A Flavour of the Book: “Now Apollo Smintheus loads up another arrow and fires it again at the man in grey. It sticks in his neck, but no blood spurts as the man stumbles, sees what’s happened, and then takes hold of the arrow with both his hands and pulls it out, leaving a gaping hole with skin-flaps, like some piece of gross-out porn from the Internet…”
The Authortrek View: Just after the Newton building on her university campus has aptly succumbed to gravity, PhD student Ariel Manto finds a copy of the mysterious book The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookshop. She can’t believe her luck, as the book is extremely rare, probably due to the fact that it is renowned to be cursed, as everyone who’s ever read it has disappeared soon afterwards, including its own author, Thomas E. Lumas. It doesn’t take long for Scarlett to read the novel, as it’s quite short, and besides, there’s a page missing… The collapse of the Newton building now means that she has to share her office space with two homeless academics: Heather, who’s running a project called LUCA, to find the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and a theologian called Adam. There’s plenty of room in the office, as its previous occupant, Saul Burlem (Ariel’s mentor and Thomas E. Lumas expert), has disappeared… Ariel very much likes Adam, and feels as though she has known him for years, but she is currently embroiled in a rather seedy affair with another academic. Ariel’s life is hardly paradise, as she struggles to survive in near poverty, but things are made worse by the arrival of men with guns who’ll do anything to get the book, and by Ariel’s descent into the mysterious troposphere…
The End of Mr. Y is a stunning novel, which asks the big questions about how our world came into being, and perhaps provides some of the answers. Scarlett Thomas thrillingly dips into chaos theory, linguistics, deconstruction, and the ideas of Derrida, Einstein and Samuel Butler and a whole lot more. Readers unfamiliar with such concepts need not worry, as the narrator of the novel, Ariel, is very talented at simplifying them. However, at the end of the novel, my head was hurting, but in a good way, since Scarlett Thomas has packed more stimulation into the novel you’d get from than a dozen cans of Red Bull. The plot is also as thrilling as the ideas, which means that you will find it very difficult to stop reading this book. I did worry a bit that the troposphere was a bit too Matrixy, but this is very much the MindSpace that a modern person, such as Ariel, would create. Scarlett Thomas is also perhaps too accurate in her realisation of a piece of late Victorian fiction, as the passages from Lumas’s book, The End of Mr. Y, are a little too dry and formal. However, these are minor quibbles in the face of Scarlett Thomas’s quite considerable achievement. Scarlett Thomas’s characters are fantastic, especially the splendid Apollo Smintheus, the eight-foot-tall god of mice that comes to Ariel’s aid and sends her on rather a strange mission to thwart the work of Abbie Lathrop. Reading back over the novel, I have also noticed some delightful wry humour throughout. Canongate are to be congratulated for the brilliant presentation of the first UK edition: the blackened pages and the aged look of the book make it appear to be the epitome of a Victorian volume that could be found in many a second-hand bookshop. The last Canongate novel that I enjoyed this much was Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, but I have to say that Scarlett Thomas’s novel is even better. The End of Mr. Y is also a vintage that is comparable to A. S. Byatt’s Possession, and if there’s any justice in this world, then Scarlett Thomas’s novel should be a runner for the Man Booker Prize. After all, the novel could just be about The End of Mystery itself…
Press Reviews: “Ingenious and original… A cracking good yarn fizzing with intelligence” – Philip Pullman
“The End of Mr. Y is a masterpiece… A brilliant, engaging story that in the end makes you rethink the nature of existence and the true structure of the world” – Douglas Coupland
“One of the most exciting
novels I have read in recent years” – Jonathan Coe
“Smart, stylish and dizzying…
with a breakneck thriller of a plot” – New York Times Book Review
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