The End Of Mr. Y

I remember the first time I saw this book. It was in the library and its red cover and velvet black pages seduced me instantly. I left with it clasped against my breast, my fingers caressing it. I must have looked like the creepy book junkie I am!But of course you can’t judge a book just by it’s cover (or its velvety black pages!) The story needs to be good too. The End of Mr Y shares the story of Ariel Manto, a PhD student obsessed by the 19th century writer Thomas Lumas. He was the writer of the original ‘The End of Mr. Y’, a book that is now incredibly rare and rumoured to be cursed – everyone who has read it has died soon afterwards.When Manto finds a second hand copy she is over the moon. It’s not that she’s unaware of the rumours, in fact that danger adds a certain spice to it for her. She’s the kind of woman who has affairs with married men. She is unconcerned with the future, now is everything to her. By the way, this is probably better reserved for over 16 as her affairs are aren’t just left to the readers imagination!Lumas’ book is all about the “Troposphere” – a place where all consciousness is connected and you can enter other people’s minds and read their thoughts. It includes the recipe for a draft that Mr Y uses to enter the Troposphere. Of course Manto can’t resist recreating the recipe and on drinking it she enters the Troposphere herself.Thankfully telling you too much about the plot is a naughty thing for a reviewer to do, after all you wouldn’t thank me for spoiling it all! And today I am exceedingly grateful for that! Describing the rest of this story would be very hard, although I really loved it I have to admit I wasn’t really sure what it all meant when I finished it the first time! I’ve read it twice more since then and I think I finally understand it now (just don’t test me on it!)It’s not a book I’d recommend to everyone, it is rather long and if I’m completely honest it is probably a little too esoteric for some peoples taste. But I do recommend it for those that like a bit of challenge and specifically for people that don’t mind having their world view or spiritual assumptions questioned.The story itself is brilliant, it’s intriguing and packed full of danger and the promise of secrets being revealed. The authors characterisations are spot on. None of her characters are off the peg, they are all complex and believable, if not always completely loveable.I returned the book to the library, but I bought my own copy and it is one of the books I will never part with.NB This review first appeared on The BookEaters Blog - http://www.thebookeaters.co.uk/

