The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas

The End of Mr. Y begins with a very vivid and accurate depiction of a poor graduate student. Ariel Manto is obsessed with many things, including theoretical physics and obscure writers. At a conference she meets a professor who shares her fixation on the author Lumas and decides to undertake graduate studies with him. At the start of this book Burlem, the professor, has been gone for months; he’s vanished. By a series of unexpected happenings, including a building collapsing into a tunnel, Ariel stumbles upon the last book by Lumas, which has the same title: The End of Mr. Y. The book is very rare with only one known copy. It is also rumored to be cursed.

Following the book’s instructions Ariel ventures into homeopathic remedies that lead her into the troposphere. The troposphere is Lumas’s term for the world of the mind. It is possible to move from mind to mind in this space. The book becomes a thriller with former agents from America trying to retrieve the book so they can make more of the remedy to enter the troposphere. The agents are after Ariel physically and in her mind. They employ KIDS to try and hurt her mind. She is saved by a mouse god named Apollo Smintheus. Ariel is helped in her endeavors to escape the agents by Adam, a former priest.

This book has some really great descriptive writing in it. The intertwining descriptions of quantum theory and religion are interesting to read, especially the multi verse versus the godverse theory. This is rare to find in a novel. I personally found the story much more interesting when it stayed in the physical world than in the troposphere. Ariel’s interactions with her lover, Patrick, are complex and seem to not correlate with the actions of an intelligent person. She keeps referring to what’s happening as only happening to her body so it doesn’t really matter. She would prefer to live a life in books, “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 the book; I’d give anything for that.” (pg 117)

I’d highly recommend reading this book if you’re interested in science or religion or simply in how other people’s minds might work. As I mentioned earlier, I was not thrilled with the troposphere part of the book. I also was disturbed at the idea of the KIDS being autistic kids who were sent out to perform missions. However, the descriptions in some parts were intensely real with Ariel being able to feel the pain of the mind she was inhabiting. Here she is in her housemate’s mind, “I was facing the door; I’d placed myself there like a little welcome mat ( ) waiting for him to wipe his feet on me. So he sat there sipping his coffee, looking beyond me to the wall, covered in postcards from Paris, and I just watched people leave like bacteria looking for a new host to infect.” (pg 176)

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Imagine a world where crazed fans battle over whether Shakespeare really wrote those plays or where the removal of a minor character from a classic book is a national crisis. Thursday Next is a Literary Tech in England in 1985 and her job is to protect books. She faces some complex personal issues such as whether she should forgive the man she loves, Landen Parke-Laine, for telling the truth about her brother during the war. This is the ongoing war, in its 131st year, between England and Russia over the Crimean Peninsula. She faces some incredible issues in hunting down Acheron Hades and battling the Goliath Corporation. Here she has told Landen that she is too busy to go out with him.
“I could see he didn’t believe me. I couldn’t really tell him I was on the trail of a master criminal who could steal thoughts and project images at will; who was invisible on film and could murder and laugh as he did so.” (pg 118)

This book is a crazy mix of fiction, science fiction, action thriller, and a whole new genre where books are at the center of life. The science fiction part is well done and interesting. For example, Thursday’s uncle invents a car that can change color and even become invisible using liquid crystal technology. This is just one of many of his inventions and another, the Prose Portal, becomes important to Acheron as well as the Goliath Corporation, and potentially devastating to literature everywhere. The Eyre mentioned in the title refers to the book Jane Eyre. The characters in Jane Eyre become endangered characters in this book.

This is the first in a series of books with Thursday Next as the protagonist. I enjoyed reading this book with its many convolutions and look forward to the second in the series, Lost in a Good Book. I wonder if the author can continue to invent such outrageous scenarios. I did think that some of the characters in this book spoke in clichés, especially Acheron, and whether this was on purpose by the author or not, it did not help develop them as characters. The action also slowed down dramatically at the end of the book.