Andrew CrumeyRezensionen

2.2

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.

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.

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.

זקן בן שמונים מגלה את האינטרנט. אהבתי.

Billed as a literary thriller with puzzles to please the readers of Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, this book does have a character who is looking for a possibly nonexistent but potentially interesting book, but ultimately, not only fails to comment on books, the hunt for missing books, the content of the missing book, and the methods of book hunting, but barrages the reader with drab passages from putative other works (yes, yes, of course that's very "meta-" but the passages are still dull), stilted dialogue packed with pseudophilosophical discussion, a distinct lack of development of the idea first presented as possibly existing in the missing book (a school of philosophy called "Xanthism" that is referenced directly only a handful of times beyond the first three chapters and not incorporated metaphorically, despite obvious opportunities to do so, in the rest of the story), jarring changes of point of view, and dislocating switches of topic that are - eventually - connected, if loosely as bits of paper on a string. Perhaps the author thought that was "meta-" as well, since one of the characters (fictional?) supposedly uses the (fictional?) missing book to construct a (functional?) primitive logical apparatus or computer that produces (oh ha ha) only the results he wants.

The three stories do connect in that the characters are within three degrees of separation of each other and each have thoughts about something to do with the putative missing book. They also can be summarized as follows: The titular character, an old man who is utterly disconnected from reality (oh, was this supposed to reflect the putative missing book's author's distance from the accepted authorities on his putative book's topics in his putative day? That was obscure) descends, with slapstick and utterly unbelievable naivete, into a world of prurience, illegal drugs, and the Internet while looking for a book because he happened to stumble across a mention of it; two men who look like Abbott and Costello, interact at a slightly lower level of emotional intelligence than Bert and Ernie, and are not clearly book-within-book-fictional-people or real people despite the implication of the Epilogue, are supposedly copying the book now being sought by Mr. Mee, but have no particular insight into the aspect of the book that interested Mr. Mee and, instead, engage in hijinks purporting to explain the mental decline of J.-J. Rousseau; a professor whose dissertation proposed to disprove the existence of the preceding two men as well as the five children Rousseau claimed to have abandoned becomes obsessed with a student and ends up hospitalized a la Proust. Wait, there's one more character, a lascivious (who isn't in this book) technician whose commentary on his equipment, a glorified radio, is, like the ridiculous explorations of Minard (the Ernie figure mentioned above), the naive stumblings of Mr. Mee, and the dual life of the professor's student, supposed to prefigure the prevalence and uses of the Internet. Also, he happens to meet Proust and inspire him not with the story of his ancestor (surprise! Minard) but, by complete tangent, the title of his novel; then he also happens to have abandoned a child who happens to be the eponymous Mr. Mee.

Yes, there are convolutions. Yes, there is commentary on the cultural phenomenon and use of the internet, the importance of memory, the potentially disjunctive avenues of scientific exploration, the selective creation of self paralleling the selective inclusion of knowledge in works of science (Diderot's Encyclopedia makes a cameo appearance). Yes, there are parallels that can be unpacked between assorted famous authors, the invented characters who knew them, and the modern people working on or connected inadvertently to them. But the failure of the book even to capitalize on the opening idea, a group of philosophers called the Xanthics who believed yellow to be the essential color and fire to be alive, coupled with the slapstick prurience of the sections about Mr. Mee and the icky self-indulgence of the professor and the pedantic botchery and uncomprehending posturing of the two French characters, Minard and Ferrand (the one like Bert), render the tone so unpleasantly impenetrable as to make the quest for this book, "Mr. Mee" by Andrew Crumey, as abortive a quest as Mee's search for Rosier's Encyclopedia.

