of cigarette smoke. I was expecting him in at about ten o’clock that morning, but he didn’t show up. By the following Monday I asked people where he was and they said they didn’t know. At some point someone arranged for his classes to be covered. I don’t know if there’s departmental gossip about this—no one gossips to me—but everyone seems to assume I’ll just carry on my research and it’s no big deal for me that he isn’t around. Of course, he’s the reason I came to the department at all: He’s the only person in the world who has done serious research on one of my main subjects: the nineteenth-century writer Thomas E. Lumas. Without Burlem, I’m not really sure why I am here. And I do feel something about him being missing; not loss, exactly, but something.
My car is in the Newton car park. When I get there I am not at all surprised to find several men in hard hats telling people to forget about their cars and walk or take the bus home. I do try to argue— I say I’m happy to take the risk that the Newton Building will not suddenly go into a slow-motion cinematic rewind in order that it can fall down again in a completely different direction— but the men pretty much tell me to piss off and walk home or take the bus like everybody else, so I eventually drift off in the direction of the bus stop. It’s only the beginning of January, but some daffodils and snowdrops have made it through the earth and stand wetly in little rows by the path. The bus stop is depressing: There’s a line of people looking as cold and fragile as the line of flowers, so I decide I’ll just walk.
Copyright © 2006 by Scarlett Thomas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online
at www.harcourt.com/ contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
You now have one choice.
You . . . I’m hanging out of the window of my office, sneaking a cigarette and trying to read Margins in the dull winter light, when there’s a noise I haven’t heard before. All right, the noise—crash, bang, etc—I probably have heard before, but it’s coming from underneath me, which isn’t right. There shouldn’t be anything underneath me: I’m on the bottom floor. But the ground shakes, as if something’s trying to push up from below, and I think about other people’s mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time; then I think, Fucking hell, it’s an earthquake, and I drop my cigarette and run out of my office at roughly the same time that the alarm starts sounding.
When alarms sound I don’t always run immediately. Who does? Usually an alarm is just an empty sign: a drill; a practice. As I’m on my way to the side door out of the building the shaking stops. Shall I go back to my office? But it’s impossible to stay in this building when this alarm goes off. It’s too loud; it wails inside your head. As I leave the building I walk past the Health and Safety notice board, which has pictures of injured people on it. The pictures blur as I go past: A man who has back pain is also having a heart attack, and various hologram people are trying to revive him. I was supposed to go to some Health and Safety training last year, but didn’t.
As I open the side door I can see people leaving the Russell Building and walking, or running, past our block and up the gray concrete steps in the direction of the Newton Building and the library. I cut around the right-hand side of the building and bound up the concrete steps, two at a time. The sky is gray, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it’s been freeze-framed. Sometimes, on these January afternoons, the sun squats low in the sky like an orange-robed Buddha in a documentary about the meaning of life. Today there is no sun. I come to the edge of the large crowd that has formed, and I stop running. Everyone is looking at the same thing, gasping and making firework-display noises.
It’s the Newton Building.
It’s falling down.
I think of this toy—have I seen it on someone’s desk recently?—which is a little horse mounted on a wooden button. When you press the button from underneath, the horse collapses to its knees. That’s what the Newton Building looks like now. It’s sinking into the ground, but in a lopsided way; one corner is now gone, now two, now . . . Now it stops. It creaks, and it stops. A window on the third floor flaps open, and a computer monitor falls out and smashes onto what’s left of the concrete courtyard below. Four men with hard hats and fluorescent jackets slowly approach the broken-up courtyard; then another man comes, says something to them, and they all move away again.
Two men in gray suits are standing next to me.
“Déjà vu,” one of them says to the other.
I look around for someone I know. There’s Mary Robinson, the head of department, talking to Lisa Hobbes. I can’t see many other people from the English Department. But I can see Max Truman standing on his own, smoking a roll-up. He’ll know what’s going on.
“Hello, Ariel,” he mumbles when I walk over and stand next to him.
Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he’s telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you’d have to pay to rig a horse race. Does he like me? I don’t think he trusts me. But why would he? I’m comparatively young, relatively new to the department, and I probably seem ambitious, even though I’m not. I also have long red hair and people say I look intimidating (because of the hair? Something else?). People who don’t say I look intimidating sometimes say I look “dodgy,” or “odd.” One of my ex-housemates said he wouldn’t like to be stuck on a desert island with me but didn’t say why.
“Hi, Max,” I say. Then: “Wow.”
“You probably don’t know about the tunnel, do you?” he says. I shake my head. “There’s a railway tunnel that runs under here,” he says, pointing downwards with his eyes. He sucks on his roll-up, but nothing seems to happen, so he takes it out of his mouth and uses it to point around the campus. “It runs under Russell over there, and Newton, over there. Goes—or used to go—from the town to the coast. It hasn’t been used in a hundred years or so. This is the second time it’s collapsed and taken Newton with it. They were supposed to fill it with concrete after last time,” he adds.
