Andrew Crumey

[John Self]

It must be four or five years now since someone first recommended Scottish physicist-turned-novelist Andrew Crumey's fiction to me. Eventually, a couple of years ago, I got around to reading a copy of his then-latest novel, Mr Mee. Here is what I thought about it at the time.

Crumey is compared to Calvino and Borges and that's true in the sense that this is a novel of ideas rather than plot or characterisation. It comes in three strands, told in cycling chapters. We have Mr. Mee, an elderly Scot who gets involved in the world of online pornography via "the coincidence of a flat tyre and a shower of rain." Then there is the story of Farrand and Minard, copyists in the late 18th century who are mentioned by Rousseau in his Confessions: in this story they try to track down the killer of a neighbouring girl. Finally there is Dr. Petrie's narrative, telling of his infatuation with a student, his study of Proust and Rousseau ... and his book about Farrand and Minard.

And so we discover that the three stories are of course interlinked, though the full extent of the connection does not become apparent until the epilogue, told in a fourth voice. I thought the book was fantastically erudite and impressive in all sorts of ways but it didn't really hit me in the gut or heart; it rarely ventured out of head territory. Part of the problem might be that Crumey seems to be writing about very specific factual subjects that he is fascinated by, without necessarily making the reader share his love. I say this because according to sources I've read, his previous novel Pfitz also deals, like Mr. Mee, in Rousseau and Rosier's Encyclopaedia and D'Alembert - and the latter is also presumably the subject of another of his novels, D'Alembert's Principle. I think that the reworking of specific factual subjects - rather than the revisiting of broader obsessional themes, which all writers engage in - can lead to ever decreasing circles (see John Irving's old triumvirate of Vienna, wrestling and bears, and see how he improved when he shook free of them), and it may be that Mr. Mee is not his best book for that reason.

I also think Mr. Mee was intended to be broadly comic, at least in two of the settings, and that didn't really work for me. The crosstalk of Ferrand and Minard was a bit music-hall, and Mr. Mee's comic naivety of all things modern, technological and pornographic ("I only wanted a few beaver shots, after all") got a bit wearing after the first, ooh, 300 pages. It does, however, have a good opening line, which more or less drew me to buy it in the first place - "It's said of the Xanthic sect that they believed fire to be a form of life, since it has the ability to reproduce itself" - and now that I've told you it, you don't need to.

I now think that was an unnecessarily harsh conclusion, because I've just read Crumey's latest novel, Mobius Dick, and it's a fizzingly brilliant piece of work. The reason it makes me doubt my earlier judgement of Mr Mee is because the two books are so similar in many ways. True, this time he has done the Irving thing and shaken free the previous obsessions; but the book is still littered with erudition in references to Thomas Mann, Schrodinger, Melville, Goethe, Schumann, Brahms and many more besides. It's amazing, really, that he manages to find room for fictional characters too, and such well-defined ones. And again we have a series of three separate worlds (or so it seems). The characters exist in parallel universes, or possibly (don't want to give too much away) stories within stories, which might bring to mind Iain Banks's Walking on Glass, or David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Mitchell's much-garlanded opus is a good reference point, in fact, because to my mind Mobius Dick is, at half the length, just as clever and imaginative, more satisfyingly and subtly interwoven, and properly complete in a way that Cloud Atlas wasn't quite. Plus it has wit oozing out of its fibres, particularly in the sections entitled Harry's Tale.

It's a curiosity of the very best books I read that I can find much less to say about them (other than Read this!) than I can about books I hate. However: the story goes like this. John Ringer, theoretical physicist, finds himself assaulted by the memory of a lost love as he travels to Scotland to deliver a speech on a new technology which could deliver quantum computing. The business suits are slavering over it but Ringer has doubts, fearing that the creation of huge energies within the 'vacuum array' could lead to the failure of wave probabilities to collapse - the underpinning of quantum theory that Schrodinger mocked with his moggy thought experiment - and thus (wake up! We're getting to it) the creation of alternative or multiple universes, and/or the destruction of our own.