Mr Mee is an improbably naive octogenarian antiquary, living in Glasgow and writing occasional twee essays for journals like The Scots Magazine. His current obsession concerns two minor players in the life of Jean Jacques Rousseau called Ferrand and Minard. His battleaxe housekeeper suggests he get himself a computer rather than continue trying to research such subjects through his dirty, dusty old books. It's not long before his surfing of the interwebs leads him to the joys of online porn: there's this live webcam, you see, showing a naked woman (in whom Mr Mee has no more than mild interest) boredly reading a book about . . . Ferrand and Minard! Next thing he knows, he's having a torrid affair with a youthful masseuse, Catriona. In another of the three narrative strands making up this book, a middle-aged university lecturer is wishing he could have a torrid, adulterous affair with a youthful student, and believes himself to be playing her as skilfully as any trout angler. The third strand involves the two 18th-century copyists Ferrand and Minard who, through their incompetence, succeed in losing from history all trace of a revolutionary encyclopedia of human knowledge full of speculations and theorems that would have seemed insane to the editors of L'Encyclopédie; various of the lost essays -- as for example the one concerning a philosopher's discovery that the laws of nature can be represented by arrangements of furniture and domestic implements, meaning that arrangements of furniture and domestic implements can be used to generate new laws of nature -- pepper the text, often to very entertaining effect. Such modern concepts as quantum theory, special relativity, social networking, Mendel's Theory of Heredity and the world wide web are prefigured by the various 18th-century French authors. But are these essays really all that they might seem?

Of course, the whole way through I was having to stop myself identifying Mr Mee with Arthur Mee, the editor/author of The Children's Encyclopedia, a compilation that haunted my childhood.

I spent the first 50 or 100 pages enchanted by the conceits of this book, and laughing a lot. After that, though, the sexual elements of the text, which had earlier been just ribald fun (Mr Mee's discovery, looking at the naked woman on his screen, thinking: So that's why Ruskin was so upset!), began to seem instead a bit voyeuristic, or masturbatory, or both; in other words, even while I continued to be entertained by the book's various nat phil fancies, I had the horrid sensation of my skin crawling. Had the novel been porn, I'd have been unruffled; had it been Laurell K. Hamilton, I'd have been either giggling or throwing the book at the wall; as it was, I was just . . . somehow uneasy.

So:

Don't take my word for it. Your reaction to the text might be quite different. You may find yourself slapping your thighs with mirth all through the passages I thought were a bit seedy. But, for me, despite very many good things, this book left a faintly nasty taste.

Half a rather dull historical novel stuck together with some silly 90s postmodernism. Probably clever when he wrote it, but 15 years on it just seems a bit past its read-by date.½

This novel begins somewhat like a fairy tale, “Two centuries ago a Prince…” is pretty close to, “Once upon a time.” However, the characters here do not “live happily ever after” and the philosophical musings the book contains are more elevated than the admonitory morals of the usual fairy tale.

The Prince concerned is keen on designing fantasy cities, so much so that whole armies of people are employed to create on paper the perfect city, Rreinstadt - not just the infrastructure but also the doings of its inhabitants and visitors. (This being in the nature of a fairy tale, where the money for this endeavour comes from is not explained.) The first two chapters, which set the novel up, contain no dialogue but manage to intrigue nonetheless.

Our hero is Schenk, a Cartographer, poring over maps of Rreinstadt, who on an errand one day is smitten by a pretty young Biographer, Estrella. He is also curious about the partly erased entries on one of his maps, that of the hotel room of a visitor to Rreinstadt, one Count Zelneck. He interprets the names concerned as Pfitz and Spontini. To impress Estrella and give him a reason for continuing to visit the Biography section he invents a story for Pfitz and Count Zelneck and writes it for her. His Pfitz - and therefore ours as we can read Pfitz’s adventures in occasional chapters - is an inveterate story teller in a magic realist kind of way. Spontini turns out to be one of the “authors” of books in Rreinstadt’s library (no detail is too small for the chroniclers of the Prince’s city) whose oeuvre is created by a team of writers. Spontini is apparently destined for madness.

