I recall reading a review of The End of Mr. Y back in early 2007 and thinking that it sounded like an interesting way to branch out from my usual and perhaps stale stable of fiction books. It took me five years but I have finally read it.
Ariel Manto is a grad student at an anonymous English university and is in a bit of a funk. She lives in a cheap apartment infested by mice, is the mistress of a professor in a mid-life crisis, her thesis advisor, Saul Burlem, has been missing for a year, and, as the book opens, one of the university buildings collapses into a heap of rubble. But, being English, she keeps her chin up and carries on. Her thesis paper is to be about late 19th century to early 20th century thought experiments as she is fascinated by Einstein’s famous one about a train traveling at the speed of light.
Along with her advisor, Ariel has a predilection for the work of a little-known Victorian author named Thomas Lumas who is known not only for stories such as one in which two men are unable to leave a blue room as all doors lead back to it, but also for his novel The End of Mr. Y that has a reputation for being hyper-rare and cursed. Lumas died the day after it hit bookstore shelves and various people involved with its publication also mysterious perished. The tome is so rare that there is apparently only one know copy that is locked in a bank vault somewhere in Germany. Both Burlem and Manto would just love to get their hands on a copy of the book. And they do.
Ariel finds a copy of it in a used bookstore and eagerly devours it. The preface to it reads like an entry in Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis and ends with the admonishment that “it is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered.” The story concerns Mr. Y who is sent on an otherworldly journey by a magician. After the circus with which he is associated leaves town, Mr. Y seeks him out to discover the formula of the potion which allowed him to go on the journey. Unfortunately the page which describes their encounter has been torn out of Ariel’s copy of the book. Upon finding it, she realizes that Burlem was the one who did so.
SPOILERS AHEAD
It turns out that Mr. Y imbibed a homeopathic concoction and Ariel sets out to discover if his eldritch trip was really fiction. It turns out it wasn’t. Instead the liquid endows the drinker with telepathy and allows their mind to travel into those of other beings. At first she ends up sharing grey matter with a mouse followed by a cat. Having sympathy for the mouse, she influences the cat’s thoughts and convinces it to not kill the mouse. This earns her the respect of Apollo Smintheus who is actually the god Apollo appearing to Ariel as a rather large mouse-human hybrid.
This encounter and Apollo’s attempts to explain the nature of the world in which Ariel’s mind/soul finds itself, which Lumas called the Troposphere, put the real book’s philosophical musings into overdrive. (The novel has three parts and Thomas includes epigraphs from the likes of Heidegger, Aristotle, and Poe as introductions.) Ariel is a fan of Jacques Derrida so his post-structuralism figures into things. I am not familiar with his work so I was stuck with Thomas’ comments on the matter via Ariel but I can say that most of it had to do with language creating reality. Can something exist if we have no way of expressing it?, for example.
The Troposphere is a collective mind. Not only can a person’s mind travel there and enter other those of other beings, but it can also travel enter the minds of others far away in both time and space. Einstein gets pulled in here with his famous dictum that matter is energy and in the form of relativity as time and distance play out differently than back in the corporeal world. And of course quantum physics gets pulled into the morass of ideas as well.
I found myself very engaged through the first part of the story when everything was mysterious. Even as answers started to be revealed I was still engaged. But as the book wore on, I found myself tired of all the post-modern mumbo jumbo. Thomas has constructed an incredibly fun vehicle for some philosophical musings but some of the conversations the characters have about language creating reality/thought manipulating matter just felt contrived; more like the ramblings of stoned college freshman than a good post-modernism for dummies lecture. In addition, having homeopathy work and dragging in quantum physics just reeked of Deepak Chopra stupidity to me. One character is even writing a book called Post-Structuralist Physics and she admits to not knowing much about physics. And that about sums up the attempt here to link science and philosophy.
While I love stories about missing books and enjoyed the meta aspect here with a novel that is a thought experiment having a protagonist that is interested in thought experiments, the attempt to justify metaphysical ideas with physics really turned me off. Admittedly, I finished the book wanting to know more about Derrida and post-modernism, too much of the thought experiment here came across as What the Bleep Do We Know!? New Age bullshit.
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