Scarlett Thomas - The end of Mr. Y

I must admit I was a bit sceptical when I started reading the book. The main character Ariel is a bit weird, but as you get to know, and like, her and get absorbed by the story and all the theories of being presented, you just can't stop reading.

Ariel is a loner, who's working on a PhD, but would rather just stay home reading. She likes kinky sex, probably in an attempt to feel alive (she cut herself when she was younger, with the same goal, and that was later replaced by smoking). The story is about a book - The end of Mr. Y - and a recipe in it that can take you to another dimension.

Her lust for and thoughts about sex are fun breaks from the story:

"A quick fuck might be just the thing to break up the afternoon. And other people have tea breaks, don't they?" (p111)

"Once I rubbed out the pencilled-in marginalia from a hundred pages of a book that I wanted to photocopy (long story) and afterwards if felt like I'd been wanking off a giant for a hundred years." (p129)

"In the sexual economy, I've got millions in the offshore account called 'Older Men', but I think I'd get turned down for an account anywhere else."

Ariel's main thesis is that the world is made of language. It's all just quarks and electrons, the only thing making a 'urinal' and a 'painting' different is because we make them different in language (p279). She's got a point when she says that we only see what's in our language - if we can't express it in our language it doesn't quite exist. So, the language limits us. (I wrote about this in my old blog, The importance of languages, and thought that people speaking English might miss out on something as they often have no words for a certain thing, but an endless amount of synonyms.)

Some interesting thoughts about religion are presented too: A story is referred to where the Catholic pope gets served by nuns. The man being served by the women and Ariel thinks: "How could he have missed the bit about everyone being equal in the eyes of God? If this was the wisest Catholic, I certainly didn't want to meet the stupidest one." (p402) Further on: "How is it possible that religion, which claims to be more profound than anything else, still has less of a grasp on humanity than any personnel department in this country? It's not just Christianity, either: how could the Buddhist have missed the bit in their thinking about freedom from desire, when most of them seem to desire to be reincarnated well, and in such a way that they can be a man, and be called 'venerable master', and tell other people what to do?" "Are we the thoughts of God? a poster asks. No, I realise. It's the reverse."

Being an engineer some of the philosophical thoughts are a bit out there, but in all it doesn't matter. This is an excellent book.