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The End of Mr. Y: A Novel Kindle Edition
Graduate student Ariel Manto has a fascination with nineteenth-century scientists—especially Thomas Lumas, the mysterious author of The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read. When she uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel goes down an interdimensional rabbit hole of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between. And to make matters worse, the CIA is onto her.
Following in Mr. Y’s footsteps, Ariel swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and is transported into the Troposphere: a wonderland where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. There she begins to understand all the mysteries surrounding the book, herself, and the universe. Or is it all just a hallucination?
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateOctober 2, 2006
- File size1760 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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From Booklist
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Review
"You might say that Thomas has redefined activism for the Digital Age. Inspired by a venerable tradition, she achieves here a scope and a passion to match the intelligence and empathy her fiction has always had."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Enough code-breaking tips, puzzles and graphs, charts, postscripts and appendixes to satisfy that other mathematician storyteller, Lewis Carroll. " The New York Times Book Review
"An exciting story with a fantastical twist, dive into the world of Ariel Manto and The End of Mr. Y." - armchairinterviews.com
"Not only will you have a great time reading this book, but you will finish it a cleverer person." - Jonathan Coe "[A] journey of wonder and danger. Delicious cross-genre literay picnic, breezy and fiercely intelligent, reminiscent of Haruki Murakami." - Kirkus "A combination of postmodern philosophy and physics, spine-tingling science fiction, clever, unexpected narrative twists, and engaging characters." - Library Journal "[S]mart, stylish and dizzying... Consider 'The End of Mr. Y' an accomplished, impressive thought experiment for the 21st Century." - New York Times Book Review "Literary manna for would-be philosophy nerds. There are little, 100-percent-literary sugar plums to be found in its pages." - Salon.com "Exhilarating. A compulsively absorbing thriller. Mr. Y burorrws into the reader’s brain, stoking a desire for real-world exploration." - Time Out New York
From the Back Cover
When Ariel Manto uncovers a copy of The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookstore, she can’t believe her eyes. Copies are exceedingly rare, and everyone who has ever read it—including its author, Victorian scientist Thomas Lumas-- has disappeared.
Ariel can’t resist the promise in the book’s history and its pages, and so steps into a thrilling adventure of time, space, love, death, and everything in between. "Smart [and] stylish." -- International Herald Tribune
"Enormously ambitious and satisfying. It overflows with love for books not just as beautiful artefacts and repositories of secret knowledge, but as gateways into parallel universes." -- Time Out London
Scarlett Thomas is the author of Bright Young Things, Going Out, PopCo, and Our Tragic Universe. ------ ORIGINAL 2006 EDITION If you knew this book were cursed, would you read it?
Ariel Manto has a fascination with The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read—maybe because it's cursed and everyone related to it (the author; various book collectors; Ariel’s doctoral advisor, Saul Burlem) disappears. But suddenly she discovers a rare copy in a used bookstore. Following in Mr. Y’s footsteps, she falls into a trance and steps into the Troposphere—a wonderland of an alternate dimension where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. And so Ariel launches into a heart-racing, brain-teasing, time-twisting adventure of science, faith, consciousness, death, and everything in between.
But what about the curse? Did Burlem read Mr. Y just before he vanished? Did these scary men in gray suits have anything to do with it? And now that Ariel understands the Troposphere--and her place in it—will she be able to save the world and still go back to it?
SCARLETT THOMAS is the author of PopCo. She was named one of the twenty best young British writers by the Independent on Sunday in 2001 and Writer of the Year at the 2002 Elle Style Awards. She teaches writing at the University of Kent and lives in Canterbury.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 noisecrash, bang, etcI probably have heard before, but it’s coming from underneath me, which isn’t right. There shouldn’t be anything underneath me: I’m on the bottom floor. But the ground shakes, as if something’s trying to push up from below, and I think about other people’s mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time; then I think, Fucking hell, it’s an earthquake, and I drop my cigarette and run out of my office at roughly the same time that the alarm starts sounding.
When alarms sound I don’t always run immediately. Who does? Usually an alarm is just an empty sign: a drill; a practice. As I’m on my way to the side door out of the building the shaking stops. Shall I go back to my office? But it’s impossible to stay in this building when this alarm goes off. It’s too loud; it wails inside your head. As I leave the building I walk past the Health and Safety notice board, which has pictures of injured people on it. The pictures blur as I go past: A man who has back pain is also having a heart attack, and various hologram people are trying to revive him. I was supposed to go to some Health and Safety training last year, but didn’t.
