If I could have one opportunity to meet with the author Scarlett Thomas, I would like to ask her why with all these wonderful ingredients and potentials in “Our Tragic Universe”, she has chosen to disintegrate them into what appears to me as a storyless story (by her definition and by my observation).  One that makes me feel tragic to even finish reading the book.  If I could meet with Douglas Coupland who wrote that wonderful piece of praise at the back of the book, I would like to ask him specifically how “Our Tragic Universe” manages to surprise him in a terrific way, why he finds it addictive and thinks that the author is a genius.  If I could meet with the one who wrote the synopses of the book, I would like to ask why he or she thinks that “Our Tragic Universe” is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, and how a story might just save our lives.  I have devoured the book slowly, from page one to page 425, and I have found none of the above.

Let’s start from the beginning again.  These days, I have tried to stick to my initial decision and finish a book that I have started reading.  Especially one whose author is not new to me.  You may wonder: Wilfrid, you are compelled to finish reading a book because you have spent a fortune on it, yes?  The reality is that I seldom buy books these days.  I have borrowed “Our Tragic Universe” from the National Library.  But still, I had this hope that “Our Tragic Universe” would live it up to my expectation.  This book is curiously divided into two parts.  In part one, the main character Meg – a book reviewer, a ghost writer, an aspired writer, a lady in her late thirties, a character that at one point I thought Scarlett is Meg – has a rather mundane life that is getting slightly worse.  In part two, Meg has a relatively more hopeful life that is getting slightly better.  If I may deduce what saves her life (as promised by the synopses), it is money.  Or rather the time freed up by not needing to think about making ends meet can be used to do something more interesting.  If I may second guess on what the synopses writer means by “Our Tragic Universe” is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, it merely means that if you stuck or think you stuck in a relationship that is going nowhere, break up and start anew.  However, I doubt that is what Scarlett Thomas has intended this book to be (and I surely hope not).

“Our Tragic Universe”, to me, is an experimental work of writing.  A storyless story as defined in page 388 and 389 (and hinted at the very beginning of the story) is as follows.

[The storyless story] is the subtle rejection of story within its own structure …  It has no moral center.  It is not something from which a reader should strive to learn something, but rather a puzzle or a paradox with no ‘answer’ or ‘solution’, except for false ones.  The readers are not encouraged to ‘get into’ the storyless story but to stay outside.

To illustrate what a storyless story is like, here is an example (page 389).  By and large, I see the similarity of that and to the entire book.

A story about a hermit making jam could be as interesting as a story about a hero overcoming a dragon, except that it would be likely that the writer would make the hermit overcome the jam in the same way the hero overcomes the dragon.  The storyless story shows the hermit making the jam while the hero overcomes the dragon, and then the hermit giving remedies and aid – and jam – to both the hero and the dragon before going to bed with a book.

And so I have subconsciously played along with this storyless story concept while throughout the bulk of the book, I was hoping that “Our Tragic Universe” would be as innovative and engaging as “The End Of Mr. Y“.  “Our Tragic Universe” has all the great ingredients.  A book that Meg needed to review called “The Science of Living Forever” has a great potential to be the metafiction (a story within a story), such as the story by Lumas in “The End Of Mr. Y”.  “The Science of Living Forever” even has a sequel called “Second World” that would have fitted beautifully with this book in two parts.  There is a mysterious wild beast living in town.  There is even a ship in a bottle that mysteriously appeared at the shore when Meg was ‘conversing’ with the Universe.  The magical healing power, the placebo versus nocebo (the opposite of placebo), the conversation with the dead on an astral plane – tragically, none of these have been converted into something intriguing, something that lives up to the basic expectation established between a reader and a writer, something that is remotely close to “The End Of Mr. Y”.  This book may wish to break away from the standard structure of (1)  having a central issue or the ‘ordinary world’ of the problem, (2) the problem itself, (3) the way to set out and resolve the issue, (4) a previously unseen element in the central conflict that could make the problem seems insurmountable, (5) a climax or turning point, and (6) the resolution – as implied using Tarot reading on page 322.  In fact, “Our Tragic Universe” has done it so well that it does not have any of the above.  The fallacy of a storyless story, to me, is in the absence of a climax or a convincing turning point, it is not a very inspiring story.  Having said that, with an open mind and if reading an experiment piece is what you are after, “Our Tragic Universe” is certainly unique.  It is still an easy read with lively conversations filled with truncated ideas and well known stories.  Be prepared that this book has nothing to with tragedy, certainly nothing to do with the Universe.  And neglect the bad and misleading marketing tagline “Could a Story Save Your Life?”.

