Shade
New Member
It must be four or five years now since someone first recommended Scottish physicist-cum-novelist Andrew Crumey's fiction to me. Eventually, a couple of years ago, I got around to reading a copy of his then-latest novel, Mr Mee. Here is what I thought about it at the time.
Crumey is compared to Calvino and Borges and that's true in the sense that this is a novel of ideas rather than plot or characterisation. It comes in three strands, told in cycling chapters. We have Mr. Mee, an elderly Scot who gets involved in the world of online pornography via "the coincidence of a flat tyre and a shower of rain." Then there is the story of Farrand and Minard, copyists in the late 18th century who are mentioned by Rousseau in his Confessions: in this story they try to track down the killer of a neighbouring girl. Finally there is Dr. Petrie's narrative, telling of his infatuation with a student, his study of Proust and Rousseau ... and his book about Farrand and Minard.
And so we discover that the three stories are of course interlinked, though the full extent of the connection does not become apparent until the epilogue, told in a fourth voice. I thought the book was fantastically erudite and impressive in all sorts of ways but it didn't really hit me in the gut or heart; it rarely ventured out of head territory. Part of the problem might be that Crumey seems to be writing about very specific factual subjects that he is fascinated by, without necessarily making the reader share his love. I say this because according to sources I've read, his previous novel Pfitz also deals, like Mr. Mee, in Rousseau and Rosier's Encyclopaedia and D'Alembert - and the latter is also presumably the subject of another of his novels, D'Alembert's Principle. I think that the reworking of specific factual subjects - rather than the revisiting of broader obsessional themes, which all writers engage in - can lead to ever decreasing circles (see John Irving's old triumvirate of Vienna, wrestling and bears, and see how he improved when he shook free of them), and it may be that Mr. Mee is not his best book for that reason.
I also think Mr. Mee was intended to be broadly comic, at least in two of the settings, and that didn't really work for me. The crosstalk of Ferrand and Minard was a bit music-hall, and Mr. Mee's comic naivety of all things modern, technological and pornographic ("I only wanted a few beaver shots, after all") got a bit wearing after the first, ooh, 300 pages. It does, however, have a good opening line, which more or less drew me to buy it in the first place - "It's said of the Xanthic sect that they believed fire to be a form of life, since it has the ability to reproduce itself" - and now that I've told you it, you don't need to.
I now wonder whether that was an unnecessarily harsh conclusion, because I've just read Crumey's latest novel, Mobius Dick, and it's a fizzingly brilliant piece of work. The reason it makes me doubt my earlier judgement of Mr Mee is because the two books are so similar in many ways. True, this time he has done the Irving thing and shaken free the previous obsessions; but the book is still littered with erudition in references to Thomas Mann, Schrodinger, Melville, Goethe, Schumann, Brahms and many more besides. It's amazing, really, that he manages to find room for fictional characters too, and such well-defined ones. And again we have a series of three separate worlds (or so it seems). The characters exist in parallel universes, or possibly (don't want to give too much away) stories within stories, which might bring to mind Iain Banks's Walking on Glass, or David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Mitchell's much-garlanded opus is a good reference point, in fact, because to my mind Mobius Dick is, at half the length, just as clever and imaginative, more satisfyingly and subtly interwoven, and properly complete in a way that Cloud Atlas wasn't quite. Plus it has wit oozing out of its fibres, particularly in the sections entitled Harry's Tale.
It's a curiosity of the very best books I read that I can find much less to say about them (other than Read this!) than I can about books I hate. However: the story goes like this. John Ringer, theoretical physicist, finds himself assaulted by the memory of a lost love as he travels to Scotland to deliver a speech on a new technology which could deliver quantum computing. The business suits are slavering over it but Ringer has doubts, fearing that the creation of huge energies within the 'vacuum array' could lead to the failure of wave probabilities to collapse - the underpinning of quantum theory that Schrodinger mocked with his moggy thought experiment - and thus (wake up! We're getting to it) the creation of alternative or multiple universes, and/or the destruction of our own.
Meanwhile: a man has woken up in a mysterious clinic, where he is told he is suffering from a little-known condition of memory which cannot be treated. He suspects he is the victim of some sort of experiment. And also: at the same time we are told of the composer Schumann and the aforementioned Schrodinger, and their trips to a sanatorium which inspired Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.
It becomes clear from early in the book - with references to the British Democratic Republic, the First Minister, and the Restructuring - that the story itself is being related from a parallel universe, or at least that one of the stories is. Unless they are all the same one... The conceit continues to the end, where Crumey ties everything up neatly (or rather, very messily) and even gets a dig in at Bush and Blair besides. What more could mortal readers desire? Mobius Dick has a kink and a twist in every chapter, is clever, playful, head-spinningly inventive, and manages the almost impossible trick of being intensely provocative and effortlessly entertaining at the same time. Needless to say, copies of the now out-of-print earlier novels Music, in a Foreign Language and D'Alembert's Principle are now on their way to me via Amazon Marketplace.
