The End of Mr Y

The blurbs on the back cover of The End of Mr. Y have all the right names praising it, including Phillip Pullman (His Dark Materials) and Douglas Copland. The novel itself could be described as a rough integration of Pullman's philosophico-theological trilogy with Borgesian scholastic thought experiments and an added dash, or even more than a dash, of Gibson's Neuromancer.

In many ways Thomas succeeds in creating a well written and realistic day-to-day life for her young scholar heroine in the first half of the book. The heroine herself seems better constructed than almost any character presented in similar books and the scenes of day to day low budget lives and dialogues have more than an edge of acute perceptiveness. This emphasis on the strong realistic tone seems to be one of the things Thomas wanted to put into the book as part of its comprehensive "thought-text experiment" scheme.

The same scheme which brightens up the first part of the book is also the exact cause of its downfall in the second half. Thomas constrained the writing trying to create a Never Ending Story type of book where reality and text meet. In order to achieve that the heroine delves into a destructive self reckoning on a path that might suggest that suffering for truth might bring on a reality where fantasy really exists (and it does). Such narcissistic goals – and I don't mean this in any bad way – can not be met with anything except failure if one wishes to achieve it with anything but the most religiously intended texts.

A couple of points where the text of the first half of the book comes off as unrealistic seem indeed to be misfires more than anything else. Such a moment occurs when two post-grad students in Biology and Theology give the heroine blank stares when she brings up the topic of Quantum Physics. It would be a strange couple indeed if they have managed to assemble so many off-curriculum activities or even in-curriculum activities in order to be able to escape the inevitable occasional mention of the concept in all of their years in the university. Nevertheless, Thomas is very good with creating believable non-identical characters and she exhibits her superior character skills delving into the minds of various mice and cats on the scene.

The general philosophical outline and suggestions the book brings up could be summed up as a Derrida meets Augustine – an idealistic world where consciousnesses create reality with a very nice use of the "History is but a single moment" theme. Having said that, Derrida read Augustine and did not come up with such a radical philosophy. Together with Heidegger, Derrida gets quite a few mentions in this book. This seems to be intended to give the book a more scholarly feel and achieves in doing the exact opposite.

One thing I have realized during the reading of the book is why Scientology is so effective: institutionalized religion has never been able to give a very satisfying answer to the Copernican revolution and to its after affects, namely the belief in the existence of other intelligent species and the existence of inhabited planets besides earth; even Thomas, with a very radical retelling of the story of Genesis has not been able to bridge this gap.