I look at where Max just pointed, and start mentally drawing straight lines connecting Newton with Russell, imagining the tunnel underneath the line. Whichever way you do it, the English and American Studies Building is on the line, too.
“Everyone’s all right, at least,” he says. “Maintenance saw a crack in the wall this morning and evacuated them all.”
Lisa shivers. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she says, looking over at the Newton Building. The gray sky has darkened and the rain is now falling more heavily. The Newton Building looks strange with no lights on: It’s as if it has been stubbed out.
“I can’t either,” I say.
For the next three or four minutes we all stand and stare in silence at the building; then a man with a megaphone comes around and tells us all to go home immediately without going back to our offices. I feel like crying. There’s something so sad about broken concrete.
I don’t know about everyone else, but it’s not that easy for me just to go home. I only have one set of keys to my flat, and that set is in my office, along with my coat, my scarf, my gloves, my hat, and my rucksack. There’s a security guard trying to stop people going in through the main entrance, so I go down the steps and in the side way. My name isn’t on my office door. Instead, it bears only the name of the official occupier of the room: my supervisor, Professor Saul Burlem. I met Burlem twice before I came here: once at a conference in Greenwich, and once at my interview. He disappeared just over a week after I arrived. I remember coming into the office on a Thursday morning and noticing that it was different. The first thing was that the blinds and the curtains were closed: Burlem always closed his blinds at the end of every day, but neither of us ever touched the horrible thin gray curtains. And the room smelled of cigarette smoke. I was expecting him in at about ten o’clock that morning, but he didn’t show up. By the following Monday I asked people where he was and they said they didn’t know. At some point someone arranged for his classes to be covered. I don’t know if there’s departmental gossip about this—no one gossips to me—but everyone seems to assume I’ll just carry on my research and it’s no big deal for me that he isn’t around. Of course, he’s the reason I came to the department at all: He’s the only person in the world who has done serious research on one of my main subjects: the nineteenth-century writer Thomas E. Lumas. Without Burlem, I’m not really sure why I am here. And I do feel something about him being missing; not loss, exactly, but something.
My car is in the Newton car park. When I get there I am not at all surprised to find several men in hard hats telling people to forget about their cars and walk or take the bus home. I do try to argue— I say I’m happy to take the risk that the Newton Building will not suddenly go into a slow-motion cinematic rewind in order that it can fall down again in a completely different direction— but the men pretty much tell me to piss off and walk home or take the bus like everybody else, so I eventually drift off in the direction of the bus stop. It’s only the beginning of January, but some daffodils and snowdrops have made it through the earth and stand wetly in little rows by the path. The bus stop is depressing: There’s a line of people looking as cold and fragile as the line of flowers, so I decide I’ll just walk.
Copyright © 2006 by Scarlett Thomas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online
at www.harcourt.com/ contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; First Edition (October 2, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0156031612
- ISBN-13 : 978-0156031615
- Lexile measure : 810L
- Item Weight : 13.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 1.02 x 5.31 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #621,423 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,681 in Mystery Action & Adventure
- #11,399 in Thriller & Suspense Action Fiction
- #31,220 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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Scarlett Thomas was born in London in 1972. Her other novels include Bright Young Things, Going Out, PopCo and The End of Mr.Y, which was longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 4, 2023
A marvelous meta-romp through philosophy, theology, romance, and the nature of consciousness and language - with a Greek mouse god as well! Ariel, a struggling PhD student who's writing her dissertation on thought experiments in science, finds a mysterious book with a page missing that recounts the author's voyage into the Troposphere, where he can access other peoples' minds. When Ariel finds the recipe to get there (a homeopathic mixture of vegetable charcoal and holy water), she finds that reality is much more peculiar than even she expected - and that some will stop at nothing to own it. Don't be intimidated by my first sentence - Thomas does an amazing job of wrapping Derrida and quantum physics in a thrilling plot and beautifully written dialogue.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 7, 2012
I truly love this book and think others would appreciate, too.
I'm always drawn to stories about parallel dimensions, and for that reason, The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas really caught my attention. Though the book is categorized as mainstream literary, it very much has science fiction and fantasy elements. This mind-meld of physics, metaphysics and literature is one of the few books lately that I've read obsessively to the end.
The voice of the narrator, Ariel Manto, grabbed me right away. She is a thirty-something Ph.D. student with a dysfunctional family background and a penchant for kinky, self-destructive sex. She loves obscure literature and philosophy and is doing graduate work on a little-known author named Thomas E. Lumas. As luck would have it, one rainy day she runs across a book of his, The End of Mr.Y, which is supposedly cursed. Ariel snatches it up using her expense money for the entire month and holes up to read the Victorian-era missive in her seedy cold-water flat. Though she is fearful of the curse that promises death to anyone who reads the book, she very much relishes the danger. Thomas does a wonderful job of letting the quirky and witty Ariel gradually unfold for us as the story progresses.
