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Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey
01/02/2005 . Source: Tom Lloyd-Williams 
pub: Picador. 312 page hardback. Price: £16.99 (UK). ISBN: 033041991-9. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/Picador.html and www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~crumey
Occasionally, I find myself finishing a book and wondering whether I should begin it again to see what I've missed. 'Feersum Endjin' was one of those and 'Mobius Dick' is another. It's a literary novel dealing with quantum mechanics and reality, set partly in an alternative present where Scotland became communist after the Second World War among other things. Not a book to idly dip into, I found myself wondering afterwards whether I had in fact a) enjoyed it and b) even got it. When the author's a theoretical physicist with a penchant for philosophy, there's a good chance I'm never going to understand some of what's going on but still I have to wonder just how much I missed because it wasn't there.
Given the subject matter and the fact that it's published by Picador, you can't help but think that no literary reviewer would like to criticise it simply for fear of looking stupid and it certainly has had some glowing reviews. As I am beyond worrying on those stakes, I'd have to sum it up as a fun and weird little book, but too thin on plot and length to really get to grips with the ramifications of multiple realities occurring in one place. It's a nice idea for a book, but Crumey seems rather to have been unsure quite what to do with it all and opted for crashing through to the end as fast as he could. The ideas are there but there's little time to consider them so the book ends up remarkably lightweight for a book about non-collapsing quantum waves. It's also not a good sign when you realise that, without the fictional postscript that ends the novel, it would have felt profoundly unsatisfactory.
The central character is John Ringer, a physicist in our reality who is lured to Scotland by the promise of a quantum-based communications technology. Added into the mix are chapters from alternative reality novels from an alternative reality (still with me?) about Schumann, Schrodinger, Herman Melville and an amnesiac called Harry Dick who awakes to find himself in a near-empty Scottish mental hospital. Though nothing is, of course, as it seems, Ringer's fears about this new technology and the effect it will have on the world start to manifest themselves through hallucinations and coincidences that begin to grow at an alarming rate.
As with many literary novels, I found the characters a little empty people, generally more interested in sex and their own obsessions than much else. As some of the chapters are from fictional novels, you can see what the author is trying to do there, but with the book being so short there is no time to develop any empathy with Ringer or anyone else. Like the hospital that various characters visit, the book is in parts intentionally sterile and, to my mind, it's not long enough to use that to good effect.
In terms of SF, it's interesting because it approaches the matter from a different perspective, but at the same time suffers from the impression that it's remarkably inventive. While literati might think so, most SF fans have significantly higher standards for what they consider inventive so they might find themselves a shade underwhelmed.
Overall, it's a good little book that I happily raced through, finding it enjoyably odd and different. I think it would have been better if it had been almost twice as long, but I'm still glad I read it on its own merits as much as an antidote to the same old format.
Tom Lloyd-Williams
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