The End Of Mr. Y

"I read this book years and years ago, when I was living in the UK, and I was just floored by it: it’s beautiful. It’s lyrical, it’s dense, and it captures a state of ennui that was very much part of my own life at that stage as a young graduate student. I taught Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library this year in one of my online courses for the MFA, and one of the things I kept thinking about is how The End of Mr. Y is the more literary and far more cynical version of The Midnight Library. It’s a really gorgeous book. It has this fantastical element – it’s not magical realism, there’s definitely the element of “this does not take place in our world” – but it’s not often brought up in as a fantasy novel or a paranormal novel. And it absolutely is! I really wanted to put it on people’s radars, because they might not have heard of it, and I think it’s a book that they would really enjoy. It is absolutely bizarre. It’s about a woman who’s a PhD student, and her topic of study is this 19th century writer. She’s been researching him, and she finds an extremely rare copy of his book, The End of Mr. Y. It’s a bit like in Martin Amis’ book The Information , where there’s an author who has a rough draft that no one can get through without migraines, and somebody finally finishes the whole thing and dies. It’s similar: anyone who’s read this book has died. Using the book she brews a potion, and she can actually enter other people’s minds and their thoughts. It’s not a psychic thing: it’s actually entering, and there’s this whole place called the troposphere… It is a bizarre book, but it’s actually very of the now. There have been a lot of recent books written about quantum physics , and it’s got these elements of quantum physics, and of the postmodern novel – it’s very philosophical. Very much asking: “What is the point of living?” It’s a very dark read, but it’s also weirdly lovely. If you’re wanting a beach read right now, it’s not your choice. If you’re wanting something that is – I don’t want to say morally ambiguous – but not afraid to look at life as something that can’t always be summarised on a bumper sticker, then this is your book. I’m talking about quantum physics with a PhD in English: I don’t know what I’m talking about! I’ve been reading Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem – he obviously knows what he’s talking about. But I feel I’ve just been reading a spate of books – I was just watching Loki – where so much of quantum physics has trickled down. I don’t actually know if most of us know what we’re talking about. There’s so much more science fiction-fantasy. Gideon The Ninth is a great example of that: is it science fiction? Is it? I don’t know! And I love that. It all goes back to Star Wars , which is basically warlocks in space. And there are writers like Ben Aaranovitch, using that Newtonian system to build a scientific magic. A lot of writers like the allure of the genuinely bonkers ideas that are part of quantum physics (and the version they’ve been sold by Marvel!); and also the interesting intersection of science and fantasy . Is it scientific? – I don’t think so, realistically, but it’s fun. It gives some ballast to fantasy. I mean, they’re just really provocative ideas. Who could not be intrigued when they read about quantum physics?"