Meanwhile: a man has woken up in a mysterious clinic, where he is told he is suffering from a little-known condition of memory which cannot be treated. He suspects he is the victim of some sort of experiment. And also: at the same time we are told of the composer Schumann and the aforementioned Schrodinger, and their trips to a sanatorium which inspired Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

It becomes clear from early in the book - with references to the British Democratic Republic, the First Minister, and the Restructuring - that the story itself is being related from a parallel universe, or at least that one of the stories is. Unless they are all the same one... The conceit continues to the end, where Crumey ties everything up neatly (or rather, very messily) and even gets a dig in at Bush and Blair besides. What more could mortal readers desire? Mobius Dick has a kink and a twist in every chapter, is clever, playful, head-spinningly inventive, and manages the almost impossible trick of being intensely provocative and effortlessly entertaining at the same time. It is both meaty and digestible, and one of those once-in-a-while novels that makes you wish all books could be like this. Needless to say, copies of the now out-of-print earlier novels Music, in a Foreign Language and D'Alembert's Principle are now on their way to me via Amazon Marketplace.

Interesting to see that, on what appears to be Crumey's official website, there's an official pronunciation guide which advises readers that his name is not pronounced Crummy. Really: no reminder required.

[John Self]

I picked up a couple of Crumey's earlier books when I enjoyed Mobius Dick so much, and last week I read his first novel, Music, In a Foreign Language (1994). It's highly assured as first novels go - though Crumey isn't exactly a child prodigy, published at the age of 33 - but it lacks the sense that Mobius Dick had of three very different worlds brought effortlessly together, not to mention almost all of that book's brilliant wit. The book does contain different worlds, but from the start we know how they work - the novelist greets us at the beginning and proceeds to tell us about his struggles with his book, which he then goes on to try to write. And so it's stories within stories.

The world of the novel-being-written-as-we-read is a curious Britain, clearly contemporary but with references to shillings, and people being interviewed by police in a very non-PC (pun intended, and as a further turn on it, non-PACEy, a-ho-ho) manner. The protagonists, as in Mobius Dick (I have read Mr Mee too but can't remember much about it), include physicists and their entangled lovers, and there is a subversive spirit in the air as academics discuss (in some of the most interesting parts of the book) the power of collective action and the contributory power of the individual, all arising from the revolutionary condition the UK of the novel finds itself in. One of the academics publishes a paper supporting the rights of homosexuals, which leads him to be investigated by the police. We discover in time (near the end of the novel or, if you prefer, by reading the slightly spoilerish blurb on the back cover before you begin) that what distinguishes this Britain from the Britain we live in is that first, Germany successfully invaded during the second World War, and second, as a result of this the Communist party won an election shortly afterwards. So this is Britain a la Soviet Bloc Eastern Europe, and very subtly portrayed it is too, with none of the usual literary dystopia sins of people declaiming at great length on the recent revolutionary history of their country (which is alway so plausible, right Ms Atwood?).

Music, in a Foreign Language then is equal parts promise and achievement. Whether it's for newcomers to Crumey's work is debatable: on the one hand, you've got the superior Mobius Dick to look forward to, so it's all up from here; on the other, you may not want to read any more if it doesn't take you by the lapels with its sparkling brilliance (which it probably won't). Hm. Probably one for the physicists to work out.

[chillicheese]

Thanks JS, I've been waiting for Mobius Dick to come out in paperback for ages (can't carry hardbacks on the train). Don't know how I missed your original review at the end of June.
Mr. Mee was responsible for my introduction to the wonderful world of the great green P since wshaw pointed me in this direction after reading my first Crumey review. I've just hit the 'One-Click' button for Mobius Dick so am looking forward to writing my second very soon.

