PopCo
Around Spring/Summer of last year I read The End Of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas and thought it was AMAZING, I genuinely loved it, the story and the philosophical questions it posed. As a result I definitely wanted to read other work by her. I didn't do so immediately largely because I didn't want to read PopCo in too close a promixity to The End Of Mr Y, I wanted to enjoy it in it's own right. I didn't want to spend time reading it wishing I was still reading Mr Y.
Where Mr Y tackled quantum physics and existential philosophy within a fictional structure; PopCo has two strands, mathematics specifically cryptography and corporate globalisation. If you think those two don't sound like they go together you'd be right.
PopCo is the story of Alice Butler, a traditional geeky misfit who wrote crosswords for a living until she was headhunted by toy company PopCo. Alice wears a necklace, a gift from her grandfather at the age of nine, within this necklace lies a key to an age old mystery a secret which pervaded Alice's childhood. Alice travels to a country manor to participate in a work team building conference but whilst there recieves a series of coded messages, but who are they from, and what are they about? I loved this side of the story, it was just good old fashioned storytelling at it's best. You cared about Alice, her development as a character during her time at the PopCo retreat, the new general knowledge imparted to you as a reader via the fiction, her rebellious yet moral grandfather. The book also does some quirky things like including a cake recipe, a crossword and a list of prime numbers, and some great lateral thinking puzzles. There is also a painfully accurate depiction of what it's like to be a teenage girl.
Which is why when a degree of authorial intrusion occurs towards the end of the novel it is very grating. One character becomes a mouthpiece for the anti globalisation movement and rails against corporate exploitation, the global village and the tricks played upon the consumer, particularly the teenage consumer. I went to university around the time that No Logo by Naomi Klein was published and we studied it a lot during one or two semesters. The arguments presented in PopCo frustrated me, as it seemed very much an attempt to educate the reader upon these matters, and I had been there, done that quite some time ago. It felt very much like the author herself on a soapbox preaching to her readership than part of a natural progression in the novel itself. The resolution of the story of Alice's grandfather, by far the best aspect of the novel ends up becoming something of a forgotten postscript.
I also REALLY hated the postmodern twist towards the end when Alice tells her friends she will write a book about what it was like to work for a toy company. They tell her to change the name. So she calls it PopCo. Sorry if that's a spoiler, but I had to mention it, because it seriously annoyed me.
I hate stuff like that, the first time it's clever but not the umpteenth.
Did I enjoy PopCo? Yes, I did. I loved all the mystery aspect, Alice's childhood etc, but I hated the end and I hated being unsubtly preached at, both about globalisation and about veganism. I do think that it would be a great starting point for the more mature teenage girl as an introduction to socio-political issues, I don't know so much if it encourages the development of independent thought and debate though as it pretty much tells you what you ought to think.
I liked certain aspects of this novel, but it's messy and at times irritating. 7/10
Showing posts with label Mysterious. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mysterious. Show all posts
Saturday, 21 January 2012
Saturday, 2 July 2011
Book #55 The End Of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas
The End Of Mr Y
I want to say right from the start that I thought The End Of Mr Y was brilliant. As soon as I started reading it I felt like this was a book I was meant to read. To borrow a popular film quote : "It had me at hello". The protagonist Ariel Monto is an English Literature graduate, with a recent burgeoning interest in theoretical physics. This immediately struck a chord with me on a personal level. When we meet Ariel she is a Phd student at an unnamed London university with an interest in little-known 18th century author Thomas E Lumas. Lumas wrote among others a novel called The End Of Mr Y, after which our novel takes its title. The novel is rare and there are but few copies in existence, it is also rumoured to be cursed.
The first section of the book is really the novel at its best. I was taken with much of the writing, and enjoyed many individual quotes about physics and other things, for example :
Or the description of a feeling Ariel experiences :
There was just a lot I liked about the opening of this book, the elusive cursed book, the academic setting and the character of Ariel herself, someone I felt I understood. I believe that detractors of this book have called it pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, but, having so recently levelled that accusation at Ali Smith's 'There But For The' I can safely say that Scarlett Thomas's 'The End Of Mr Y' bears no comparison to it. Instead, my position is that the book is incredibly intelligent and so is, clearly, its author. Where it succeeds and mightily over the former book, is that its storytelling is king. It is not a book trying to be clever, making some redundant point about society that might have been interesting ten years ago, it is actually genuinely clever. For there to be a fictional tale about a woman on a journey of discovery in a fourth dimension, a fantasy, magical realism tale; that pulls off discussions on quantum physics and philosophy, existential and otherwise, making them integral to as opposed to harming the story is a feat indeed. However, if you don't want your mind seriously taxed by difficult questions of science and existence, it would be best avoided.
The middle third is somewhat difficult bearing the similarities it did to 1980's computer games and virtual reality with shades of the 1999 film 'The Matrix'. It faltered somewhat for me in this section, though I did like the concept of "Pedesis" which is brought in at this stage.