Ariel has already proven that she has an addictive personality with her chain smoking and sexual compulsions, so, naturally when the book tells her how to enter an alternate dimension called the Troposphere, she jumps at the chance and right away becomes completely addicted to it, much to detriment of her life and physical body.
Through the Troposphere, Ariel is able to enter into the minds of other people and animals. During her first time in that parallel universe, she enters into the mind of a mouse that is caught in a trap beneath her kitchen sink. She gets in touch with its anguish and suffering and on her return to her normal dimension, immediately finds it under her sink and releases it into the wild. After that, she has quite a bit of empathy for the suffering of animals, which figures into the resolution of the plot later on.
Complications arise when she begins to be followed by a couple of CIA agents who intend to use the Troposphere for their own evil purposes, which will end up with the enslavement of mankind. Since Ariel knows about it, she's a dead duck. Her love interest, a celibate ex-priest, who is the opposite of what you'd expect for the kinky Ariel, helps her out in her endeavors. The odd ending is anything but predictable.
I found Ariel's theories about the origin and workings of the Troposphere fascinating, but I'm kind of an alternate-reality geek, so others might find it a bit tedious. In this book, the alternate reality functions very much like a video-game with a console that comes up at crucial decision times, but one could surmise that the alternate reality somehow speaks to each person in a way he/she can personally understand.
Thomas has a wonderful way with language. Some of my favorite quotes from the book are: "... the sky is the color of sad weddings." And as a book lover I could relate to this quote: "Real life is regularly running out of money, and then food. Real life is having no proper heating. Real life is physical. Give me books instead: Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book; I'd give anything for that."
The End of Mr. Y is truly imaginative and weaves interesting theory in with the narrative. This is a smart book that completely engages the emotions, senses and intellect. It is definitely one of my favorite books of the past few years.
I'm always drawn to stories about parallel dimensions, and for that reason, The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas really caught my attention. Though the book is categorized as mainstream literary, it very much has science fiction and fantasy elements. This mind-meld of physics, metaphysics and literature is one of the few books lately that I've read obsessively to the end.
The voice of the narrator, Ariel Manto, grabbed me right away. She is a thirty-something Ph.D. student with a dysfunctional family background and a penchant for kinky, self-destructive sex. She loves obscure literature and philosophy and is doing graduate work on a little-known author named Thomas E. Lumas. As luck would have it, one rainy day she runs across a book of his, The End of Mr.Y, which is supposedly cursed. Ariel snatches it up using her expense money for the entire month and holes up to read the Victorian-era missive in her seedy cold-water flat. Though she is fearful of the curse that promises death to anyone who reads the book, she very much relishes the danger. Thomas does a wonderful job of letting the quirky and witty Ariel gradually unfold for us as the story progresses.
Ariel has already proven that she has an addictive personality with her chain smoking and sexual compulsions, so, naturally when the book tells her how to enter an alternate dimension called the Troposphere, she jumps at the chance and right away becomes completely addicted to it, much to detriment of her life and physical body.
Through the Troposphere, Ariel is able to enter into the minds of other people and animals. During her first time in that parallel universe, she enters into the mind of a mouse that is caught in a trap beneath her kitchen sink. She gets in touch with its anguish and suffering and on her return to her normal dimension, immediately finds it under her sink and releases it into the wild. After that, she has quite a bit of empathy for the suffering of animals, which figures into the resolution of the plot later on.
Complications arise when she begins to be followed by a couple of CIA agents who intend to use the Troposphere for their own evil purposes, which will end up with the enslavement of mankind. Since Ariel knows about it, she's a dead duck. Her love interest, a celibate ex-priest, who is the opposite of what you'd expect for the kinky Ariel, helps her out in her endeavors. The odd ending is anything but predictable.
I found Ariel's theories about the origin and workings of the Troposphere fascinating, but I'm kind of an alternate-reality geek, so others might find it a bit tedious. In this book, the alternate reality functions very much like a video-game with a console that comes up at crucial decision times, but one could surmise that the alternate reality somehow speaks to each person in a way he/she can personally understand.
Thomas has a wonderful way with language. Some of my favorite quotes from the book are: "... the sky is the color of sad weddings." And as a book lover I could relate to this quote: "Real life is regularly running out of money, and then food. Real life is having no proper heating. Real life is physical. Give me books instead: Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book; I'd give anything for that."
The End of Mr. Y is truly imaginative and weaves interesting theory in with the narrative. This is a smart book that completely engages the emotions, senses and intellect. It is definitely one of my favorite books of the past few years.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 3, 2015
I found this novel in parts fascinating, in parts infuriating.
