The End of Mr. Y
Scarlett Thomas, 2006
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780156031615
Summary
A cursed book. A missing professor. Some nefarious men in gray suits. And a dreamworld called the Troposphere?
Ariel Manto has a fascination with nineteenth-century scientists—especially Thomas Lumas and The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read. When she mysteriously uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel is launched into an adventure of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between.
Seeking answers, Ariel follows in Mr. Y’s footsteps: She swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and is transported into the Troposphere—a wonderland where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. There she begins to understand all the mysteries surrounding the book, herself, and the universe. Or is it all just a hallucination?
With The End of Mr. Y, Scarlett Thomas brings us another fast-paced mix of popular culture, love, mystery, and irresistible philosophical adventure. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—Hammersmith, England, UK
• Education—Chelmsford College; University of East London
• Awards—Elle Style Award-Best Young Writer;
• Currently—teachers at University of Kent
Scarlett Thomas is an English author, who has written some 10+ novels, including PopCo (2005), The End of Mr. Y (2006), and Our Tragic Universe (2011), and Oligarchy (2019). She teaches English literature at the University of Kent.
She is the daughter of Francesca Ashurst, and attended a variety of schools, including a state junior school in Barking, and a boarding school for eighteen months. She studied for her A levels at Chelmsford College and achieved a First in a degree in Cultural Studies at the University of East London from 1992-1995.
Her first three novels feature Lily Pascale, an English literature lecturer who solves murder mysteries. Each of the succeeding novels is independent of the others.
In 2008 she was a member of the Edinburgh International Film Festival jury, along with Director Iain Softley and presided over by actor Danny Huston.
She has taught English Literature at the University of Kent since 2004, and has previously taught at Dartmouth Community College, South East Essex College and the University of East London. She reviews books for the Literary Review, Independent on Sunday, and Scotland on Sunday.
Thomas shares with Ariel, her protagonist in The End of Mr. Y, a wish to know everything:
I'm very much someone who wants to work out the answers. I want to know what's outside the universe, what's at the end of time, and is there a God? But I think fiction's great for that--it's very close to philosophy.
She is currently studying for an MSc in Ethnobotany, and working on her ninth novel, The Seed Collectors.
In 2001 she was named by the Independent as one of 20 Best Young Writers.
In 2002 she won Best New Writer in the Elle Style Awards, and also featured as an author in New Puritans, a project led by the novelists Matt Thorne and Nicholas Blincoeconsisting of both a manifesto and an anthology of short stories. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
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.... 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.
Ursula Le Guin - Guardian (UK)
Thomas writes with marvelous panache, although I wish she indulged less in her earnest calls for homeopathy and animal rights. Amid all the novel s engaging questions about the nature of reality, it s hard to get worked up about a subplot that has Ariel traveling through time to save laboratory mice. Still, she spins Derrida and subatomic theory into a wholly enchanting alternate universe that should appeal to a wide popular audience, and that s something no deconstructionist or physicist has managed to do. Consider The End of Mr. Y an accomplished, impressive thought experiment for the 21st century.
Gregory Cowles - New York Times Book Review
You might say that Thomas has redefined activism for the Digital Age. Inspired by a venerable tradition, she achieves here a scope and a passion to match the intelligence and empathy her fiction has always had.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
In Thomas's dense, freewheeling novel, Ariel Manto, an oversexed renegade academic, stumbles across a cursed text, which takes her into the Troposphere, a dimension where she can enter the consciousness, undetected, of other beings. Thomas first signals something is askew even in Ariel's everyday life when a university building collapses; soon after, Ariel discovers her intellectual holy grail at a used book shop: a rare book with the same title as the novel, written by an eccentric 19th-century writer interested in "experiments of the mind." The volume jump-starts her doctoral thesis, but her adviser disappears. And when Ariel follows a recipe in the book, she finds herself in deep trouble in the Troposphere. Her young ex-priest love interest may be too late to save her. Thomas blithely references popular physics, Aristotle, Derrida, Samuel Butler and video game shenanigans while yoking a Back to the Future-like conundrum to a gooey love story. The novel's academic banter runs the gamut from intellectually engaging to droning; this journey to the "edge of consciousness" is similarly playful but less accessible than its predecessor, PopCo.