Though I have seen criticism of the ending and expected something awful I was blown away by it. Whilst looking back near the beginning of the book after completion, I noticed a foreshadowing that I had not done on the first read. This book is ABSOLUTELY a novel which bears re-reading, not least for its philosophical and theoretical concepts which are worth further exploration. I read Paradise Lost about a year ago, and this book along with others I have read this year including Mirror, Mirror and The Vintner's Luck has clearly taken some inspiration from Milton's epic poem. I think once you've read a classic like Milton you start to see his impact everywhere. I loved the ending, loved it, and would argue down and defend it against detractors.
Responses to The End Of Mr Y are very clearly polarised and I would say that this is a book you will either fall in love with or detest, fortunately I am of the former camp. And though reader responses to Thomas's other novels 'Popco' and 'Our Tragic Universe' are equally polarised I look forward to reading them with serious enthusiasm.
For me this is a Read This: 10/10 book, but I have the objectivity to recognise that for some people this book may be the exact opposite.
I want to say right from the start that I thought The End Of Mr Y was brilliant. As soon as I started reading it I felt like this was a book I was meant to read. To borrow a popular film quote : "It had me at hello". The protagonist Ariel Monto is an English Literature graduate, with a recent burgeoning interest in theoretical physics. This immediately struck a chord with me on a personal level. When we meet Ariel she is a Phd student at an unnamed London university with an interest in little-known 18th century author Thomas E Lumas. Lumas wrote among others a novel called The End Of Mr Y, after which our novel takes its title. The novel is rare and there are but few copies in existence, it is also rumoured to be cursed.
The first section of the book is really the novel at its best. I was taken with much of the writing, and enjoyed many individual quotes about physics and other things, for example :
Or this description about the weather :I didn't go further and say that I want to know everything because of the high probability that if you know everything there'll be something to actually believe in.
Monday morning and the sky is the colour of sad weddings.
Or the description of a feeling Ariel experiences :
On days like this I do not feel afraid of death or pain. I don't know if it's tiredness, the book, or even the curse, but today as I walk through this housing estate, there's a feeling inside me like the potential nuclear fission of every atom in my body: a chain reaction of energy that could take me to the limits of everything. As I walk along, I almost desire some kind of violence: to live, to die, just for the experience of it. I'm so hyped up that suddenly I want to fuck the world or be fucked by it. Yes, I want to be penetrated by the shrapnel of a million explosions. I want to see my own blood.I don't know whether others will like these quotes, but personally I found them insightful. I could have sat here and listed many other quotes but I decided to stop at 3.
There was just a lot I liked about the opening of this book, the elusive cursed book, the academic setting and the character of Ariel herself, someone I felt I understood. I believe that detractors of this book have called it pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, but, having so recently levelled that accusation at Ali Smith's 'There But For The' I can safely say that Scarlett Thomas's 'The End Of Mr Y' bears no comparison to it. Instead, my position is that the book is incredibly intelligent and so is, clearly, its author. Where it succeeds and mightily over the former book, is that its storytelling is king. It is not a book trying to be clever, making some redundant point about society that might have been interesting ten years ago, it is actually genuinely clever. For there to be a fictional tale about a woman on a journey of discovery in a fourth dimension, a fantasy, magical realism tale; that pulls off discussions on quantum physics and philosophy, existential and otherwise, making them integral to as opposed to harming the story is a feat indeed. However, if you don't want your mind seriously taxed by difficult questions of science and existence, it would be best avoided.
The middle third is somewhat difficult bearing the similarities it did to 1980's computer games and virtual reality with shades of the 1999 film 'The Matrix'. It faltered somewhat for me in this section, though I did like the concept of "Pedesis" which is brought in at this stage.
Though I have seen criticism of the ending and expected something awful I was blown away by it. Whilst looking back near the beginning of the book after completion, I noticed a foreshadowing that I had not done on the first read. This book is ABSOLUTELY a novel which bears re-reading, not least for its philosophical and theoretical concepts which are worth further exploration. I read Paradise Lost about a year ago, and this book along with others I have read this year including Mirror, Mirror and The Vintner's Luck has clearly taken some inspiration from Milton's epic poem. I think once you've read a classic like Milton you start to see his impact everywhere. I loved the ending, loved it, and would argue down and defend it against detractors.
Responses to The End Of Mr Y are very clearly polarised and I would say that this is a book you will either fall in love with or detest, fortunately I am of the former camp. And though reader responses to Thomas's other novels 'Popco' and 'Our Tragic Universe' are equally polarised I look forward to reading them with serious enthusiasm.
For me this is a Read This: 10/10 book, but I have the objectivity to recognise that for some people this book may be the exact opposite.
Monday, 28 March 2011
Book #15 Notorious by Roberta Lowing
Notorious
They say you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but I'm afraid I did with Notorious. It's cover is stunning, intricate red and gold lines, surrounding a blue oval cut out in it's centre. The lettering of the title also looks like what Notorious means. I also like the word Notorious, the sound and all that it implies.