First, the good. An interesting concept (a potion that allows the drinker to inhabit another person's body, and experience their thoughts and emotions) that sometimes was delivered extremely well. The description of Ariel's neighbor's thoughts and emotions was one of the strongest parts of the book. Thomas gives Axel, the neighbor, and most of the characters in her book distinct and well-developed, each with his/her own voice. Her "novel-within-a-novel" is also well done, capturing well the distinctive, older, style of writing she proposed for that book. Finally, Thomas has a full box of metafictional tricks, and she deploys these with skill throughout. The meta-references, and meta-meta-references were fun, to me.
The bad. The narrator, Ariel, is a bit too unsympathetic, though obviously that is a matter of taste for the reader. But I found myself not really caring about what happened to her, or her adventures. The plot is creaky. It seemed to me that Thomas realized that the very slight plot of the novel-within-the-novel wouldn't support the larger novel she planned around it, and so she had to come up with something more dramatic and involved (or maybe her editor told her that she needed a more engaging plot). But what she has come up with is melodramatic and convoluted. The novel also includes lots of devices that are there only because the novel wouldn't work without them (such as Ariel calling up "console" when she wants to go into a different mind), but that otherwise make no sense within the story she's created. Finally, Ariel becomes obsessed (as Mr. Y did) with re-entering the Troposphere, as Thomas names the mystical place where the potion takes its users. But she really fails to communicate why anyone would be so obsessed with the place, or what makes it so attractive. As Ariel's desire to go back to the Troposphere is a main plot driver, the failure to make a convincing case as to why anyone would want to go there is a major weakness of the book. I have to say that I also found the grimy sex scenes a bit gratuitous, but that is again a matter of taste.
The ugly. The dialogue. Oh Lord, the dialogue. It's atrocious. Pages and pages are spent on conversations, primarily between Ariel and Adam, her "love interest", about scientific and philosophical matters. It's the worst sort of first-year-university-student-drunk-on-too-much-booze b.s., with the most superficial (and often inaccurate) condensation of already almost-unintelligible Continental philosophy (Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, etc.) you can possible imagine. Half-way through, I just started skipping over these conversations. They add nothing to the plot. I don't know whether Thomas herself believes that she's properly elucidating these philosophies, or whether it's just the characters, but either way it's just embarrassing and cringe-inducing. Thomas constantly has Ariel say or think things such as "... which made me think of Derrida" or "... which leads me back to Heidegger's theory", followed by amateurish, wildly incorrect summations of the relevant philosopher's ideas. And she has a very annoying tendency to refer to ideas, theories, arguments as "stuff". I counted four uses of the word "stuff" on just one page -- there are literally dozens and dozens throughout the book. Really lazy writing that a good editor should have caught and corrected.
This book would have worked much better as a novella (of the length that the work-within-the-work, "The End of Mr. Y", seems to be), without all the pseudo-philosophical "stuff". As written, it's over-stuffed with needless description and execrable dialogue, which threaten to overwhelm the positive qualities. When I finished it, I realized that, in fact, the book is really just a novelistic retelling of "Being John Malkovich" with lots of unnecessary bells and whistles added in. So I went and re-watched "Being John Malkovich". That's what I'd recommend you do too.
First, the good. An interesting concept (a potion that allows the drinker to inhabit another person's body, and experience their thoughts and emotions) that sometimes was delivered extremely well. The description of Ariel's neighbor's thoughts and emotions was one of the strongest parts of the book. Thomas gives Axel, the neighbor, and most of the characters in her book distinct and well-developed, each with his/her own voice. Her "novel-within-a-novel" is also well done, capturing well the distinctive, older, style of writing she proposed for that book. Finally, Thomas has a full box of metafictional tricks, and she deploys these with skill throughout. The meta-references, and meta-meta-references were fun, to me.
The bad. The narrator, Ariel, is a bit too unsympathetic, though obviously that is a matter of taste for the reader. But I found myself not really caring about what happened to her, or her adventures. The plot is creaky. It seemed to me that Thomas realized that the very slight plot of the novel-within-the-novel wouldn't support the larger novel she planned around it, and so she had to come up with something more dramatic and involved (or maybe her editor told her that she needed a more engaging plot). But what she has come up with is melodramatic and convoluted. The novel also includes lots of devices that are there only because the novel wouldn't work without them (such as Ariel calling up "console" when she wants to go into a different mind), but that otherwise make no sense within the story she's created. Finally, Ariel becomes obsessed (as Mr. Y did) with re-entering the Troposphere, as Thomas names the mystical place where the potion takes its users. But she really fails to communicate why anyone would be so obsessed with the place, or what makes it so attractive. As Ariel's desire to go back to the Troposphere is a main plot driver, the failure to make a convincing case as to why anyone would want to go there is a major weakness of the book. I have to say that I also found the grimy sex scenes a bit gratuitous, but that is again a matter of taste.