I do not think I would subscribe to the notions of fictionless fiction, historyless history, romanceless romance, unproven proof, and uncertain certainty (page 390).  I think these are some pointless phases the author has dreamed up with (that anyone could create a dozen more).  I do not think that being a realist writer means that he or she has to produce fictionless fiction (page 390).  To me, the goal of a realist artist is to produce artworks with the goals of truth and accuracy in mind.  That, in the context of writing, is a job belongs to the journalists.  A fiction is not a real story, as repeatedly mentioned in a wonderful book called “How To Read Novels Like A Professor”.  A fiction is simply a work of fiction.  If Scarlett Thomas’s aim in this book is to engage an active dialog with her readers, I think she has achieved just that.

I think “The End of Mr. Y” (2007) is a classic. “PopCo” (2005) is not. Some may argue that plots do not necessarily require closure, protagonists do not necessarily be likeable.  Having read “PopCo”, I can certainly see “The End of Mr. Y” a much improved version of “PopCo”. Even the writing style is much better in her latest novel. The similarity is haunting between the two. They both full of big intriguing ideas, split storyline, groups of people from different disciplines, and tons of puzzles.

“PopCo”, like “The End of Mr. Y”, is split into two stories running in parallel – Alice’s present and her younger days living with her grandparents.  The one puzzle that strings the two stories is a necklace given by her grandpa that contains a code that leads to some ancient pirate treasure. The big ideas circle around Cryptology, marketing, and anti-consumerism that, to me, are pretty dry topics to read. “PopCo” started right giving the readers hands-on education on how to apply codes to encrypt messages. It is without doubt a fun read trying to break the codes together with Alice. The corporate retreat, that turns out to be one long brainstorming seminar in creating an ultimate toy for teen girls, dominates the majority of the literature. If I was the editor, I would have trimmed that a fair bit and I would create a more satisfying closure. I personally love to read Alice’s childhood story. Unfortunately, that too ends too abruptly. The final breaking of the ultimate code has totally gone past me – or perhaps I read a bit too fast towards the end. So much for reading a puzzle book.

One interesting takeaway though is my deeper understanding on the teen girls. It was not at all obvious to me.  Some of the highlights are as follows.  Perhaps some of you can verify for me?

• Teen girls value motherhood a great deal. Many of their fantasies are connected to caring and responsibility (think soft toys).
• With regards to friendship, there is a need to care far more than a need to be cared for. A typical sentiment would be: I want to be there for my friends when they need me.
• Teen girls are non-competitive as a rule. In terms of priorities, girls from all cultures place friendship above all else.
• The word “sharing” is very important for girls. The word “winning” is hardly important.
• Of course girls do compete.  But they never admit that they are engaged in competition. Girls try to refine their identities to further their more general aims: to have important social relationships and find a “perfect man”.
• Communication is of vast importance to teen girls. 79% of MSN Messenger users are girls. Closeness and telling secrets are important.
• SMS text messaging is the most popular way for the teen girls to keep in touch. Communicating using text in this way reinforces the need girls have to exchange messages perceived as ‘secret’.