I bought this book in Borders in Christchurch, New Zealand
(Yes, they still have Borders there : extreme jealousy)
It was published by an Australian publisher, Allen & Unwin and is the work of an Australian writer. A check by me has found it to be unavailable on Amazon UK, but available on Amazon USA, so that's where the link at the top leads to.
As a debut novel this work deserves praise, a LOT of hard work has gone into it, and debut novels are normally not expected to be of this quality.
The main protagonists are Australian, a man going by the alias John Devlin and a woman who remains nameless throughout the novel. The action however bounces us through Poland, Morocco, Fifties Italy, Present Day Italy and Borneo, before bouncing us back again around these locations. The author also plays with the chronology of events so that the reader has occasional difficulty, at least I did, keeping track.
I respect the fact that Lowing does not hold your hand through this novel, or spell anything out, generally I prefer it that way, but, having completed it I'm not sure if the conclusions I have drawn are the correct ones, perhaps that was intentional. If there is one thing this book cannot be accused of, it cannot be accused of lacking mysteriousness.
The entire novel from it's beginning prologue is a mystery. Why is the nameless woman being hunted? Just what did happen to her missing brother? What is the exact relationship between the woman and Devlin? And why, oh why, is that book authored by Arthur Rimbaud so significant? I got to around page 300 before I figured that out and wanted to kick myself.
The descriptive prose weaves a rich tapestry both of location and character, sometimes feeling rather more like poetry, and though we don't know the characters real names I felt that I knew them better than some characters in other novels whose names I did know.
Where I do have a slight criticism is in the dialogue, the woman almost always speaks in a poetic, philosophical, enigmatic way. Many of us experience the phenomena of analysing a past conversation and coming up with a clever answer which we "should have said". This woman always seems to have the clever answer, which I found artificial in a way. It is very pretty to read however.
The books last section reveals a twist/coincidence which I found rather unlikely if I'm honest. A bit like the happy coincidences of certain 19th century novels (I'm looking at you Jane Eyre and Great Expectations) The existence of this strange coincidence though, acts as a way of taking all the strings of the novel and tying them together in a way that is clever. Well, it's clever if I've understood the end of it correctly!
I think that this book is intriguing in every way and has a real sense of the atmosphere of all its locations, making you feel as a present observer, which is a genuine skill. I think however that the lack of a direct and clear explanation of all the things left untold, will definitely frustrate many readers. 8/10
They say you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but I'm afraid I did with Notorious. It's cover is stunning, intricate red and gold lines, surrounding a blue oval cut out in it's centre. The lettering of the title also looks like what Notorious means. I also like the word Notorious, the sound and all that it implies.
I bought this book in Borders in Christchurch, New Zealand
(Yes, they still have Borders there : extreme jealousy)
It was published by an Australian publisher, Allen & Unwin and is the work of an Australian writer. A check by me has found it to be unavailable on Amazon UK, but available on Amazon USA, so that's where the link at the top leads to.
As a debut novel this work deserves praise, a LOT of hard work has gone into it, and debut novels are normally not expected to be of this quality.
The main protagonists are Australian, a man going by the alias John Devlin and a woman who remains nameless throughout the novel. The action however bounces us through Poland, Morocco, Fifties Italy, Present Day Italy and Borneo, before bouncing us back again around these locations. The author also plays with the chronology of events so that the reader has occasional difficulty, at least I did, keeping track.
I respect the fact that Lowing does not hold your hand through this novel, or spell anything out, generally I prefer it that way, but, having completed it I'm not sure if the conclusions I have drawn are the correct ones, perhaps that was intentional. If there is one thing this book cannot be accused of, it cannot be accused of lacking mysteriousness.
The entire novel from it's beginning prologue is a mystery. Why is the nameless woman being hunted? Just what did happen to her missing brother? What is the exact relationship between the woman and Devlin? And why, oh why, is that book authored by Arthur Rimbaud so significant? I got to around page 300 before I figured that out and wanted to kick myself.
The descriptive prose weaves a rich tapestry both of location and character, sometimes feeling rather more like poetry, and though we don't know the characters real names I felt that I knew them better than some characters in other novels whose names I did know.
Where I do have a slight criticism is in the dialogue, the woman almost always speaks in a poetic, philosophical, enigmatic way. Many of us experience the phenomena of analysing a past conversation and coming up with a clever answer which we "should have said". This woman always seems to have the clever answer, which I found artificial in a way. It is very pretty to read however.
The books last section reveals a twist/coincidence which I found rather unlikely if I'm honest. A bit like the happy coincidences of certain 19th century novels (I'm looking at you Jane Eyre and Great Expectations) The existence of this strange coincidence though, acts as a way of taking all the strings of the novel and tying them together in a way that is clever. Well, it's clever if I've understood the end of it correctly!
I think that this book is intriguing in every way and has a real sense of the atmosphere of all its locations, making you feel as a present observer, which is a genuine skill. I think however that the lack of a direct and clear explanation of all the things left untold, will definitely frustrate many readers. 8/10
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