Publishers Weekly
Graduate student Ariel Manto acquires a copy of a cursed book, The End of Mr. Y. According to the curse, whoever reads the book will die. This doesn't stop Ariel from reading it and taking a tincture prescribed in the text, which transports her to a parallel, multidimensional existence called the Troposphere. Suddenly, Ariel is being pursued by ominous government agents, making friends with the god of mice, falling in love with an office mate, and trying to save the world or at least, the laboratory mice therein. The bare plot outline cannot begin to describe the dizzying inventiveness of Thomas's (PopCo) second novel. It is a combination of postmodern philosophy and physics, spine-tingling science fiction, clever, unexpected narrative twists, and engaging characters all on one wild drug trip. With this book, Thomas, who in 2001 was named by the Independent on Sunday one of Britain's 20 best young writers, has moved into first place. While the science, mathematics, and philosophy may challenge readers, this novel is highly recommended for all fiction collections. —Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park
Library Journal
British author Thomas bites off a bit more than she can chew in this novel incorporating time travel, Derrida, and the dangers of sadistic trysts.... Like her previous novel, PopCo (2005), Thomas' mildly amusing second offering aspires to be both wonky and hip: her protagonist obsesses over philosophical matters one moment, her lamentable love life the next. Chick lit for nerds. —Allison Block
Booklist
The curiosity of a young academic triggers a journey of wonder and danger. Ariel Manto, a Ph.D. candidate at a British university, gets an unexpected day off when old tunnels in the campus building adjoining hers threaten to collapse. On the way home, she stumbles onto a much bigger stroke of luck. At a modest bookshop, she comes across a copy of Thomas Lumas's seminal work, The End of Mr. Y, a mysterious novel often cited but thought to be no longer extant. Serendipitously, Ariel is studying Lumas. Lured to the university by Professor Saul Burlem, Ariel has been writing extensively about science, but from a literary perspective. This makes Lumas—a scientific theorist who wrote books in many genres—an ideal candidate for her research. Shortly after April moved into Burlem's capacious office, Burlem vanished, presumably on a research project. Ariel begins to devour Lumas's masterpiece, chunks of which alternate with the main narrative. Mr. Y describes a sort of time travel, into what Lumas calls the Troposphere. Unfortunately, the crucial page that explains how the hero achieves the time-travel trick is missing. Acting on a hunch, Ariel downloads all the information on Burlem's computer, and just in time. Department secretary Yvonne is about to have all Burlem's belongings put into storage to make room for two new occupants, the overfriendly Heather and the highly attractive Adam, with whom Ariel feels an immediate attraction. They seem headed for an affair until Adam informs her that he's a clergyman. Burlem's computer contains the missing page, which had a formula, the ingredients for which Ariel acquires at a local herbalist. Almost before she knows it, she's transported to Lumas's alternate reality, gets chased by CIA-like agents back in her "real" world and indeed drifts toward romance with dreamy Adam. Delicious cross-genre literary picnic, breezy and fiercely intelligent, reminiscent of Haruki Murakami.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The End of Mr. Y:
1. Is Ariel a winning narrator? Why or why not? Would you describe her voice as sassy...or whiney? How would you describe her as a character? In what way is she an addictive personality (as she describes herself)?
2. Ariel says, "Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book...." Why is the book world more attractive to Ariel than the physical world? Do you ever feel that way? Is that why we read...why you read?
3. What exactly is the Troposphere? Is it an alluring place...or not? A reviewer from the Telegraph (UK) likened it to surfing the web. Good analogy? How is the Troposhpere a metaphor for literature?
4. Is the Troposphere "real"? How does Scarlett Thomas use Derrida's and Heidegger's ideas for her Troposphere? (In other words, how is the Troposhpere a manifestsation of the philosophical ideas of phenomenology?)
5. Is the "real" world real? Based on the theroy of quantum physicals—with its mysterious quarks and charms—how "real" is our 3-dimenionsal physical realm?
6. Does something have to be thought of in order to be real? For example: did Einstein create relativity by thinking it into existence? How does Thomas apply Einstein's theories to conjure up her fictional world?
7. What about the weighty intellectualism of Derrida, Heidegger, or Einstein? Do they get in the way of the plot? Do Ariel's digressions into homeopathy interest you?
8. Ariel must accomplish two tasks: halt the breeding of a line of laboratory mice and stop the writing of Mr. Y. How do those tasks represent time and the metaphysical relationship of past, present, and future?
9. Are the passages from the Lumas book of interest...or do they drag the book's pacing down?
10. Consider the name Ariel.
- Ariel possesses special powers within the Troposphere. How does that suggest the symbolism of her first name?
- Ariel Manto" is an anagram of "I am not real." What's the joke? How is this a philosophical comment on the book...its very existence, its ideas, your reading it, your talking about it?
11. Is Apollo Smitheus a more appealing hero than Adam? To what does the Mouse God owe his existence...and what does that suggest about the power of thought?
12. What does Adam's role as an ex-priest suggest about religion?
13. Talk about the book's title as a pun, "The End of Mystery." What does the pun mean?
14. How does this book explore the importance in life of literature? Does it provide answers to the questions, why read fiction...what is fiction good for?
15. The joy of books lies in their disconnect from the real world. Certainly, Ariel's intellectual life is separate from her squalid physical life. Even her doctoral supervisor has disappeared from her real life. How does The End of Mr. Y pose a solution to the idea that one's creative / intellectual life is divorced the "real" world?
16. In what way is Ariel's task a classic quest-story?
17. Is the ending satisfying? What questions about the nature of reality are you left with after having read this book?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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