The ugly. The dialogue. Oh Lord, the dialogue. It's atrocious. Pages and pages are spent on conversations, primarily between Ariel and Adam, her "love interest", about scientific and philosophical matters. It's the worst sort of first-year-university-student-drunk-on-too-much-booze b.s., with the most superficial (and often inaccurate) condensation of already almost-unintelligible Continental philosophy (Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, etc.) you can possible imagine. Half-way through, I just started skipping over these conversations. They add nothing to the plot. I don't know whether Thomas herself believes that she's properly elucidating these philosophies, or whether it's just the characters, but either way it's just embarrassing and cringe-inducing. Thomas constantly has Ariel say or think things such as "... which made me think of Derrida" or "... which leads me back to Heidegger's theory", followed by amateurish, wildly incorrect summations of the relevant philosopher's ideas. And she has a very annoying tendency to refer to ideas, theories, arguments as "stuff". I counted four uses of the word "stuff" on just one page -- there are literally dozens and dozens throughout the book. Really lazy writing that a good editor should have caught and corrected.
This book would have worked much better as a novella (of the length that the work-within-the-work, "The End of Mr. Y", seems to be), without all the pseudo-philosophical "stuff". As written, it's over-stuffed with needless description and execrable dialogue, which threaten to overwhelm the positive qualities. When I finished it, I realized that, in fact, the book is really just a novelistic retelling of "Being John Malkovich" with lots of unnecessary bells and whistles added in. So I went and re-watched "Being John Malkovich". That's what I'd recommend you do too.
Top reviews from other countries
Mrs S J Sansom
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enchanting, a little dark, but utterly addictive!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 20, 2020
I first read The End of Mr Y in 2007, having had it so enthusiastically recommended to me by a Waterstones bookworm that I snapped it up on the spot. And I was SO glad I did; what an original story! If I were to try and describe the vibe of this book - because reading it really does evoke a feeling - then I’d say I felt energised … it’s utterly compelling and intoxicating, to the point where it almost resonates with a potency that’s impossible to ignore. Picking it up again this week I briefly wondered if I wouldn’t feel as strongly about it after all this time … but it was a solid 5 stars then, and it more than upholds that status today.
Ariel Manto is a PhD student with a penchant for ‘thought experiments’, theoretical physics, and Victorian scientists. Her studies have seeded and nurtured an obsession with one eccentric scientist in particular; the enigmatic Thomas Lumas. Having read almost all his published works, just one remains tantalisingly out of reach - The End of Mr Y. This book is shrouded in mystery, with the only known copy said to be held in the vault of a bank … in Germany. Ariel’s PhD supervisor, initially incredibly supportive of her pursuit of Mr Y, has a sudden and inexplicable change of heart … and then even more suddenly, vanishes!
Somewhat dissolute and directionless, Ariel is enjoying a quiet smoke out of her office window one day when the ground quite literally opens up, taking a neighbouring uni building down with it. No, this isn’t the work of the curse, just a disagreement between mother nature and structural engineers … but it’s the event that prompts Ariel to walk home early, passing a second hand bookshop where she stumbles across a box of books bearing an uncanny resemblance to her own studies … and an exceedingly rare copy of Lumas’s The End of Mr Y.
Thomas Lumas’s The End of Mr Y is a book about a respectable businessman who passes the annual Goose Fair on his way home from a meeting. He feels himself drawn in to the fair ‘as if by mesmerism’, deeper and deeper until he happens upon the Spectral Opera. Unable to comprehend what he’s seeing he lingers after the show finishes and follows curiosity’s claw to a moodily-lit ante chamber where he encounters the fairground doctor, a mysterious tincture to drink, and a black dot. Hours later he resurfaces from an inexplicable experience where he was living inside the soul of another man; thinking his thoughts, feeling his emotions, tasting his food, all while remaining lucid and cogent, entirely aware of his own self existing in parallel. The doctor is gone when Mr Y wakes, and so begins a fruitless search for the fair which blossoms into an all-consuming obsession and the decline of his business.
It’s apparent that Thomas Lumas’s book isn’t the work of fiction he asserts it to be, and soon Ariel becomes convinced that the recipe for the tincture was transcribed on the missing page of the book. Without giving too much away, Ariel embarks on an obsessive quest to track down the missing page to recreate this mysterious draught, so she too can travel through the thoughts and memories of others.
The place where this mind-travel takes place was christened the Troposphere by Mr Y in Lumas’s book; it’s a place that’s as hard to grasp as your own dreams, with that sensation of unease and disquiet that linger after the dream has faded. The Troposphere isn’t a cosy dream world - quite the opposite, and it’s made all the more unsafe by the grey-suited, gun-toting American spooks who are hunting Ariel in this world, and the real one.