Interesting to see that, on what appears to be Crumey's official website, there's an official pronunciation guide which advises readers that his name is not pronounced Crummy. Really: no reminder required.
Crumey is compared to Calvino and Borges and that's true in the sense that this is a novel of ideas rather than plot or characterisation. It comes in three strands, told in cycling chapters. We have Mr. Mee, an elderly Scot who gets involved in the world of online pornography via "the coincidence of a flat tyre and a shower of rain." Then there is the story of Farrand and Minard, copyists in the late 18th century who are mentioned by Rousseau in his Confessions: in this story they try to track down the killer of a neighbouring girl. Finally there is Dr. Petrie's narrative, telling of his infatuation with a student, his study of Proust and Rousseau ... and his book about Farrand and Minard.
And so we discover that the three stories are of course interlinked, though the full extent of the connection does not become apparent until the epilogue, told in a fourth voice. I thought the book was fantastically erudite and impressive in all sorts of ways but it didn't really hit me in the gut or heart; it rarely ventured out of head territory. Part of the problem might be that Crumey seems to be writing about very specific factual subjects that he is fascinated by, without necessarily making the reader share his love. I say this because according to sources I've read, his previous novel Pfitz also deals, like Mr. Mee, in Rousseau and Rosier's Encyclopaedia and D'Alembert - and the latter is also presumably the subject of another of his novels, D'Alembert's Principle. I think that the reworking of specific factual subjects - rather than the revisiting of broader obsessional themes, which all writers engage in - can lead to ever decreasing circles (see John Irving's old triumvirate of Vienna, wrestling and bears, and see how he improved when he shook free of them), and it may be that Mr. Mee is not his best book for that reason.
I also think Mr. Mee was intended to be broadly comic, at least in two of the settings, and that didn't really work for me. The crosstalk of Ferrand and Minard was a bit music-hall, and Mr. Mee's comic naivety of all things modern, technological and pornographic ("I only wanted a few beaver shots, after all") got a bit wearing after the first, ooh, 300 pages. It does, however, have a good opening line, which more or less drew me to buy it in the first place - "It's said of the Xanthic sect that they believed fire to be a form of life, since it has the ability to reproduce itself" - and now that I've told you it, you don't need to.
I now wonder whether that was an unnecessarily harsh conclusion, because I've just read Crumey's latest novel, Mobius Dick, and it's a fizzingly brilliant piece of work. The reason it makes me doubt my earlier judgement of Mr Mee is because the two books are so similar in many ways. True, this time he has done the Irving thing and shaken free the previous obsessions; but the book is still littered with erudition in references to Thomas Mann, Schrodinger, Melville, Goethe, Schumann, Brahms and many more besides. It's amazing, really, that he manages to find room for fictional characters too, and such well-defined ones. And again we have a series of three separate worlds (or so it seems). The characters exist in parallel universes, or possibly (don't want to give too much away) stories within stories, which might bring to mind Iain Banks's Walking on Glass, or David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Mitchell's much-garlanded opus is a good reference point, in fact, because to my mind Mobius Dick is, at half the length, just as clever and imaginative, more satisfyingly and subtly interwoven, and properly complete in a way that Cloud Atlas wasn't quite. Plus it has wit oozing out of its fibres, particularly in the sections entitled Harry's Tale.
It's a curiosity of the very best books I read that I can find much less to say about them (other than Read this!) than I can about books I hate. However: the story goes like this. John Ringer, theoretical physicist, finds himself assaulted by the memory of a lost love as he travels to Scotland to deliver a speech on a new technology which could deliver quantum computing. The business suits are slavering over it but Ringer has doubts, fearing that the creation of huge energies within the 'vacuum array' could lead to the failure of wave probabilities to collapse - the underpinning of quantum theory that Schrodinger mocked with his moggy thought experiment - and thus (wake up! We're getting to it) the creation of alternative or multiple universes, and/or the destruction of our own.
Meanwhile: a man has woken up in a mysterious clinic, where he is told he is suffering from a little-known condition of memory which cannot be treated. He suspects he is the victim of some sort of experiment. And also: at the same time we are told of the composer Schumann and the aforementioned Schrodinger, and their trips to a sanatorium which inspired Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.
It becomes clear from early in the book - with references to the British Democratic Republic, the First Minister, and the Restructuring - that the story itself is being related from a parallel universe, or at least that one of the stories is. Unless they are all the same one... The conceit continues to the end, where Crumey ties everything up neatly (or rather, very messily) and even gets a dig in at Bush and Blair besides. What more could mortal readers desire? Mobius Dick has a kink and a twist in every chapter, is clever, playful, head-spinningly inventive, and manages the almost impossible trick of being intensely provocative and effortlessly entertaining at the same time. Needless to say, copies of the now out-of-print earlier novels Music, in a Foreign Language and D'Alembert's Principle are now on their way to me via Amazon Marketplace.
Interesting to see that, on what appears to be Crumey's official website, there's an official pronunciation guide which advises readers that his name is not pronounced Crummy. Really: no reminder required.