So we have tales within tales and characters coming to wonder if they themselves are creations in someone else’s fiction. All very self-referential and post-modern. And, of course, begging a very Science Fictional question as to whether our world is itself a fictional creation or not.

Where the treatment began to unravel for me was that events in the “real” world - that of the Prince's city planners - its jealousies and murder attempts, started to mirror the “invented” one (which being cause and which effect, a moot point) This seemed to me to labour the parallels too much.

Had I not previously read Crumey’s Mobius Dick, Sputnik Caledonia and Music, in a Foreign Language I might have been more taken with PfITZ. It is still a worthwhile novel; it just doesn’t reach the heights those books did.

Andrew Crumey's Pfitz (Picador, 1997) may run to just 164 pages, but if you're not paying close enough attention as you read even one, beware. A postmodernist meta-romp, featuring stories within stories within stories, a whole series of narrators, and a very playful conception of "time," the novel is by fits (no pun intended) and starts delightful, bizarre, and frustrating (not necessarily in that order).

The best part is the very first chapter, outlining Crumey's framing device: an 18th-century European principality, vaguely Germanic, where the prince has opted to spend all his (and his people's) time, wealth, and energy in the creation of a fictional city. Maps will be drawn showing every aspect of the city from the streets to the buildings to the locations of its citizens; those citizens will be given minutely-detailed biographies, and if the are found to have written books, those books will be written, and placed within the exquistely-engineered Library, a Borgesian wonder-place paired with an even-more-wonderful Museum (see p. 15-16 for some absolutely wonderful descriptions of how these two great edifices would be designed).

A massive bureaucracy is, naturally, required for the undertaking of such a project, and our main protagonist, Schenck, is a minor functionary in the Cartography Division, responsible for the creation of some of the many maps of the fictional city (his project, when we meet him, is to chart the functioning of the fictional city's storm drains during downpours). But Schenck is distracted by an alluring redhead up in Biography, and in trying to please her, he quickly finds that with each layer of meta-fiction, the set lines of chronology, authorship and narrative begin to get very fluid indeed.

While I was frustrated at times over just what the book was trying to be, I very much enjoyed Crumey's descriptions in certain parts of the book: the opening chapter alone makes the book worth a read.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2012/01/book-review-pfitz.html

Not being a straightforward narrative this is a difficult novel to describe. Tenses shift within sections, there are stories within stories, false starts, rewritten chapters, repetitions of scenarios and the narrator is at pains to point out the fictionality of it all, indeed at times it reads more as a disquisition on literary efforts than an attempt at one. Yet, for all these strictures, it was immensely readable.

The tricksiness begins early as the novel starts with Chapter 0, where the narrator is thinking post coital thoughts about two characters who meet on a train and about whom he intends to write a novel. The bulk of Music, in a Foreign Language deals with the back story of one of these, a young man called Duncan, and the events leading up to the death of his father, Robert Waters. Waters and his friend Charles King had at the time been involved in slightly subversive activity in a Soviet style post-war Britain. This was the first appearance of that altered history in which Crumey also set parts of Mobius Dick and Sputnik Caledonia. The compromises such a society demands, the paranoia it engenders - and the betrayals it necessitates - are allowed to emerge organically from the story. Despite the title, music as a motif appears sparingly.

My one minor caveat is that the female characters are not as fully rounded as they might be, but the book’s main focus is on the friendship between Waters and King, so perhaps that is understandable.

I was equally as impressed by this, Crumey’s debut novel, as I was by both others of his I have read. If you like well written, thoughtful - even playful - novels you could do worse than give Crumey a try.

I normally read science fiction but this mainstream novel looked interesting for a number of reasons. It was set in the early Sixties, which I grew up in. It was located in Scotland where I now live.And it did appear to involve 'alternate worlds', linked to relativity theory, which is a common theme in science fiction.

