Ariel Manto is a PhD student researching the history of thought experiments and fascinated by the works of little known Victorian-age author, Thomas Lumas. One day she unexpectedly stumbles on his incredibly rare last work, The End of Mr Y, a book said to be cursed – anyone who reads it, dies. The book relates Mr Y’s eventually fatal obsession with the Troposphere, a world which allows you to walk into the minds of others. It includes a recipe for getting to the Troposphere – the page is missing, but Ariel finds it, and plunges straight in. But what happened to her vanished supervisor, who also read the book (and hid the missing page)? Who are the two mysterious strangers chasing her? And why does anyone who reads the book die?

I like to see the genre-bending books, of which this is an example: a mainstream novel with SF concepts like alternate realities, linked consciousness and time travel, but unfortunately in this case I don’t think it works as a hybrid. Mainstream writers like to dismiss SF as all ray guns and ‘squids in space’ and fail to acknowledge that, in fact, SF is the venerable genre of ideas. This book is hung all over with detailed summaries of things like thought experiments, the history of homeopathy, metaphysics and philosophy about the nature of reality: SF readers have seen it done better and are used to authors trusting them to already know the basics of current scientific thinking or to grasp new information quickly; mainstream readers are possibly not all that interested in long, tedious, contrived talking-head philosophic conversations (and you know what? Neither are SF readers, because that stuff normally gets fed to us with some level of subtlety), which leaves the book appealing to…well, to university students grappling with their first taste of that poster-boy for postmodernism, Baudrillard.

The level of detail is troubling for two reasons: one, it slows the narrative down – and this is not just with the dumping in of whatever information Thomas has decided the readers need to know. It can take an entire page for Ariel to eat, shower and walk home; we never quite get the level of having to watch her do her laundry but it comes close. Thankfully, things begin to speed up a bit in the second half, but the idea, poststructuralist physics (theories by people with a certain power don’t describe the world, but shape it), that should have been the starting point (for true SF-worthy exploration of new ideas rather than just being a derivative version of William Gibson) only appears right near the end.

Secondly, it turns the characters – every character – into mere mouthpieces for philosophic or metaphysic points of views. Take Adam, for example, the love interest. This is a man who falls in love with Ariel so quickly that he makes an enormous sacrifice for her; this is a man who is supposed to be the most attractive man she’s ever met…yeah, you can really feel the connection with all the sizzling dialogue about metaphysic approaches to faith and illusion…it’s unconvincing, it’s contrived (she meets Adam when she has to share her office with a theologian and…please, take a guess…an evolutionary biologist…).

Ariel herself should be an interesting character – promiscuous and self-destructive, intelligent and intellectually curious – but she falls victim to same mouthpiece problem as everyone else. The book also presents a negative attitude to sex despite the supposed Modern Girl no-strings-sex independent nature of Ariel: every act of sex, every last one, in the physical world is shown as sordid. Opinions, of course, vary, but I have a hard time thinking of a woman who enjoys consensual vanilla-kinky sex like being tied up or bent over an office desk as sexually deviant, as she herself labels herself. The only ‘good’ sex occurs in the Troposphere, the world of thought-made-matter, as if to highlight the extra dirty nature of that nasty real-world sex.

There’s other irritating things about this book: there’s a time-travel element to it, for example, that is incredibly dissatisfying. One of the great joys and challenges of time-travel writing is how to deal with the paradoxes – except here, Thomas announces, don’t worry about them, there won’t be any, which utterly fails the time-travel writing test to such a level that it’s laughable (also laughable is the tired why-we-can’t-kill-Hitler conversation).

And there’s also a kind of striving for ‘literary’ writing in the descriptions (which is why, I think, it takes so long for Ariel to walk places, all the arty descriptions of what she’s seeing), including this gem: ‘the sky was the colour of a sad wedding’. Look, if you really feel the reader needs to know the colour of the sky, could you maybe make sure they actually know what colour the sky is when you’re done? I could enter that line in Bulwer-Lytton, I swear.

Thomas is a decent writer and the central story and idea is a good one…its execution – pacing, dialogue, characters – is just not to my taste. However, as I say, as a primer for university students taking postmodern or deconstruction theory, this book would be wonderful: ‘a thought experiment…a kind of story but with no characters’ (because the characters aren’t real, they’re just there to present the theory under discussion). The book at least does put difficult-to-grasp theories into prose for students; it just doesn’t necessarily make for a satisfying novel. Her website is here.

Studying poststructuralism? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au