There are the books I think of as my favourites (conveniently recently compiled here) and then there's a subset of those which are most inspiring for my own writing, and PopCo and The End of Mr Y have sat snugly amidst those since I read them in succession now nearly a decade ago. It's both of those capacities that have led me to re-read them back to back over the last few weeks, and what a pleasure to find that they hold up.
Re-reads of favourites can go a few different ways. Sometimes the book's significantly less amazing than it once was, for whatever combination of then/now circumstances and the qualities of the book itself (Brideshead Revisited was like that when I started trying to re-read it a while back), while when it is still great, that can be in ways which have evolved since the last read (for me The Great Gatsby is the clearest example) or in ways that are fundamentally still the same as what draw me to it in the first time - and both of these two of Scarlett Thomas's are very much in that last category.
So here are a few things I remember liking or noticing about them last time which stood out again (in some cases with further observations this time round):
Re-reads of favourites can go a few different ways. Sometimes the book's significantly less amazing than it once was, for whatever combination of then/now circumstances and the qualities of the book itself (Brideshead Revisited was like that when I started trying to re-read it a while back), while when it is still great, that can be in ways which have evolved since the last read (for me The Great Gatsby is the clearest example) or in ways that are fundamentally still the same as what draw me to it in the first time - and both of these two of Scarlett Thomas's are very much in that last category.
So here are a few things I remember liking or noticing about them last time which stood out again (in some cases with further observations this time round):
- Both have great openings - exciting in an unusual way that is immersive and makes me want to read more. It's mostly in the voice and perspective, but also in the strongly visual sense of mystery and uncertainty that both create: Alice at the train station at night as her perceptions go a bit wonky in PopCo; Ariel evacuating her office as a nearby building collapses ground and then stumbling across the mysterious book in The End of Mr Y.
- First person present tense. So good! But, I suspect, also a limitation which contributes to Thomas's use of various crutches across both books, especially PopCo: extended exposition (often via interior monologue); dialogue which can be very explain-y (even though that's consistent with the characters' backgrounds); long slabs of back/side-story (pirates etc). There's also the accumulation of often quite banal descriptive detail, but I think that's more a feature than a bug in relation to the books' phenomenological approaches.
- The extended intellectual excursions - about homoeopathy, cryptography/cryptanalysis, mathematics, quantum physics, consciousness, phenomenological existentialism, theories of hyper-reality, the 'linguistic turn' and more - which don't have anything direct to do with story or character (but are important to the whole) are another crutch, but probably not due to 1stPPT.
- Related to the two points above - part of why the plotting of PopCo is so unusual is that there's not much plotting there ... at least not in the present-day of the book's narrative. (This is one that I only noticed this time, although the line from a review in my edition's inside front has always appealed to me: "No heroine this year was more beguiling than Alice in Scarlett Thomas's PopCo, a character so wayward that she went to bed with her homoeopathic remedies for much of the book until she felt like joining in the plot again.")
- In their different ways, these books are also pretty much about the meaning of life or at least the nature of reality, in a way that's much more overt than most novels allow themselves to be, especially The End of Mr Y. Which is excellent!
- This time Alice from PopCo and Ariel from The End of Mr Y were more distinct from each other in my mind than last time, even though they definitely have a bunch of similarities in terms of how they perceive the world and their interests and habits they have (generally bad habits stemming from worse impulses beyond their own control but of which they are very aware).
- I don't remember noticing the (obvious) pun in the title of The End of Mr Y before, although maybe I did and just forgot, not least given that Ariel literally uses the phrase "the end of mystery" at one point.
- Their unabashed contemporariness is still something I like about them - the way they are so explicitly located in the modern world, technologically and otherwise. But the world moves at a ferocious rate. Ten years ago in The End of Mr Y, one (older) character finds it remarkably postmodern that his (younger) lover has an ipod; today it feels anachronistic to still use that same device.
Unsurprisingly, the flaws in these two novels stand out a lot more now, I suspect more because I'm a decade older myself than because these have been second reads. The three biggest ones are the tendency towards long, usually ideas/concept-driven explanations of things, the rubberiness of the plot and character trajectories, and (to a lesser extent) the tendency towards thinness in the characterisations in general.
But, just like last time, those are all things that I notice without them particularly detracting from my enjoyment; somehow, both novels feel like they're always racing forward despite their unconventionality. (Her more recent novels are an interesting compare and contrast. I admire both Our Tragic Universe and The Seed Collectors more than I like them - although The Seed Collectors in particular is really excellent - but in both I can really see the way she is deliberately putting pressure on conventional uses of narrative and characterisation towards interesting ends, whereas in PopCo and The End of Mr Y it feels like the unconventionality is more a consequence of the - fascinating - high concepts with which she started.)
So there it is. How I relate to these books has evolved, but they remain as totemic as ever.
But, just like last time, those are all things that I notice without them particularly detracting from my enjoyment; somehow, both novels feel like they're always racing forward despite their unconventionality. (Her more recent novels are an interesting compare and contrast. I admire both Our Tragic Universe and The Seed Collectors more than I like them - although The Seed Collectors in particular is really excellent - but in both I can really see the way she is deliberately putting pressure on conventional uses of narrative and characterisation towards interesting ends, whereas in PopCo and The End of Mr Y it feels like the unconventionality is more a consequence of the - fascinating - high concepts with which she started.)
So there it is. How I relate to these books has evolved, but they remain as totemic as ever.
