The End of Mr. Y

[sawyl]

As a present, one of my thoughtful relatives, with exquisite good taste, bought me a copy of Linda Smith's I Think the Nurses are Stealing my Clothes. Indeed, so discerning was their judgment that they managed to buy me a book I'd already got. Thus armed with a receipt, I took myself off to the bookstore and swapped it for a copy of Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr. Y which I'd wanted to read since it came out in mid-2007. Here are a few musings.

Ariel Manto is studying for a PhD in English Literature. Or rather, she's supposed to be. Her supervisor, Saul Burlem, has disappeared, part of the university has fallen down and she's just spent her last 50 on second hand books. But not any old second hand books. Rather, a box which happens to contain the last existing copy of The End of Mr. Y, a supposedly cursed novel by the Victorian writer Thomas E. Lumas. Clutching her precious books, Ariel returns to her dank flat and decides, curse or no, to read the book.

The book tells the story of a tailor, Mr. Y, who encounters a fairground doctor with a mysterious elixir that makes it possible to enter the minds of others. Waking from his experience and desperate for another hit, Mr. Y finds the doctor gone. After a frantic and protracted search, during which he has neglected his tailoring business, Mr. Y finds the doctor and pays him his last few pounds for the recipe... And here the narrative breaks off because, much to Ariel's frustration, a page has been removed.

Reluctantly returning to the university, Ariel finds herself saddled with a pair of new office mates, refugees from the collapsed Newton Building: an evolutionary biologist called Heather and a theologian called Adam. Preparing for their arrival, she starts to pack some of Burlem's books into crates ready to send them off into storage, only to discover a loose leaf of paper in his copy of Zoonomia. Sure enough, its the missing page from Mr. Y. The one that describes how to prepare the secret elixir that allowed Mr. Y to cross into the troposphere.

Unfortunately, after a couple of jaunts into the minds of others, Ariel finds herself caught up in a complicated plot that involves a couple of sinister Americans, her missing supervisor and the mouse god Apollo Smintheus. Her only hope lies in decyphering the workings of troposphere and using it to track down the missing Professor Burlem.

Although I've given a rough outline of the plot of the first part of Mr. Y, I haven't really done it justice. I haven't really given much of a feel for the way that the plot is revealed, the roles of the twin icons of post-modernism, Derrida and Baudrillard, or some of Ariel's theorising about the nature of the relationship between language and the world, but then I'm not sure that I'd be able to do so, even if I'd wanted to.

All of which suggests a potential problem with the novel — does Thomas manage to get all that philosophy into the book without disrupting the flow of the plot? My conclusion is that she does, but then I'm biased — despite not being a fully paid-up post-modernist, I find the ideas endlessly fascinating — but there are weaknesses, in that it requires Ariel to have a vast and comprehensive body of knowledge at her finger tips, in a way that sometimes prevents her from being a fully convincing protagonist. But perhaps Thomas herself realised this because, on a couple of occasions, Ariel complains that she feels that her life is flat and unconvincing and speculates that the only people who are really alive are characters in novels.

Minor quibbles about the protagonist aside, I found Mr. Y consistently exciting, beguiling, thought-provoking and the most philosophically thrilling novel I've read in a long, long time. My only hesitation in recommending it to everyone is that I realise that I'm a complete ideas junkie and that, while I found it dizzyingly wonderful, others who don't share my addiction to such things might find it to be pretentious and dull. But screw them. What do they know? They might as well be dead...