The End of Mr Y, by Scarlett Thomas

One way of talking about things is that we live and breathe in a world of flesh and stone, as well as a world of mind, words and numbers. Another is that looking at things in a certain light changes them; that it is a way of doing magic, and that when philosophers seek to understand the world, they end up changing it whether they meant to or not. Language as well as magic is a technology of will. Scarlett Thomas's remorselessly intelligent third novel is as much meditation as tale, but manages to be as exhilarating and suspenseful when its characters explain things to each other as when they are in mortal danger or sexual heat.

In some ways, The End of Mr Y is an example of one of the oldest modes of storytelling. Its heroine, Ariel, finds out things that she was not meant to know, from a book whose readers all die, and loses everything in the pursuit of a few moments of clarity about the nature of the world. She reads a book, and it changes her life.

The use of pastiche here is finely judged. The Victorian mystic and controversy-monger Lumas is as real as the modern academics who potter around in his intellectual footsteps. Lumas found a secret that killed him; the scholars Lura and Burlem work out what it was; and Ariel follows in their footsteps.

The secret seems to be merely that you can take a simple formula and wander a world made up of minds, chasing your enemies and friends from casual sighting to deep-seated memory until everything is open to you. But it turns out to be so much more than that; to be a revelation of what the world is made of.

Ariel has to wander around accumulating plot tokens, for all that she is a smart-ass postmodern intellectual who knows precisely what is going on. Thomas is demonstrating that all stories are thought experiments and all thought experiments are stories. This is not just the story of Ariel and her dreadful fate, but a narrative about the possible consequences of fashionable ideas.

Thomasalso gives us the standard consolations of the "dark fantasy" thriller. Ariel has to deal with adversaries as well as her quest, and finds allies along the way. The unpleasant American spooks and the demon children they unleash, and the Mouse God who becomes her friend, are stock genre material. Yet they are entirely as real as the world of shared flats, starvation meals, sexual encounters in the bathrooms of Little Chef restaurants and disagreements with university administrators which Ariel so grittily inhabits.

If this were just a meditation, it would lose us at an early stage; if it were just another story of someone who wanders into a book of magic and never gets out again, it would be a tale too often told for prolonged attention. As things are, The End of Mr Y is an elegant construction which reminds us that a magician's book is a "grimoire" and that the organising principle of the world of thought is grammar; and that glamour, even the seedy glamour of Ariel's world, is utter enchantment.

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