The novel is in three distinct sections. The first centres on Robbie Coyle, who is fixated on technology, especially anything to do with space exploration. His Dad is a shop steward and socialist, so Robbie wants to be a Cosmonaut, rather than be a NASA astronaut. The family radio is the main device, which they all listen to as a group tuning into programs in English from different stations around Europe. The best moment for Robbie is when this radio is moved into his room, to make way for a new one. Now he can roam the airwaves searching for strange broadcasts...He is though already in contact with aliens, known as 'girls'. His elder sister treats him like dirt, as do the two girls who live next door. To make things worse, the family next door are upwardly mobile and give the Coyles a real sense of inferiority.

The second section is set in an alternate Scotland. It seems Britain, in league with the USSR, defeated the Nazis and became a socialist republic. Robbie Coyle wakes up in an army hospital, having no memory of how he got there. He has volunteered for a special mission: to contact the Red Star, a seeming alien device which is passing through the Solar System. But things are very bleak in this socialist 'paradise'. Secret police are everywhere. Everything is in short supply. And morals are lax since the base Robbie is stationed at contains a brothel, staffed by girls suspected of being dissidents. Robbie falls in love with Dora, one of these girls. He gradually rebels against his mission, as the madness of the chief scientist who is planning the mission (which will be one way only) is gradually revealed, along with the non-scientific methods employed (ESP, yoga and sexual stimulation) by his female deputy.

The final section sees the Coyles old and childless, their daughter having broken contact with them and Robbie having died many years ago in an accident in the grounds of a now disused research lab, yet someone using his name seems to be abroad. I especially enjoyed the rants of the elder Mr Coyle regarding such things as the profligate use of red elastic bands by postmen...

A drowning in a nearby river claims different lives in the different timelines and seems to be the cause of the reality switches. To my mind the 'realistic' parts did not need, or benefit from, the more 'science fictional' elements, while these latter, since the 'scientists' themselves are a strange bunch working for a heartless regime that merely parrots support for 'science', seemed more like props rather than believable phenomena. All in all a rather sad novel which sees hopes for the future dashed...

Borgesian conceit - check
Generic 18th century setting - check
Kafkaesque bureaucracy - check
Diderot dialogue - check
Shandean narrative - check
Story within a story within a story - check
Best of all possible Voltaires - check
Death of author - check
Fractals - check
Never-twice-the-same-river - check
Final scene from Faust - check
Wittgenstein - check

...in short, this is every cliché of nineties postmodernism crammed into 160 gloriously over-the-top pages. I suspect that Crumey is sending the whole thing up, but with postmodernists you can never quite tell at which point they disappear up their own orifices. At any rate, it doesn't fall into the trap of taking itself too seriously, and Crumey has a light enough touch to allow you to get a bit of fun out of it, even though the fashion for this sort of thing is long gone.½

In the first part of the novel a shy boy called Robbie Coyle is growing up in a village called Kenzie in 1960s Scotland with the ambition of going into space. Since his father is an ardent socialist and anti-American Robbie therefore wants to be a cosmonaut. A frequent attender at his local library, he devours knowledge about the Soviet Union and discovers that “Russian is a language where some letters are written back to front and others are completely made up.” Quotes such as this display Crumey’s excellent ability to inhabit the world of a pre-adolescent. As he matures he starts to hear a voice in his head. The section ends with that voice saying, “I guess we’re not in Kenzie any more.”

The story then flips into a scenario of a Soviet-style Britain where a young adult Robert Coyle has been recruited into a space project to reach, before the wicked capitalists do so, what is possibly a black hole travelling through the solar system. The secret “Installation” where Robert is in training is suitably grim, the illustrations of the many compromises people have to make in such a society convincing, though whether dissidents could flourish there is another question. Perhaps this exists in the same British Democratic Republic which featured in the author’s Mobius Dick.

