Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett ThomasHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010 (Originally Canongate, 2010)

Meg, the narrator of Our Tragic Universe, is a writer: she’s been working for years on a novel that she can’t seem to finish, or even properly start. In the meantime, she’s been ghostwriting YA books, and also writing her own genre fiction, and also reviewing pop science books for a newspaper, the latter of which she’s in the midst of doing when this book starts: the review is due the following day, and she hasn’t actually finished reading the book she’s reviewing. (Meg’s a procrastinator, clearly: two days before the review is due, she’s worried because she hasn’t even looked yet to see what book she’s reviewing, exactly. Which totally made her appealing to me.) So right: she’s reading the book, which is called The Science of Living Forever and turns out to be about the Omega Point (which is a real theory: go read about Frank Tipler): the moment when the universe is “pure energy, capable of everything imaginable, just for a moment” (5). And in this moment, according to the book Meg’s reading, the universe creates a new universe, an eternal one, in which everyone who has ever lived is brought back to life, forever. This is all definitely unappealing to Meg, who’s not so interested in this whole living forever thing: she’s more interested a universe structured like human life as we know it: which is to say, with an end-point.

Meg’s interested in structure in general, actually, and so, clearly, is Scarlett Thomas: a lot of this book is about different ideas of narrative structure, different ways to construct a story, and also about different ways to live. Early in the book, Meg’s talking to a friend who’s having an affair, trying to help the friend construct a plausible alibi for herself. “How do you tell a really good story?” is what Meg’s friend asks her, and Meg’s advice is to “keep it simple,” to “base the story on cause and effect,” and to have “a problem, a climax, and a solution” (13). But that’s not the only kind of story you can tell, and in life cause and effect aren’t necessarily clear: at one point Meg talks about her academic friends Frank and Vi and their re-enactment of Captain Cook’s death: “Was he killed because he demanded too much generosity? Or was it because he’d inadvertently become a character in a ritual, and this character wasn’t supposed to return?” (23). Stories can be dangerous, see?

Captain Cook’s not the only one in danger of becoming a character in a story, with possible negative consequences: the author of the book Meg reads about the Omega Point has a second book that’s all about how to gain immortality, which is basically all about going on a hero’s quest. But that idea of the quest, the idea of being a hero and traveling a set path with a set goal, can be limiting (it leaves out all the things to do in life that aren’t quests, and all the things to be that aren’t heroes). But the hero’s quest isn’t the only possibility. Meg’s friend Vi is doing work on the “storyless story” and reading lots of Zen stories and looking at other non-linear narrative as research.

Not that this book is all about theories of the universe and narrative structure: there are concrete bits, too. Meg’s got a sweet dog, and a boyfriend who’s not particularly a good match for her, and a crush on an older man; she lives in Devonshire, whose landscape, with the River Dart and the sea, the towns and the ferries across the river, is pleasingly described, in passages like this:

I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens. (268)

But oh, the writerly bits might be my favorite. I loved this, about the things Meg has written and scrapped:

I’d invented a writer character from New York who deletes a whole book until it’s a haiku and then deletes that, but then I deleted him too. […] In the past few years I’d invented a couple of sisters, called Io and Xanthe, who have lost everything in their lives, a building site with yellow cranes, a run-down B&B owned by a chewed-up old woman called Sylvia, an inconsiderate boyfriend, a married lover, a girl in a coma telling her life story from the beginning in real-time, a life-support machine wired up to the Internet, a charismatic A-level physics teacher called Dylan, a psychic game show, an extended game of ‘Dare’ that goes wrong, some people trapped in a sauna, a car accident, a meaningful tattoo, dreams of a post-oil world full of flickering candles, a plane crash, an imposter, a character with OCD who follows any written instructions she sees, some creepy junk mail, a sweet teenage boy on a skateboard and various other things, all of which had now been deleted as well. (31)

Fun, right?