[chillicheese]

Some authors ache to impress with feats of fancy plot combos and multiple voice and style transformations. Others achieve more with less.
Crumey's effortless style hides most of the intellectual swan's paddling while giving us just enough of a glimpse at the mechanism to make us appreciate his brilliance.
With Mobius Dick, he once again embarks on a voyage through three main and apparently disperate threads each of which spawns it's own side roads. All along though, they are each inching back toward their inevitable intertwinement.
This alone would be an achievement but just so we don't get lazy, he chucks in a whole layer of carefully researched history of quantum physics with a little philosophy, literature and music mixed in for good measure. There just don't seem to be enough printed pages present to account for the quantity of goods delivered. Perhaps it's the absence of padding ; every story or sub-story has a vital part to play even if it's not immediately obvious where it fits in to the wider whole.

As with the previous Mr Mee, the postscript comes from an entirely separate source yet is the means to the tightest tying of ends. Just when you're thinking he's missed one, it turns out he was just saving it for a final flourish of the magicians cloak.

The inimitable JS has already pointed out that it's difficult to avoid having Cloud Atlas in mind while reading this, but this time I think that Richard and Judy chose the wrong book !

[John Self]

Originally Posted by chillicheese

There just don't seem to be enough printed pages present to account for the quantity of goods delivered.

This is an excellent way of putting it. Mobius Dick is way up there in my best reads of the year - like, along with Chekhov and Flaubert*!

---
*Madame Bovary, not The Temptation of St Antony, of course...

[John Self]

I read Crumey's third novel, D'Alembert's Principle, this week, which means I've got through all his output now with the exception of his slim second novel Pfitz. I wonder if I should bother, since the repetition of motifs in his work is such that I'm likely to feel deja lu (er, or whatever). As well as a character named Pfitz, in D'Alembert's Principle all the usual suspects are there: mathematics, 18th century France, philosophy, and of course various tangles of love.

Like Mr Mee, Mobius Dick and Music, In a Foreign Language, the book tells three different stories. These are less well integrated than in Music or Mobius Dick, however, both thematically (they share the setting of France in the 18th century, and characters between the stories almost, but don't quite, meet) and structurally (the stories are told complete, one after another, rather than cycling through and interwoven with one another). Nonetheless, Crumey still pulls off the difficult trick of making genuine erudition truly readable (perhaps because the characters don't speak in 18th century constructions), and the pages passed through my hands very quickly indeed. I can't help feeling though, that D'Alembert's Principle counts as an also-by work and it seems to me more than ever that everything he has written so far was just working up to Mobius Dick, which is frankly some kind of masterpiece. That ascending scale of excellence promises great things for the future.

[John Self]

Hurray hurray, Andrew Crumey has a new book out in May of next year: just twelve months and counting! It's called Sputnik Caledonia and it's the fruit of his winning the Northern Rock Foundation writer's award, which gave him £60,000 over three years and enabled him to give up his day job as literary editor of Scotland on Sunday, and concentrate on the newie.

It's about a young boy growing up in 1970s Scotland who embarks on a space mission. It melds quantum physics with telepathy and is the first novel he's written with a synopsis in mind.

"With all my other novels I would write bits and pieces and they would connect together and usually have several threads," he says. "With this one I wanted something which was a bit simpler but with more complex ideas going on."

[Quink]

More complex ideas ! He means that he has more mind boggling fiction than Mobius Dick ?

Crumey is impressive. He reminds me not only of the Continentals so often affixed in comparison but also of Richard Powers. But I can hardly bring myself to recollect the disappointment of The Echomaker.

BTW, what was the source of the joyous news ?

[John Self]

So here we have it, Sputnik Caledonia, and a whopper at 550 pages; Crumey sure is giving Northern Rock value for money. And, per his comment above, despite the length it is “a bit simpler:” I wouldn’t say linear exactly, but where the earlier books cycled regularly between different characters, centuries and worlds, this has three separate (but not quite discrete) sections. In the good-natured first part, Robbie Coyle is a twelve-year-old boy in the Scotland of the 1970s, brought up by a whimsical and uncomplaining mother, and an avidly socialist father (”Even if I’m wrong I never go back on my word”), who longs for the revolution:

His own experiences as a child, he told his offspring, had been enough to convince him that the Catholic Church in which he was raised was only another way of controlling people’s minds, along with capitalism, television and golf, the latter being one of Mr Coyle’s pet hates. … ‘At least he was a good socialist, I’ll say that for Jesus. It’s these people who want to bow down and worship him that I can’t abide.’