As I open the side door I can see people leaving the Russell Building and walking, or running, past our block and up the gray concrete steps in the direction of the Newton Building and the library. I cut around the right-hand side of the building and bound up the concrete steps, two at a time. The sky is gray, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it’s been freeze-framed. Sometimes, on these January afternoons, the sun squats low in the sky like an orange-robed Buddha in a documentary about the meaning of life. Today there is no sun. I come to the edge of the large crowd that has formed, and I stop running. Everyone is looking at the same thing, gasping and making firework-display noises.
It’s the Newton Building.
It’s falling down.
I think of this toyhave I seen it on someone’s desk recently?which is a little horse mounted on a wooden button. When you press the button from underneath, the horse collapses to its knees. That’s what the Newton Building looks like now. It’s sinking into the ground, but in a lopsided way; one corner is now gone, now two, now . . . Now it stops. It creaks, and it stops. A window on the third floor flaps open, and a computer monitor falls out and smashes onto what’s left of the concrete courtyard below. Four men with hard hats and fluorescent jackets slowly approach the broken-up courtyard; then another man comes, says something to them, and they all move away again.
Two men in gray suits are standing next to me.
Déjà vu,” one of them says to the other.
I look around for someone I know. There’s Mary Robinson, the head of department, talking to Lisa Hobbes. I can’t see many other people from the English Department. But I can see Max Truman standing on his own, smoking a roll-up. He’ll know what’s going on.
Hello, Ariel,” he mumbles when I walk over and stand next to him.
Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he’s telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you’d have to pay to rig a horse race. Does he like me? I don’t think he trusts me. But why would he? I’m comparatively young, relatively new to the department, and I probably seem ambitious, even though I’m not. I also have long red hair and people say I look intimidating (because of the hair? Something else?). People who don’t say I look intimidating sometimes say I look dodgy,” or odd.” One of my ex-housemates said he wouldn’t like to be stuck on a desert island with me but didn’t say why.
Hi, Max,” I say. Then: Wow.”
You probably don’t know about the tunnel, do you?” he says. I shake my head. There’s a railway tunnel that runs under here,” he says, pointing downwards with his eyes. He sucks on his roll-up, but nothing seems to happen, so he takes it out of his mouth and uses it to point around the campus. It runs under Russell over there, and Newton, over there. Goesor used to gofrom the town to the coast. It hasn’t been used in a hundred years or so. This is the second time it’s collapsed and taken Newton with it. They were supposed to fill it with concrete after last time,” he adds.
I look at where Max just pointed, and start mentally drawing straight lines connecting Newton with Russell, imagining the tunnel underneath the line. Whichever way you do it, the English and American Studies Building is on the line, too.
Everyone’s all right, at least,” he says. Maintenance saw a crack in the wall this morning and evacuated them all.”
Lisa shivers. I can’t believe this is happening,” she says, looking over at the Newton Building. The gray sky has darkened and the rain is now falling more heavily. The Newton Building looks strange with no lights on: It’s as if it has been stubbed out.
I can’t either,” I say.
For the next three or four minutes we all stand and stare in silence at the building; then a man with a megaphone comes around and tells us all to go home immediately without going back to our offices. I feel like crying. There’s something so sad about broken concrete.
I don’t know about everyone else, but it’s not that easy for me just to go home. I only have one set of keys to my flat, and that set is in my office, along with my coat, my scarf, my gloves, my hat, and my rucksack. There’s a security guard trying to stop people going in through the main entrance, so I go down the steps and in the side way. My name isn’t on my office door. Instead, it bears only the name of the official occupier of the room: my supervisor, Professor Saul Burlem. I met Burlem twice before I came here: once at a conference in Greenwich, and once at my interview. He disappeared just over a week after I arrived. I remember coming into the office on a Thursday morning and noticing that it was different. The first thing was that the blinds and the curtains were closed: Burlem always closed his blinds at the end of every day, but neither of us ever touched the horrible thin gray curtains. And the room smelled of cigarette smoke. I was expecting him in at about ten o’clock that morning, but he didn’t show up. By the following Monday I asked people where he was and they said they didn’t know. At some point someone arranged for his classes to be covered. I don’t know if there’s departmental gossip about thisno one gossips to mebut everyone seems to assume I’ll just carry on my research and it’s no big deal for me that he isn’t around. Of course, he’s the reason I came to the department at all: He’s the only person in the world who has done serious research on one of my main subjects: the nineteenth-century writer Thomas E. Lumas. Without Burlem, I’m not really sure why I am here. And I do feel something about him being missing; not loss, exactly, but something.