The End of Mr Y is a marmite book … and I’m a wholehearted lover. It’s an ingenious book of many layers, time zones, and narratives. There are times when the conversations between Ariel and other characters delve really deeply into physics, philosophy, religion and homeopathy. My brain just isn’t wired that way, and I found myself re-reading some parts of it because I wanted to try and understand the many depths and facets of this book. However, the abundance of science in no way affected my enjoyment of the book. Whilst I’m on this point, I want to make mention of the fact that I’ve read several reviews of The End of Mr Y that are quite disparaging of the accuracy of its scientific content … whilst these reviewers are clearly mega-brains, I think they’re missing the point that this is a book to be read for enjoyment; it’s not an academic tome. In fact, I think it’s ironic that a sentence lifted straight from Thomas Lumas’s own original copy of the End of Mr Y makes the purpose of Scarlett Thomas’s book quite clear: ‘It is only as a work of fiction that I wish this book to be considered.’
So, if you’re craving a book that’s going to seize you by the imagination and draw you in to something enchanting and a little dark, The End of Mr Y is your book. Scarlett Thomas has woven a story of so many layers, and you will emerge feeling just a little bit smarter too! It’s fast-paced and addictive, and although you won’t always like the characters, you’ll find its intriguing complexity makes it nigh on impossible to put down … right until you reach the most perfectly symbiotic ending.
Ariel Manto is a PhD student with a penchant for ‘thought experiments’, theoretical physics, and Victorian scientists. Her studies have seeded and nurtured an obsession with one eccentric scientist in particular; the enigmatic Thomas Lumas. Having read almost all his published works, just one remains tantalisingly out of reach - The End of Mr Y. This book is shrouded in mystery, with the only known copy said to be held in the vault of a bank … in Germany. Ariel’s PhD supervisor, initially incredibly supportive of her pursuit of Mr Y, has a sudden and inexplicable change of heart … and then even more suddenly, vanishes!
Somewhat dissolute and directionless, Ariel is enjoying a quiet smoke out of her office window one day when the ground quite literally opens up, taking a neighbouring uni building down with it. No, this isn’t the work of the curse, just a disagreement between mother nature and structural engineers … but it’s the event that prompts Ariel to walk home early, passing a second hand bookshop where she stumbles across a box of books bearing an uncanny resemblance to her own studies … and an exceedingly rare copy of Lumas’s The End of Mr Y.
Thomas Lumas’s The End of Mr Y is a book about a respectable businessman who passes the annual Goose Fair on his way home from a meeting. He feels himself drawn in to the fair ‘as if by mesmerism’, deeper and deeper until he happens upon the Spectral Opera. Unable to comprehend what he’s seeing he lingers after the show finishes and follows curiosity’s claw to a moodily-lit ante chamber where he encounters the fairground doctor, a mysterious tincture to drink, and a black dot. Hours later he resurfaces from an inexplicable experience where he was living inside the soul of another man; thinking his thoughts, feeling his emotions, tasting his food, all while remaining lucid and cogent, entirely aware of his own self existing in parallel. The doctor is gone when Mr Y wakes, and so begins a fruitless search for the fair which blossoms into an all-consuming obsession and the decline of his business.
It’s apparent that Thomas Lumas’s book isn’t the work of fiction he asserts it to be, and soon Ariel becomes convinced that the recipe for the tincture was transcribed on the missing page of the book. Without giving too much away, Ariel embarks on an obsessive quest to track down the missing page to recreate this mysterious draught, so she too can travel through the thoughts and memories of others.
The place where this mind-travel takes place was christened the Troposphere by Mr Y in Lumas’s book; it’s a place that’s as hard to grasp as your own dreams, with that sensation of unease and disquiet that linger after the dream has faded. The Troposphere isn’t a cosy dream world - quite the opposite, and it’s made all the more unsafe by the grey-suited, gun-toting American spooks who are hunting Ariel in this world, and the real one.
The End of Mr Y is a marmite book … and I’m a wholehearted lover. It’s an ingenious book of many layers, time zones, and narratives. There are times when the conversations between Ariel and other characters delve really deeply into physics, philosophy, religion and homeopathy. My brain just isn’t wired that way, and I found myself re-reading some parts of it because I wanted to try and understand the many depths and facets of this book. However, the abundance of science in no way affected my enjoyment of the book. Whilst I’m on this point, I want to make mention of the fact that I’ve read several reviews of The End of Mr Y that are quite disparaging of the accuracy of its scientific content … whilst these reviewers are clearly mega-brains, I think they’re missing the point that this is a book to be read for enjoyment; it’s not an academic tome. In fact, I think it’s ironic that a sentence lifted straight from Thomas Lumas’s own original copy of the End of Mr Y makes the purpose of Scarlett Thomas’s book quite clear: ‘It is only as a work of fiction that I wish this book to be considered.’
