The End of Mr Y ? Scarlett Thomas
The End of Mr Y
Read our interview with Scarlett Thomas
The End of Mr Y would feel like a crash course on philosophy, linguistics and quantum physics were it not so much darn fun. PhD student Ariel Manto (interests and activities: philosopy, self-loathing, older men) stumbles across a cursed book and cannot resist reading it.
The book contains a recipe for getting into the “Troposphere” – a strange world in which you can jump into people’s minds and where every object is a metaphor for something else.
But there are others that want the recipe – and they also want Ariel dead. Soon she is running for her life, hopping around space-time with the help of a mouse-god called Apollo Smintheus, and working out a new theory of the universe along the way.
It is an assured work for a writer in her mid-thirties and, on the whole, the theory and the action interlock satisfyingly. There are moments when Thomas is forced to put long speeches into the mouths of her characters to get across background information and you have to slow down and focus.
But that is hardly a fatal flaw in a book so full of ideas and which still has time for romance, thrills, glimmers of dark humour, and a heroine you can believe in.
Canongate, £12.99
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