Andrew Crumey

I found this book marked down to £3 in a post-Christmas sale, and picked it up just because it looked interestingly challenging. I found it a fascinating blend of philosophy, fantasy and history, but the games Crumey plays with form, ideas and his own characters are dizzying and at times difficult to follow.

The first and longest of the three sections is the most straightforward - an exploration of the life and times of the eighteenth century scientist and philosopher D'Alembert, who worked on Diderot's encyclopedia and believed that the ultimate aim of science was to produce a simple universal model that everything else would follow from. The entertainment is provided by the exploration of his milieu and his unrequited love for a woman who humours him while betraying him.

In the short second part a fictitious Scottish philosopher imagines a dream journey to various planets all of which cause him to come back to fundamental Cartesian questions about his own existence, and the history and provenance of his supposed works is also explored in a playful way.

The third part Tales from Rreinnstadt is apparently linked to, and quotes from, Crumey's previous novel Pfitz. It is a loosely linked set of rather Borgesian philosophical fables exploring the nature of imagination and infinity, gently ridiculing D'Alembert's world view.

This is not a book I would recommend to the casual reader, but it would probably reward a more detailed study, and certainly left me with plenty of interesting questions to ponder.… (meer)

An ordered first novel, this is a 3.5 star effort. It is also mild and polite. The novel concerns political oppression and betrayal in an alternate historical 20C where the UK is subject to a Stalinist regime. The previous two sentences create a tension. Victory gin can help with that. Two of the characters play duets --which makes for brighter mornings. There's a car crash and a great deal of sitting on trains.

There's a good deal of meta reframing going along: found notebooks, the germ of a novel during a nocturnal trip to the toilet. There's also philosophical musing -- destiny and love fare and fall. There a crackpot who claims that physics led him to Jesus and a cure for halitosis. The novel is drab and understated. There is a stirring within, a promise of a wider violent lens. I think I'd prefer that one.… (meer)

A quick glance at the customer reviews of this book on Amazon shows how widely opinion is divided. One five star review asserts that it is 'original, thought-provoking, erudite … and above all great fun' while the next dismisses it as 'confusing and tedious'. I am not sure whether I agree with neither … or perhaps both.

There can certainly be no question about the thought-provoking. In its three hundred pages this book offers a wide swathe of subjects including theoretical physics with cameo appearances from Schrodinger, psychology and the interpretation of dreams, the travails of nineteenth century novelists with an exchange between Hermann Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the descent into mental disrepair of Robert Schumann, all enmeshed with some what-if speculations about the outcome of the last world war and a contemporary physicist's recollections of an old lover. 'What, no ventriloquists? I hear you ask, and that does indeed some to be one of the few fields of artistic endeavour that doesn't rate a mention.

On reflection I feel I did enjoy it. It is not an easy read, but it is rewarding, though I also think that some of the apostrophising was a little over-extended. Hamlet with nothing but the prince, perhaps, and a surfeit of tangential sidebars.… (meer)