So, if you’re craving a book that’s going to seize you by the imagination and draw you in to something enchanting and a little dark, The End of Mr Y is your book. Scarlett Thomas has woven a story of so many layers, and you will emerge feeling just a little bit smarter too! It’s fast-paced and addictive, and although you won’t always like the characters, you’ll find its intriguing complexity makes it nigh on impossible to put down … right until you reach the most perfectly symbiotic ending.
9 people found this helpful
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GemBookEater
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing, dangerous with the promise of secrets to be revealed!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 14, 2015
I remember the first time I saw this book. It was in the library and its red cover and velvet black pages seduced me instantly. I left with it clasped against my breast, my fingers caressing it. I must have looked like the creepy book junkie I am!
But of course you can’t judge a book just by it’s cover (or its velvety black pages!) The story needs to be good too. The End of Mr Y shares the story of Ariel Manto, a PhD student obsessed by the 19th century writer Thomas Lumas. He was the writer of the original ‘The End of Mr. Y’, a book that is now incredibly rare and rumoured to be cursed – everyone who has read it has died soon afterwards.
When Manto finds a second hand copy she is over the moon. It’s not that she’s unaware of the rumours, in fact that danger adds a certain spice to it for her. She’s the kind of woman who has affairs with married men. She is unconcerned with the future, now is everything to her. By the way, this is probably better reserved for over 16 as her affairs are aren’t just left to the readers imagination!
Lumas’ book is all about the “Troposphere” – a place where all consciousness is connected and you can enter other people’s minds and read their thoughts. It includes the recipe for a draft that Mr Y uses to enter the Troposphere. Of course Manto can’t resist recreating the recipe and on drinking it she enters the Troposphere herself.
Thankfully telling you too much about the plot is a naughty thing for a reviewer to do, after all you wouldn’t thank me for spoiling it all! And today I am exceedingly grateful for that! Describing the rest of this story would be very hard, although I really loved it I have to admit I wasn’t really sure what it all meant when I finished it the first time! I’ve read it twice more since then and I think I finally understand it now (just don’t test me on it!)
It’s not a book I’d recommend to everyone, it is rather long and if I’m completely honest it is probably a little too esoteric for some peoples taste. But I do recommend it for those that like a bit of challenge and specifically for people that don’t mind having their world view or spiritual assumptions questioned.
The story itself is brilliant, it’s intriguing and packed full of danger and the promise of secrets being revealed. The authors characterisations are spot on. None of her characters are off the peg, they are all complex and believable, if not always completely loveable.
I returned the book to the library, but I bought my own copy and it is one of the books I will never part with.
NB This review first appeared on The BookEaters Blog - http://www.thebookeaters.co.uk/
But of course you can’t judge a book just by it’s cover (or its velvety black pages!) The story needs to be good too. The End of Mr Y shares the story of Ariel Manto, a PhD student obsessed by the 19th century writer Thomas Lumas. He was the writer of the original ‘The End of Mr. Y’, a book that is now incredibly rare and rumoured to be cursed – everyone who has read it has died soon afterwards.
When Manto finds a second hand copy she is over the moon. It’s not that she’s unaware of the rumours, in fact that danger adds a certain spice to it for her. She’s the kind of woman who has affairs with married men. She is unconcerned with the future, now is everything to her. By the way, this is probably better reserved for over 16 as her affairs are aren’t just left to the readers imagination!
Lumas’ book is all about the “Troposphere” – a place where all consciousness is connected and you can enter other people’s minds and read their thoughts. It includes the recipe for a draft that Mr Y uses to enter the Troposphere. Of course Manto can’t resist recreating the recipe and on drinking it she enters the Troposphere herself.
Thankfully telling you too much about the plot is a naughty thing for a reviewer to do, after all you wouldn’t thank me for spoiling it all! And today I am exceedingly grateful for that! Describing the rest of this story would be very hard, although I really loved it I have to admit I wasn’t really sure what it all meant when I finished it the first time! I’ve read it twice more since then and I think I finally understand it now (just don’t test me on it!)
It’s not a book I’d recommend to everyone, it is rather long and if I’m completely honest it is probably a little too esoteric for some peoples taste. But I do recommend it for those that like a bit of challenge and specifically for people that don’t mind having their world view or spiritual assumptions questioned.
The story itself is brilliant, it’s intriguing and packed full of danger and the promise of secrets being revealed. The authors characterisations are spot on. None of her characters are off the peg, they are all complex and believable, if not always completely loveable.
I returned the book to the library, but I bought my own copy and it is one of the books I will never part with.
NB This review first appeared on The BookEaters Blog - http://www.thebookeaters.co.uk/
11 people found this helpful
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MisterHobgoblin
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ideal holiday reading
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 23, 2017
Scarlett Thomas is a fun writer who often manages to weave maths or science into her work. This is no exception; we have forays into thought experiments and the theory of homeopathy.
