The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
One of the great things about Goodreads is the variety of opinions given about a book. I didn’t care much for The End of Mr. Y, and there are plenty of reviews that say what I want to say; but there are also plenty of folks who liked the book just fine. On the one hand, this is not very helpful, in that you might not know whether to read the book or not. On the other, it’s great because the onus is no longer on the reviewer to recommend as much as to share an experience. That’s what I want to do. I want to tell you why I didn’t like the book, even though I might not be able to tell you it wasn’t any good.
The first half of the novel is just a mystery about the discovery and provenance of a strange book, and satisfies in that sense. The small college town in a cold England winter is atmospheric, edging on haunting. Her main character, Ariel, is interesting enough, though secondary characters are sort of glossed over, sounding boards for Ariel to bounces theories against.
But then it goes all “fantasy” in the second half, which I didn’t expect, and since I didn’t know I was supposed to ramp up my willing suspension of disbelief, I found myself scowling much of the time. Maybe that’s my fault. But fantasy requires a very rigid consistency, lest we feel the writer is just, literally, creating conflict (and resolution) out of nothing. Lost, utterly, was all that atmosphere. There’s plenty of mystery, but it’s of the “wtf” variety, with no hope of explanation or justification.
Scarlett Thomas takes the “what if” of post-structural linguistics and applies it to the “what if” of quantum mechanics. That’s fine, and for an idle browser of both subjects such as myself, her exploration has potential. But it’s a potential ramrodded in the last eight of the book into a conclusion that’s a little too inevitable—instead of opening up a world of possibility, paradoxes of time travel are used to justify a lack of free will, a numbing experience for the reader, peppered with, in my opinion, ridiculous sex scenes.
Honestly, it was the sex scenes throughout that really bored me. I just don’t see how they were required—one character is nothing more than an ATM for cash and shame, except the shame is utterly unconvincing, doesn’t develop Ariel’s character all, and has no impact on the plot whatsoever.
I’m giving this two stars, begrudgingly. At least Thomas knows how to handle a sentence, and like I said, there was all of that wonderful atmosphere in the first half of the book. And it did remind me that I want to go read up on Baudrillard, not to mention my having read The End of Mr. Y right around the time the CERN folks were revealing their evidence for the existence of the Higgs Boson.