My car is in the Newton car park. When I get there I am not at all surprised to find several men in hard hats telling people to forget about their cars and walk or take the bus home. I do try to argue I say I’m happy to take the risk that the Newton Building will not suddenly go into a slow-motion cinematic rewind in order that it can fall down again in a completely different direction but the men pretty much tell me to piss off and walk home or take the bus like everybody else, so I eventually drift off in the direction of the bus stop. It’s only the beginning of January, but some daffodils and snowdrops have made it through the earth and stand wetly in little rows by the path. The bus stop is depressing: There’s a line of people looking as cold and fragile as the line of flowers, so I decide I’ll just walk.
Copyright © 2006 by Scarlett Thomas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online
at www.harcourt.com/ contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
Product details
- ASIN : B003WJQ6BS
- Publisher : Mariner Books; First edition (October 2, 2006)
- Publication date : October 2, 2006
- Language : English
- File size : 1760 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 511 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #311,599 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,649 in Contemporary Fantasy (Kindle Store)
- #1,971 in Coming of Age Fantasy eBooks
- #3,180 in Coming of Age Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Scarlett Thomas was born in London in 1972. Her other novels include Bright Young Things, Going Out, PopCo and The End of Mr.Y, which was longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent.
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I'm always drawn to stories about parallel dimensions, and for that reason, The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas really caught my attention. Though the book is categorized as mainstream literary, it very much has science fiction and fantasy elements. This mind-meld of physics, metaphysics and literature is one of the few books lately that I've read obsessively to the end.
The voice of the narrator, Ariel Manto, grabbed me right away. She is a thirty-something Ph.D. student with a dysfunctional family background and a penchant for kinky, self-destructive sex. She loves obscure literature and philosophy and is doing graduate work on a little-known author named Thomas E. Lumas. As luck would have it, one rainy day she runs across a book of his, The End of Mr.Y, which is supposedly cursed. Ariel snatches it up using her expense money for the entire month and holes up to read the Victorian-era missive in her seedy cold-water flat. Though she is fearful of the curse that promises death to anyone who reads the book, she very much relishes the danger. Thomas does a wonderful job of letting the quirky and witty Ariel gradually unfold for us as the story progresses.
Ariel has already proven that she has an addictive personality with her chain smoking and sexual compulsions, so, naturally when the book tells her how to enter an alternate dimension called the Troposphere, she jumps at the chance and right away becomes completely addicted to it, much to detriment of her life and physical body.
Through the Troposphere, Ariel is able to enter into the minds of other people and animals. During her first time in that parallel universe, she enters into the mind of a mouse that is caught in a trap beneath her kitchen sink. She gets in touch with its anguish and suffering and on her return to her normal dimension, immediately finds it under her sink and releases it into the wild. After that, she has quite a bit of empathy for the suffering of animals, which figures into the resolution of the plot later on.
Complications arise when she begins to be followed by a couple of CIA agents who intend to use the Troposphere for their own evil purposes, which will end up with the enslavement of mankind. Since Ariel knows about it, she's a dead duck. Her love interest, a celibate ex-priest, who is the opposite of what you'd expect for the kinky Ariel, helps her out in her endeavors. The odd ending is anything but predictable.
I found Ariel's theories about the origin and workings of the Troposphere fascinating, but I'm kind of an alternate-reality geek, so others might find it a bit tedious. In this book, the alternate reality functions very much like a video-game with a console that comes up at crucial decision times, but one could surmise that the alternate reality somehow speaks to each person in a way he/she can personally understand.
Thomas has a wonderful way with language. Some of my favorite quotes from the book are: "... the sky is the color of sad weddings." And as a book lover I could relate to this quote: "Real life is regularly running out of money, and then food. Real life is having no proper heating. Real life is physical. Give me books instead: Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book; I'd give anything for that."
The End of Mr. Y is truly imaginative and weaves interesting theory in with the narrative. This is a smart book that completely engages the emotions, senses and intellect. It is definitely one of my favorite books of the past few years.
That said, I waited over a year to pick up The End of Mr. Y - oddly enough at exactly the right moment I needed to read it.
An entirely different experience! While Thomas still managed to create characters I cared nothing about, the premise of Mr. Y is absolutely fascinating. The author's background knowledge of philosophy, theology, and literature is woven flawlessly into the plot presenting ideas I obsessed over after finishing the book.
The ending was impossible to see coming as were the twists & turns of plot. Thomas is all about ideas and certainly there were aggravating moments when this reader wished she could argue with some of the characters!