Robbie, fascinated by space flight but inculcated into hating America, decides to learn Russian and astrophysics and become a cosmonaut. All this, in case I have failed to get across the tone, is done with one eyebrow raised. He also falls in love, and it’s at a moment of consummation (”their lips touched and he was blasted into space”) that everything changes.

The central chunk of the book - 300 pages - sees Mr Coyle get his revolution (”The Coyles’ next door neighbours were the Dunbars, who had a telephone, a car, took package holidays in Spain, and would face summary execution come the uprising”). We are in the British Democratic Republic, the same alternate present which Crumey has used before in his first novel Music, in a Foreign Language, and in parts of Mobius Dick. Robbie - now called Robert - Coyle is a soldier at The Installation:

‘The Installation was created over thirty years ago, right at the end of the Patriotic War, when the invading Nazi scum who terrorized this land of ours for five dark years were defeated by the People’s Army. The Central Committee knew that if such horrors were to be prevented from ever happening again, then Britain needed to have its own nuclear deterrent alongside that of our Soviet allies.’

To go into more detail would definitely be spoilerish (and by the way nothing I've revealed so far goes further than the back cover blurb), but Crumey creates a world which at first appears to have occasional parallels with the first part, and gradually is shown to have threads of light peeking out and linking the worlds in a complex matrix of equivalence, and even characters who balance others in the alternate world (and yes, The Wizard of Oz is acknowledged, before you put your hand up). “Everything is deliberate. Nothing is accidental.” Crumey has fun with the language of ideology, such as when the Installation’s recruits are being lectured on a heavenly body:

‘In the capitalist world, such hypothetical objects are referred to as black holes. Of course we reject the term, with its colonialist implications, its unsavoury air of medieval clericalism, its sheer inaccuracy. … We follow the Soviet nomenclature and call it a frozen star. What to capitalists symbolizes a fate worse than death represents for us the highest form of astrophysical evolution. Our visitor is not a monster - it is a unique opportunity for socialist exploration.’

At the same time, a little mirroring goes a long way, and Crumey plots out the story in this central section in too painstaking detail. As a result the book appears less complex and rich than the much shorter Mobius Dick and Mr Mee. I missed too the literary intelligence of those books, which by reference and parallel lit up whole ranks of European authors from Hoffmann and Mann to Proust and Rousseau: here, we have just a little Goethe. The central notion - “Everything in the universe both determines and is determined by everything else” - is hammered out repeatedly. Did the freedom of writing full time soften Crumey’s sharp edge?

But it is foolish to feel disappointment that Sputnik Caledonia is not more like Crumey’s earlier books. We should not want such gifted writers to repeat themselves (though weakly, I often do). Fortunately then, the third part of the book gives a new dimension to Crumey’s writing: this master of making our heads spin has found out how to hit the heart. Again, little more can be said without ruining it, and the new voices he adopts take time to bed in, but it neatly undermines any, well, neatness in our assumptions of how Part 2 can be explained. It also provides a moving portrait of decline and loss, which is not bad going for a book which started out on a cleverly comic note.

Sputnik Caledonia is a long but approachable book; it takes time to read, but remarkably, it forces your brain to carry on finishing it even after the end. Must be some scientific trickery hidden in the pages. In Part 1 Robbie, while ‘training’ for space travel, reads textbooks which become “his Bible: sacred, encyclopaedically authoritative, open to infinite interpretation, and almost entirely unreadable.” A couple of these epithets, very definitely excluding the last, could be applied to the works of Andrew Crumey.

[John Self]

Looks as though Crumey has seen this forum, as there's a link to us on his website (Links page) - and a link to my blog review of Sputnik Caledonia at the top of his homepage. Cool!