Ariel Manto is in the slightly weird position of being a PhD student without anyone to supervise her work: she’s writing a thesis on thought experiments, but her supervisor, who is one of the few people in the world to have done research on Thomas E. Lumas, a (fictional) nineteenth-century writer who is also one of Ariel’s main research interests, went missing the week after she started. But Ariel’s been carrying on anyhow, until one day a building collapse at the university where she works changes everything for her. She can’t get to her car because no one’s allowed near the collapsed building, which means she has to walk home, and she ends up stopping in a secondhand bookshop because it’s cold out. She asks, as she always does, if they’ve got anything by Lumas: she’s shocked to be shown a copy of The End of Mr. Y, a novel of his that is impossibly rare (she knows of one extant copy) and supposedly cursed. (Lumas died the day after it was published; his publisher, editor, and typesetter all died while working on it.) Of course, Ariel buys it, despite the fact that she really can’t afford it, and takes it home and starts reading (though she soon finds that the novel is missing a page). We get to read bits of this fictional The End of Mr. Y, too, as a story within a story, reading the preface, in which Lumas talks about a “place where dreams and automata are one, where the very fibres of being are conjured from memories no more real or unreal than the dream in which we may observe them,” as Ariel reads it, too (26).
This aspect of reading, the way the reader of a novel can experience the action of a book alongside its characters experiencing the actions of the book/their lives, is something Ariel herself thinks about as she reads. Like Ariel’s narrative, Mr. Y’s story is a first-person narration: Mr. Y is traveling for business and ends up visiting a fair, where he sees a stage illusion he wants to know more about. A man who introduces himself as the “fairground doctor” says he’ll show him, and does so by giving Mr. Y a potion. Ariel gets a bit worried: “Am I Mr. Y? Do I have to be for the book to work?” (44). She talks about how, as a child, she would pick a secondary character rather than the protagonist to identify with, “because bad things, or more troublingly, big things tended to happen to” protagonists, and how she “couldn’t cope with the feeling that these things were also happening” to her, “to the self that you project into fiction when you read” (ibid.). The potion Mr. Y takes, meanwhile, allows him another sort of reader-like experience: after drinking it, he finds he’s in the mind of the man at the fairground whose stage illusion he wanted to learn about: he remains conscious of his own identity, but shares the man’s thoughts, sensations, memories, and experiences. Having had this experience once, Mr. Y wants to have it again, and resolves to visit the fairground doctor again to get more of the potion.
The missing page in Ariel’s copy of The End of Mr. Y turns out to be the one containing the recipe for the potion Mr. Y was given; she manages to find it and, of course, decides to make the potion, though she’s pretty sure it won’t do anything: it’s a homeopathic remedy mixed in holy water. But as it turns out, it works: she has the same kind of experience Mr. Y did, though she ends up in the mind of a mouse (and then another mouse, and then a cat) before she ends up in the mind of a person. She realizes her supervisor must also have made and tried the potion, and that it must be related to his disappearance: and from there the plot gets a bit nuts, with violent ex-CIA agents trying to get the ingredients of the potion from Ariel, and Ariel’s interactions with a new potential romantic interest who’s also trying to protect her from the ex-CIA guys, and the mouse god Apollo Smintheus, and Ariel’s further explorations of the Troposphere, as Lumas called the place from which you can enter the mind of another. Not that a bit nuts is bad: it’s fast-paced and immensely readable and smart, as Ariel ponders what the Troposphere is and what it might mean, e.g. the idea of thought somehow making the world.
Meanwhile, I totally love the attention to certain kinds of detail in this book: in the story within a story, there are various Victorian products/advertisements that Mr. Y mentions, which are totally real; when Ariel first enters the Troposphere, there’s a chunk of binary code which, yes, says something when you translate it to ASCII. ♥!
Leave a Reply