Review of the End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas

I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I have to say it's one of the reasons I first picked this book up. It's an odd size and shape, with black-lined pages, so it does stand out from the crowd. I don't really know what I was expecting from that. A friend who'd previously read it said that it was good, but by the time I came to read it, I couldn't even remember what the blurb on the back said.

I'll say now, it was a pretty compulsive read. The last book I read (the third in a trilogy, which I'm not sure I could review without spoiling the whole trilogy because the ending was so disappointing), took over a month, despite the fact that it was compelling. I started Mr Y last weekend when I had very little else to do, but nonetheless it made the time fly by happily, and I read the whole book within a week, which goes to show that if nothing else, it was very readable.

Without wanting to give too much away, The End of Mr Y is about a PhD student, Ariel Manto, studying thought experiments in science and literature, who finds a book (The End of Mr Y), of which there is only supposed to be one copy left in existence. The book is supposed to be cursed, so that anyone who reads it will die. And so it leads to smiles and happiness, obviously...

Ariel is an interesting main character; she's flawed, but believable, which makes it possible to really identify with her as she's facing things. She's also intelligent and well-read, and so a relatively large portion of the book is her explaining or debating various aspects of philosophy and metaphysics with the people she meets along the way. It's a little odd at time, but I have to say it contains one of the best explanations of quantum theory that I've ever read. My biggest criticism of this is that sometimes the discussions get a little too one-sided; Ariel thinking aloud to one or other avid listener. But all the people she's talking to tend to be very well-educated, so even this has just enough realism that it doesn't become annoying.

The plot winds carefully through various problems, and solutions, and some interesting things crop up along the way. I can't say I agreed with the underlying structure of the world that the book was trying to imply, but it was definitely an interesting and riveting idea... and ideas is really what science fiction is all about. I wanted slightly more out of the ending than I got; I think some of the emotion was drained out of it, which was a little sad. But it didn't detract from the brilliance of the lead-up (unlike the aforementioned trilogy I just finished).

One of the things I like most about the book is that it bends genres a bit. It's nominally science fiction, but with heavy elements of (low) fantasy, while the setting is contemporary. On plot alone, it might have become one of those rare accessible science fiction books, like The Handmaid's Tale... but the heavy debate sections probably lean it back towards the genre fans.

All in all, I'm glad I judged this particular book by its cover enough to pick it up and buy it. It was a great read, and I was thoroughly entertained all the way through. Recommended.