When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookshop, she can't believe her eyes. She knows enough about its author, the eccentric Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas, to know that copies are exceedingly rare. And, some say, cursed. With Mr. Y under her arm, Ariel finds herself swept into a thrilling adventure of love, sex, death and time-travel.
An adequate adventure with a veneer of something deeper
3 stars
I was intrigued by mentions of Quantum Mechanics and Derrida in reviews of this book. I was disappointed that these ideas are mentioned, but never really used. There's some dialogue that serves no purpose except to demonstrate how widely read the author is. (For example the scene at dinner where Ariel meets Adam at the biologist's house. Almost none of what they talk about really has any bearing on anything).
It's fine as a sort of modern fantasy thriller, but some of what I'd read about it promised something more interesting.
I require a very high bar for spec fic books based predominantly on quantum mechanics, but I think Thomas did a very good job here. She clearly learned her stuff, and uses it sparingly and deeply when used. I'm less a philosophical expert, but it seemed to be handled similarly. All of that being said, while many books use quantum mechanics in service to the plot, Thomas seems to be writing more of a Sophie's World style, where the plot exists to advance her thoughts on quantum mechanics and philosophy.
While this seems to have turned a lot of people off, I found her completely forthright about it: this is a book about a main character who is writing her thesis about novels that are thought experiments. This is a novel that is a thought experiment: let's say we could enter thoughts. If that were possible, what would it mean …
I require a very high bar for spec fic books based predominantly on quantum mechanics, but I think Thomas did a very good job here. She clearly learned her stuff, and uses it sparingly and deeply when used. I'm less a philosophical expert, but it seemed to be handled similarly. All of that being said, while many books use quantum mechanics in service to the plot, Thomas seems to be writing more of a Sophie's World style, where the plot exists to advance her thoughts on quantum mechanics and philosophy.
While this seems to have turned a lot of people off, I found her completely forthright about it: this is a book about a main character who is writing her thesis about novels that are thought experiments. This is a novel that is a thought experiment: let's say we could enter thoughts. If that were possible, what would it mean for how thoughts are made? What would that say about what it means to be conscious? Is what we learned from this thought experiment generalizable even in a universe where thoughts aren't a manifest place that can be visited? Those are fun questions to ask and explore.
When she veers away from that core, the book really falls flat (the love story? The random officemate who was into evo bio and got totally dropped, even though I really wanted her to integrate into the main plot line?), but that's OK, because it's not supposed to be a proper novel. My only real complaint is the ending kind of petered out.
I thought Thomas had interesting thoughts about what it means to think, what defines consciousness and whether emergent consciousness is possible. I was intrigued by the thought process of whether defining phenomena mathematically instantiates them or merely defines them and I think she explores this in a particularly deft and nuanced way.
Post-structuralist physics with a plot, which is how it ought to be since even an equation is really just a love story told by someone with Aspergers. Come to think of it, there are autistic kids, or more accurately, KIDS in the plot and they come to a bad end with the help of the CIA, but if you're worried about spoilers, we could just go back to before that happened, only we'd better do it before the end of The End of Mr. Y.
Personally, I'm post-Post-structualism, but I still enjoy a romp through the existential questions that need to be resolved before the end of the story which luckily is not the end of our personal story. Like the main character, I too want to know everything but unlike a fictional character, I don't get to find out. Books are subject to intelligent design and its characters are …
Post-structuralist physics with a plot, which is how it ought to be since even an equation is really just a love story told by someone with Aspergers. Come to think of it, there are autistic kids, or more accurately, KIDS in the plot and they come to a bad end with the help of the CIA, but if you're worried about spoilers, we could just go back to before that happened, only we'd better do it before the end of The End of Mr. Y.
Personally, I'm post-Post-structualism, but I still enjoy a romp through the existential questions that need to be resolved before the end of the story which luckily is not the end of our personal story. Like the main character, I too want to know everything but unlike a fictional character, I don't get to find out. Books are subject to intelligent design and its characters are created by an author outside the story though they usually are unaware of this (though T. E. Lumas knows he's really Mr. Y). Characters' worlds are created by language, and to some extent, we create ours with language as well. We spend much time in the Lacanian Symbolic register, but there's also a real register even if we can't really talk about it because talking is symbolic. Still, it's there, though I'll bet many of us readers feel like Ariel, preferring books to embodied existence. We're all connected through ancestry, proximity, language, and empathy and posting on Goodreads and destroying the troposphere can't disconnect us. What passes for a resolution at the end is insufficiently satisfying but when you're out to explain everything, this is to be expected.
I enjoyed the extra edges everything has when their fourth dimensionality is limited to three since I've seen the diagrams of tesseracts (aka hypercubes), the videogame interface to reality, and Ariel social-engineering the password to Saul's computer, (but does she ever make use of what she downloads from it?) And what of the diseases that would never have been cured without experiments on mice? Maybe one of those now incurable illnesses would kill Hitler and prevent the holocaust.
Reading others' reviews of this book makes me see the difficult position the author finds herself in. She wants to engage with the thoughts of various philosophers and theorists, but she can't just explain them from scratch. So some readers felt she under-explained, others felt she over-explained. Some felt threatened by the ideas being there at all, and blamed Ms. Thomas of pretension. In my opinion, she did reasonable well with this insoluble problem. She might understand Dasein better than I do, but I don't think she fully grasps that the zeros and ones of machine code is just another metaphor. To be fair, most computer scientists don't either.