The basic idea is that a young PhD student, Ariel Manto, finds a copy of a rare work by the subject of her thesis, Thomas Lumas. Not much is known of the book; only one copy is known to exist, stored in a bank vault in Germany, and there is a rumour that anyone who reads the book will die. Her supervisor has suggested she ignore the text in her doctorate, but the supervisor disappeared about a year ago… The book itself – a 19th century work called The End of Mr Y – finds the eponymous Mr Y visiting a circus sideshow and being intrigued by a clairvoyant.
This all sounds like the plot of a very bad self-published work, just waiting for the zombies to appear. Fortunately they don’t, and Thomas is a skilful enough writer to bring this potential implausibility into something coherent. But instead of zombies, we have a chase across international borders by some very dodgy American spooks, refuge being sought in monasteries and mind-reading.
At times the text feels over-long and some of the pseudo-science does get a bit hard to follow at times. But this is balanced by a genuinely intriguing plot whose direction is not always as obvious as it seems. There are multiple timelines and backstories all shepherded well and there are moments of sheer inventive brilliance. By the end, it all gets very surreal in a way that some people are not going to like, but I think it worked.
This is a novel that is a lot of fun. It’s ideal holiday reading; enough to think about and the pages keep turning without the need to take notes.
The basic idea is that a young PhD student, Ariel Manto, finds a copy of a rare work by the subject of her thesis, Thomas Lumas. Not much is known of the book; only one copy is known to exist, stored in a bank vault in Germany, and there is a rumour that anyone who reads the book will die. Her supervisor has suggested she ignore the text in her doctorate, but the supervisor disappeared about a year ago… The book itself – a 19th century work called The End of Mr Y – finds the eponymous Mr Y visiting a circus sideshow and being intrigued by a clairvoyant.
This all sounds like the plot of a very bad self-published work, just waiting for the zombies to appear. Fortunately they don’t, and Thomas is a skilful enough writer to bring this potential implausibility into something coherent. But instead of zombies, we have a chase across international borders by some very dodgy American spooks, refuge being sought in monasteries and mind-reading.
At times the text feels over-long and some of the pseudo-science does get a bit hard to follow at times. But this is balanced by a genuinely intriguing plot whose direction is not always as obvious as it seems. There are multiple timelines and backstories all shepherded well and there are moments of sheer inventive brilliance. By the end, it all gets very surreal in a way that some people are not going to like, but I think it worked.
This is a novel that is a lot of fun. It’s ideal holiday reading; enough to think about and the pages keep turning without the need to take notes.
2 people found this helpful
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ceecee
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 22, 2014
I really enjoyed this book it had me hooked from the start with the university building falling into the tunnel underneath! Scarlett Thomas is an excellent and most creative author. The book is well written with some fantastic descriptions, for example when Mr Y enters the troposphere. This first journey is described so eloquently the reader can picture it very clearly. There are also some marvellous moments of black humour, I know I shouldn't have laughed when Wolf returned from his disastrous weekend away at his girlfriend parents house and had run over the dog in the mini tractor (lawn mower) but I'm afraid I did(sorry dog lovers). Some of the ideas are hard to understand especially the science but I went with the flow and just decided to accept it rather than puzzle over it! Similarly the philosophical ideas especially Heidegger who is frequently referred to. However, despite the lack of personal knowledge here, I found the whole concept fascinating and extremely thought provoking so I guess it doesn't matter that you know little about these eminent people or were a duffer at science at school!! I liked the characters especially Ariel who though she is flawed is very honest and brave. Adam was also very interesting character and though we are given some understanding of him towards the end I would have liked to understand him better. The end is fantastic - I won't spoil it for future readers! Would recommend this book because it is so completely different - definitely not run of the mill.
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kindler
4.0 out of 5 stars
Original, quirky, clever
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 18, 2014
This book is hard to describe. Whilst reading it on my Kindle at work, I was asked several times what I was reading, what it was about, and I found it very hard to explain. It's a very original premise and has all the fantastic writing and intelligence we have come to expect from Scarlett Thomas. It's ambitious but it doesn't disappoint. I would place it somewhere between fantasy and sci-fi within the banner of fiction. It's philosophical and yet mundane, includes such literary exercises as writing from the perspective of a male mouse, there's bits of science and religion in there... It's a real mixture. Hard to describe.The one thing I disliked about the book was the preoccupation with homeopathy - it's a personal preference/view but I find all of that to be utter rubbish. I'm okay with it being in there as an interest for one of the characters but there were times when the author/narrator was just going on and on about it and it seemed like she was trying to sell it to you as a concept, and much like religious people knocking on my door, I didn't appreciate that. But I wouldn't let that detract from what is a truly amazing book. Her writing is always good - I have several of her other books and they are so varied and so well-written.
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