The End of Mr Y
Oct. 24th, 2008 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI picked "The End of Mr Y" up on chance in Borders to fulfil a three-for-two offer[*]. It was uniquely designed, with red page-edges, and obviously designed to look like another, more mainstream, Jonathan Strange. Well, it worked :)
The book comes in roughly three different phases. Firstly, the parts in the real world are pretty good: Ariel Manto is an arts graduate, not sure what she's doing in the world or how much to value herself (reminding me a little of intelligent non-maths/science people who fell in amongst maths/computer geeks, and are very intelligent and knowledgeable, but not sure what career to parlay that into). She's living penny-to-penny eking out a living writing some series of articles for magazines on popular history/science/etc, when she meets an academic, and is persuaded to write a PhD (with unfortunately little more financial support, in the end). She's had affairs with people, but not really comfortable with men her own age, and not something she really wants to think about.
Secondly, she and her supervisor both have a connection to an obscure 19th century author, Lumas; one of his books is particularly obscure, that he is most well known for, semi-autobiographical, and reputed to be have an obscure curse. The 19th century style of gentleman academic magic, not sure if it's there or not, recounted from the book, works very well.
Both of those sections are very pleasing. Unfortunately, they seem to draw you enticingly on and then not really go anywhere.
Unfortunately, the present-day mysticism becomes a bit tawdry and over-pedantically described. Some of it is very good, exciting and creepy, when someone is in someone else's head, and planning things, or besieged in a church, or trapped in the body of a mouse in a trap, or cascading endlessly through bodies. Alas, when we start to get into the "rules" of the place, it all seems a bit arbitrary and pointless.
So, I'd be curious to know what other people think, it's a good book to read once, but I probably won't go back to.
Footnotes
[*] Whether that makes sense or not. You probably want (i) to buy at least one book and (ii) to minimize the total cost. Assume all the books are approximately equal in price $X, and on amazon at about 3/4 of that. Then you are constrained to buy one book at £X, and can choose to buy two more books for £X more, or buy them later on amazon for 2 * 3/4 * £X = £X.5[†][‡]. So you should buy them now if you're at least 2/3 certain (on average) to want them. But I feel there's some hidden advantage to buying some books on spec, so occasionally do buy books from traditional bookshops, and use three-for-two as an excuse, when I know I really wouldn't buy those books if I went online later.
[†] You know what I mean. X and a half. (A half of X, not of one.) Isn't it odd that that makes sense to me? Presumably it's a combination of (i) being verbalised similarly and (ii) thinking of X as a unit -- a person and a half means half a person, not half of some other unit.
[‡] I used symbols rather than ordinals for footnotes in the hope that it would be less confusing in the midst of a numeric expression.
The book comes in roughly three different phases. Firstly, the parts in the real world are pretty good: Ariel Manto is an arts graduate, not sure what she's doing in the world or how much to value herself (reminding me a little of intelligent non-maths/science people who fell in amongst maths/computer geeks, and are very intelligent and knowledgeable, but not sure what career to parlay that into). She's living penny-to-penny eking out a living writing some series of articles for magazines on popular history/science/etc, when she meets an academic, and is persuaded to write a PhD (with unfortunately little more financial support, in the end). She's had affairs with people, but not really comfortable with men her own age, and not something she really wants to think about.
Secondly, she and her supervisor both have a connection to an obscure 19th century author, Lumas; one of his books is particularly obscure, that he is most well known for, semi-autobiographical, and reputed to be have an obscure curse. The 19th century style of gentleman academic magic, not sure if it's there or not, recounted from the book, works very well.
Both of those sections are very pleasing. Unfortunately, they seem to draw you enticingly on and then not really go anywhere.
Unfortunately, the present-day mysticism becomes a bit tawdry and over-pedantically described. Some of it is very good, exciting and creepy, when someone is in someone else's head, and planning things, or besieged in a church, or trapped in the body of a mouse in a trap, or cascading endlessly through bodies. Alas, when we start to get into the "rules" of the place, it all seems a bit arbitrary and pointless.
So, I'd be curious to know what other people think, it's a good book to read once, but I probably won't go back to.
Footnotes
[*] Whether that makes sense or not. You probably want (i) to buy at least one book and (ii) to minimize the total cost. Assume all the books are approximately equal in price $X, and on amazon at about 3/4 of that. Then you are constrained to buy one book at £X, and can choose to buy two more books for £X more, or buy them later on amazon for 2 * 3/4 * £X = £X.5[†][‡]. So you should buy them now if you're at least 2/3 certain (on average) to want them. But I feel there's some hidden advantage to buying some books on spec, so occasionally do buy books from traditional bookshops, and use three-for-two as an excuse, when I know I really wouldn't buy those books if I went online later.
[†] You know what I mean. X and a half. (A half of X, not of one.) Isn't it odd that that makes sense to me? Presumably it's a combination of (i) being verbalised similarly and (ii) thinking of X as a unit -- a person and a half means half a person, not half of some other unit.
[‡] I used symbols rather than ordinals for footnotes in the hope that it would be less confusing in the midst of a numeric expression.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-24 08:50 pm (UTC)Her previous novel, PopCo, is also pretty good - more cryptographical than homeopathic, which is a good thing, I think. She treads a fine line between trying to teach the reader about something she's interested in, and shoving it down your throat, in the same way as Neal Stephenson does.
The other parallel which keeps springing to mind is Sophie's World, which I read and hated, primarily because it was "philosophy for dummies" with a bit of story wrapped around it (and, had I realized, I wouldn't have read it in the first place), but Scarlett Thomas is way off from that.