At first, I was curious about the marketing tag line: If you knew this book was cursed, would you read it? That was the exact choice the main character Ariel has to make when she came across a rare book “The End of Mr. Y” by Thomas E. Lumas. Inside the story by Lumas – more like a story within a story (Lumas) within a story (Lumas’s character Mr. Y) – his character has found a way to step into Troposphere, an alternative dimension where one can travel through time and space and enter into people’s mind. Why is the book cursed you may ask? In the beginning of the story, we are told that Mr. Y did not live long (hence “the end”), the author Lumas died right after the book was published and so were all the major people involved in the book publishing activities. Now this rare book fell onto the hand of Ariel and you will have to find out what happened to her by reading the book.

“The End of Mr. Y” is a great book in many dimensions. The writing style is intelligent with concluding sentences at times unexpectedly displace you from your normal train of thoughts. The excerpt of “The End of Mr. Y” – the rare book that Ariel found – is written with a different writing style and truly reads like a book within a book. The real life portion of Ariel as a poor (and a highly intelligent) PHD student troubled with real life circumstances and too much bad sex draws readers into the emotional world of the character. The intellectual conversations between the characters of different disciplines awed me a great deal. The topic ranges from literature to evolution to theology to physics to philosophy and more. Scarlett Thomas has certainly done a great deal of research on parallel world and big bang amongst many other topics during the authoring of “The End of Mr. Y”. And then, there is the sci-fi portion where Scarlett Thomas’s imagination knows no bound. It is because all these imagination worlds are constructed based on well-known scientific theories, they read convincing enough to me. Within the book, some philosophical questions are being explored (such as “Is consciousness some forms of matter?” or “Are human beings being created or evolved from plants or evolved from something created by God?”) and although none are answered, different opinions are offered via different characters.

Is “The End of Mr. Y” an original piece of work? Does it not read like “Alice in Wonderland” (the artwork on the cover of the book has perhaps summarized the theme nicely by the way)? From a main theme point of view, perhaps just a little bit. The center character Ariel does read like Colene from Piers Anthony’s Mode series (e.g. a sci-fi fiction “Virtual Mode” [1991]). Colene was self-destructive in real life who was able to step into another dimension solving quests and puzzles while she was inside the “Mode”. Ariel has a somewhat similar character who was able to step into the Troposphere and solved some bizarre quests. While Ariel is inside the Troposphere, some scenes read like the movie “The Matrix” – the train station, the agents, and etc. Some of the literature on explaining the deep content can be a bit dry (read like some of the Paulo Coelho books trying to explain a certain idea via the narration of a few people and at times read like one person talking to himself). The way that the author attempts to involve the readers into the story? Certainly reminds me of my favorite Italian writer Italo Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” (1979). But by and large, Scarlett Thomas has done a superb job in helping the readers attempt to understand difficult and unfamiliar contents. Parts of the book may not be entirely original. But to sum them up into one single volume is original enough to me.

I am not going to divulge what the ending is like but trust me, when you read that last chapter, it will hit you like a nail to the head. And then when I re-read the book from the beginning (just a bit), it suddenly hit me …

You now have one choice.

You … I’m hanging out of the window of my office, sneaking a cigarette and trying to read Margins in the dull winter light, when there’s a noise I haven’t heard before. All right, the noise – crash, bang, etc. – I probably have heard before, but it’s coming from underneath me, which isn’t right.

The very first sentence, that appears numerous times inside the book, makes me wonder. Am I already inside the Troposphere? Just Brilliance.

When trying to persuade Cynthia to give a try on “The End Of Mr. Y”, her immediate response was: is it a happy ending? (Erm …) Then got me thinking. Another brilliant thing about the book is that … it follows the general philosophy of Quantum Physics even till the end. You will see what I mean when you get there in terms of feel.

I will probably add Scarlett Thomas to my list of authors whom I will attempt to read every single title. I will probably publish that list shortly. Meanwhile, do give this young British writer a try (she was named as one of the twenty best young British writers back in 2001).