In a time when most fiction isn't worth bothering with as so many authors are afraid to inspire readers to actually "think", this book stands out as one of the best I've read in years. The only reason Mr. Y didn't receive five stars was the characterization - easy to put down a book and forget it if the characters are flat and well, repulsive at times. Yet to do that with Mr. Y would be to miss the treasure hidden in the dirt. Reading this book challenges the reader to question reality and rigidly held beliefs. How often does that happen?
I can't wait to read this book again - though I'd still like to argue with the main character about Derrida!
On a personal note, thank you Scarlett Thomas for introducing me to "St. Jude" - I'd never heard of this particular saint. Discovering him now was an eerie synchronicity making the book even more mysterious and one of the rare novels I'll read a second time.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Italy on November 12, 2022
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.
Story:
Ariel arbeitet für ihre Doktorarbeit in einem völligen Nischenfach, für das sich genau genommen nur sie selbst und ihr Doktorvater interessieren: den englischen Schriftsteller Thomas Lumas, welcher nach Fertigstellung seines letzten Buches (The End Of Mr Y) spurlos verschwand. Genauso wie der Lektor, der Drucker und überhaupt jeder, der mit diesem Buch in Berührung kam - inklusive Ariels Doktorvater. Per Zufall gerät jenes seltene und angeblich verflucht Buch in Ariels Besitz.
Obwohl der Fluch des Buches fast berühmter als das Werk selbst ist, beschließt Ariel "The End Of Mr Y" zu lesen - in der Hoffnung herauszufinden, was mit ihrem Doktorvater geschehen ist. Kaum beginnt sie mit der Lektüre, muss Ariel feststellen, dass sich hinter "The End Of Mr Y" weit mehr verbirgt als sie ahnen konnte. Und auch die zwei Schläger die plötzlich hinter ihr her sind lassen nicht Gutes ahnen. Was als literarische Detektivgeschichte beginnt, verdichtet sich nach und nach zu einer fantastischen Reise hinter die Grenzen von Realität, Wissen, Glauben, Wahrheit...
Wenn Du ein Buch in Deinem Besitz hättest, auf dem ein Fluch lastet, würdest Du es lesen?
Meine Meinung:
Nach dem Cover hat mich natürlich die Frage gereizt: wenn "The End Of Mr Y" verflucht ist - lese ICH es dann? Das habe ich (und zum Glück bin ich noch da).
Von Anfang an ist klar, dass hinter diesem Buch mehr stecken muss als augenscheinlich, und es stellt sich heraus, dass MrY das Tor zu einer anderen Sphäre ist, zu einer Metaebene des Geistes, die es erlaubt, als mentaler Zaungast den Gedanken anderer Menschen zu lauschen. Ein schwerer Brocken für den aufgeklärten Leser und die nicht minder naturwissenschaftlich geprägte Ariel.
Die Jagd durch die Welt der Materie und die der Sphäre ist spannend und aufregend erzählt, zumal man selten mehr weiß als Ariel selber. Und die stürzt sich nun sehr unbesonnen in medias res.
So gilt es herauszufinden, WAS diese Sphäre genau ist, aber auch was Ariels Doktorvater zugestoßen ist und warum plötzlich irgendwelche Männer hinter Ariel her sind (und zwar nicht auf die "Blume&Pralinen"-Art, sondern die etwas handfestere und endgültigere Weise).
Vor dem Hintergrund dieser phantastischen Erkundungs- und Survival-Tour stellt das Buch nebenher ganz spielerisch die aktuellen Theorien zur Beschaffenheit unseres Universums dar und stellt ganz unaufdringlich grundlegende Fragen nach Verantwortlichkeit, Mitgefühl und Opferbereitschaft. Und stellt, mit der Metasphäre als Gedankenexperiment die Frage nach dem Ursprung des Lebens - und findet gegen Ende eine (für mich) völlig unerwartete Antwort. Ob man mit diesem Schlusspunkt einverstanden ist, muss wohl jeder nach der Lektüre selber entscheiden, ein interessanter Twist und glänzender Abschluss ist es allemal.
Von der etwas phantastisch anmutenden Story um verschwundene Professoren und Geistessphären sollte man sich nicht abschrecken lassen - MrY liest sich spannend, abwechslungsreich und bleibt dabei mehr im Her und Jetzt als mancher Krimi. Zumindest im Englischen ist die sprachliche Ausgestaltung sehr lebendig und flüssig und zieht einen richtig in das Geschehen hinein.
Wer sich noch ein kleines bisschen für das aktuelle Geschehen im Streit um den BigBang interessiert ohne sich gleich mit irgendwelchen Fachjournalen belasten zu wollen, kann nichts falsch machen.
(Vergleiche mit dem ehrgeizigen aber langatmigen "Sophies Welt" sind übrigens völlig unangebracht.)