I first read The End of Mr Y in 2007, having had it so enthusiastically recommended to me by a Waterstones bookworm that I snapped it up on the spot. And I was SO glad I did; what an original story! If I were to try and describe the vibe of this book - because reading it really does evoke a feeling - then I’d say I felt energised … it’s utterly compelling and intoxicating, to the point where it almost resonates with a potency that’s impossible to ignore. Picking it up again this week I briefly wondered if I wouldn’t feel as strongly about it after all this time … but it was a solid 5 stars then, and it more than upholds that status today.Ariel Manto is a PhD student with a penchant for ‘thought experiments’, theoretical physics, and Victorian scientists. Her studies have seeded and nurtured an obsession with one eccentric scientist in particular; the enigmatic Thomas Lumas. Having read almost all his published works, just one remains tantalisingly out of reach - The End of Mr Y. This book is shrouded in mystery, with the only known copy said to be held in the vault of a bank … in Germany. Ariel’s PhD supervisor, initially incredibly supportive of her pursuit of Mr Y, has a sudden and inexplicable change of heart … and then even more suddenly, vanishes!Somewhat dissolute and directionless, Ariel is enjoying a quiet smoke out of her office window one day when the ground quite literally opens up, taking a neighbouring uni building down with it. No, this isn’t the work of the curse, just a disagreement between mother nature and structural engineers … but it’s the event that prompts Ariel to walk home early, passing a second hand bookshop where she stumbles across a box of books bearing an uncanny resemblance to her own studies … and an exceedingly rare copy of Lumas’s The End of Mr Y.Thomas Lumas’s The End of Mr Y is a book about a respectable businessman who passes the annual Goose Fair on his way home from a meeting. He feels himself drawn in to the fair ‘as if by mesmerism’, deeper and deeper until he happens upon the Spectral Opera. Unable to comprehend what he’s seeing he lingers after the show finishes and follows curiosity’s claw to a moodily-lit ante chamber where he encounters the fairground doctor, a mysterious tincture to drink, and a black dot. Hours later he resurfaces from an inexplicable experience where he was living inside the soul of another man; thinking his thoughts, feeling his emotions, tasting his food, all while remaining lucid and cogent, entirely aware of his own self existing in parallel. The doctor is gone when Mr Y wakes, and so begins a fruitless search for the fair which blossoms into an all-consuming obsession and the decline of his business.It’s apparent that Thomas Lumas’s book isn’t the work of fiction he asserts it to be, and soon Ariel becomes convinced that the recipe for the tincture was transcribed on the missing page of the book. Without giving too much away, Ariel embarks on an obsessive quest to track down the missing page to recreate this mysterious draught, so she too can travel through the thoughts and memories of others.The place where this mind-travel takes place was christened the Troposphere by Mr Y in Lumas’s book; it’s a place that’s as hard to grasp as your own dreams, with that sensation of unease and disquiet that linger after the dream has faded. The Troposphere isn’t a cosy dream world - quite the opposite, and it’s made all the more unsafe by the grey-suited, gun-toting American spooks who are hunting Ariel in this world, and the real one.The End of Mr Y is a marmite book … and I’m a wholehearted lover. It’s an ingenious book of many layers, time zones, and narratives. There are times when the conversations between Ariel and other characters delve really deeply into physics, philosophy, religion and homeopathy. My brain just isn’t wired that way, and I found myself re-reading some parts of it because I wanted to try and understand the many depths and facets of this book. However, the abundance of science in no way affected my enjoyment of the book. Whilst I’m on this point, I want to make mention of the fact that I’ve read several reviews of The End of Mr Y that are quite disparaging of the accuracy of its scientific content … whilst these reviewers are clearly mega-brains, I think they’re missing the point that this is a book to be read for enjoyment; it’s not an academic tome. In fact, I think it’s ironic that a sentence lifted straight from Thomas Lumas’s own original copy of the End of Mr Y makes the purpose of Scarlett Thomas’s book quite clear: ‘It is only as a work of fiction that I wish this book to be considered.’So, if you’re craving a book that’s going to seize you by the imagination and draw you in to something enchanting and a little dark, The End of Mr Y is your book. Scarlett Thomas has woven a story of so many layers, and you will emerge feeling just a little bit smarter too! It’s fast-paced and addictive, and although you won’t always like the characters, you’ll find its intriguing complexity makes it nigh on impossible to put down … right until you reach the most perfectly symbiotic ending.

Scarlett Thomas is a fun writer who often manages to weave maths or science into her work. This is no exception; we have forays into thought experiments and the theory of homeopathy.The basic idea is that a young PhD student, Ariel Manto, finds a copy of a rare work by the subject of her thesis, Thomas Lumas. Not much is known of the book; only one copy is known to exist, stored in a bank vault in Germany, and there is a rumour that anyone who reads the book will die. Her supervisor has suggested she ignore the text in her doctorate, but the supervisor disappeared about a year ago… The book itself – a 19th century work called The End of Mr Y – finds the eponymous Mr Y visiting a circus sideshow and being intrigued by a clairvoyant.This all sounds like the plot of a very bad self-published work, just waiting for the zombies to appear. Fortunately they don’t, and Thomas is a skilful enough writer to bring this potential implausibility into something coherent. But instead of zombies, we have a chase across international borders by some very dodgy American spooks, refuge being sought in monasteries and mind-reading.At times the text feels over-long and some of the pseudo-science does get a bit hard to follow at times. But this is balanced by a genuinely intriguing plot whose direction is not always as obvious as it seems. There are multiple timelines and backstories all shepherded well and there are moments of sheer inventive brilliance. By the end, it all gets very surreal in a way that some people are not going to like, but I think it worked.This is a novel that is a lot of fun. It’s ideal holiday reading; enough to think about and the pages keep turning without the need to take notes.