Books This article is more than 16 years oldReviewLost in Mindspace
This article is more than 16 years oldThe out-of-body experiences of Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y most resemble a computer game, says Ursula K Le GuinThe End of Mr Y
by Scarlett Thomas
455pp, Canongate, £12.99
By combining elements of various genres - fantasy, science fiction, cerebro-thriller - and by having no unicorns or spaceships on the cover, The End of Mr Y will probably escape being described as fantasy or science fiction. Genre, in fact, is now pretty much a function of the publisher's presentation or the author's reputation; thus Cormac McCarthy's The Road, though it repeats a story familiar from several science fiction novels and films, is almost universally described as "not sci fi" because the author is a literary figure. I hope Scarlett Thomas and her publisher will not take it amiss if I evaluate her book in terms of genre, as to my mind this is to evaluate it as literature.
It starts off with a classic fantasy trope: the reappearance of the only copy of an obscure Victorian novelist's last book - called of course The End of Mr Y - which appears to have mystical powers, and which indeed has a curse on it: whoever reads it dies (including the author, Lumas). There are some passages of faux-Victorian prose to give us a taste of Lumas's book, and a general sense of the uncanny prevails, though it has to struggle against the voice of the narrator. A graduate student of 30 or so, unloved by her parents and addicted to various self-destructive substances and behaviours, Ariel Manto tells her story in the present tense in a sort of clever whine; the voice expresses a personality, certainly, but not a very winning one. And, however effective it may be in conversation, in written prose the adjective "fucking" never quite replaces other, more exact means of conveying emphasis or emotion.
Though her affective vocabulary is repetitive and her sex life is only too much like it, Ariel is immensely bright, and very much on the cutting edge; she understands Derrida and différance, reads Heidegger and catches on at once to all the philosophy, physics, and metaphysics hurled about her head by the other characters. A lot of talk, brilliant cerebro-thriller talk, whisks us through various theories which may or may not describe and explain the effect of a potion whose recipe is revealed in the mysterious book. For this is its fatal secret: a homeopathic whiff of charcoal in holy water is enough to transport Ariel's mind to another plane of reality, which she calls the Troposphere and which the evil CIA agents who pursue her there call Mindspace. Speculative explanations of the existence and nature of this region bring us into the science fiction mode; and the mixture of intellectual discussion with a thriller plot should please fans of Umberto Eco.
Unfortunately, to my mind, the more times Ariel swallows her holy water and enters the Troposphere and the more deadly become the perils there, the more the place feels like a computer game. While there, she consults a Console which instructs her as to how many choices she has; these choices are not of any ethical or emotional interest, but, as in the usual action game, tend to be in terms of violence escaped or impending. Given Ariel's self-description as an addictive personality, it is not surprising that she gets hooked. But there is a vast gap between even the most interactive computer game and genuine narrative, and this novel dissipates much of its power in that empty space.
The importance of the Troposphere increases until it appears that the agents of evil there may bring about the end of the world as we know it. So Ariel and her true love, the former priest Adam, undertake to save us. The mode of salvation they arrive at is both a surprise and a letdown, rather like the punchline of a shaggy dog story.
What I remember fondly from the book, oddly enough, are the mice. First of all a perfectly charming mouse-god, Apollo Smintheus, kept in virtual existence by the prayers of a small group of young people in Illinois; and then the tormented laboratory mice whose minds Ariel and Adam briefly inhabit on their way back through time to the Victorian age. In this episode, feeling replaces cleverness, and the book escapes from the limitations of brain-games into a quite different Mindspace.
· Ursula K Le Guin's Changing Planes is published by Gollancz
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