This central section could be considered an Altered History novel where the Jonbar Hinge lies in whether or not a man named Deuchar died while trying to rescue twins from drowning many years before the time the action is set. Yet its juxtaposition with the preceding and following parts, set in the “real” world, argues against this. And Crumey’s treatment of his subject matter does not have the feel of SF. The Soviet section can be read to be implicitly a figment of Robbie’s imagination. The subtlety of the point of divergence also marks this out from SF treatments of Altered Worlds. While Crumey pushes credibility a little by having characters in the central section behave and speak, or have the same names as, those in the book-end segments he does certainly avoid the trap into which Philip Roth fell in The Plot Against America of restoring the altered world to normal by the end.

The coda, a (present day?) exploration of the situation of Robbie’s ageing parents and a young boy who meets a mysterious stranger on a mission (which he is unwilling to explain) provides counterpoint and a resolution of sorts.

Sputnik Caledonia is excellently written and engaging, with convincing characters, but not quite as full of verve as Mobius Dick.

I ordered some of the author's other books before I was even halfway through with this one because I was enjoying the book immensely, particularly the presentation of the characters, Mr. Mee and his housekeeper. But I found myself struggling with the reading of the book after the housekeeper no longer was a character in the story.

Mindbending stuff. I'm not sure I understood everything here. No, let me rephrase that, I am sure I didn’t understand everything here. Parallel realities and alternate histories stirred together by the quantum mechanical effects of an experimental “vacuum array” at a secret test site in Scotland. There are echoes of Calvinoesque metafiction, Dickian reality paranoia, Aldiss’ Frankenstein Unbound, Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently and Mostly Harmless (without the jokes) ... plus a little political satire and sex too.½

The novel covers so much ground, and so many different points of view and angles that I was unable to connect the dots. It is not clear how the Ferrand and Minard chapters connect to the rest of the book. It is quite clear that Ferrand and Minard are unreliable crooks, and so are Hitler and Eichmann, appearing in some other chapters, but the whole discussion of whether or not literature and art elevate mankind or destroy it (the Rousseau line) once again does not connect to the rest of the book. Chapter 9 is stylistically so different from the book, that it seems as if the author "fictionalised" an academic paper and included it in the book. The "I" persona, does not seem constant, i.e. the "I" in the first chapters, an apparently very egg-headed academic, is very different from the "I" character in the final chapters. One of the main features of the book does not technically seem plausible - even if a model on a pornographic photo on the Internet held a book in her hand, the title of that book would not appear in a web search. Is the epilogue there to tell us how old Mr Mee is? I could not think of any other way to connect it to the rest of the book.

Unless, of course, I missed it all, which I suppose I did. Towards the end of the book I started loosing interest.½

For better or worse, I often judge books by their covers, which is what initially drew me to Sputnik Caledonia. The book gets off to a great start. Robbie Coyle lives in Kenzie, a Scottish suburb, in the 70s. He has a vivid imagination and dreams of joining the Russian cosmonaut program; he also drifts off into his daydreams, has a tendency to wet his bed, and is seen as a bit of a loner, weird kid by his peers. His father is a rather cranky conspiracy theorist with Communist leanings; his mother is more upbeat, rolls her eyes when the father gets started and provides a more balanced counter to the father. This section of the book develops interesting characters and is a wonderfully written slice of life. We get hints of things being slightly awry, for example, when Robbie hears voices through an old bakelite radio.

(POSSIBLE SPOILER, OR AT LEAST FURTHER DETAILS) Then come the 2nd and 3rd parts. The 2nd part jumps 'ahead' to the Installation, where a 20ish year old Robert Coyle has been recruited from the military to join this highly secret, experimental mission; even he and the other recruits are not told much about the program. This is where the science fiction/alternate reality really kicks in. The Installation is in Scotland, but very cordoned off from its surroundings; higher-ranked residents have their own vouchers instead of money, can't discuss their jobs with lower ranks, and find release, well, of all kinds at the Blue Cat. This is an alternate Scotland, where Communism has prevailed and a space program is being developed. Without giving too much away, the 3rd part shifts yet again. (END)

Again, I loved the 1st part of this book. I was less enamored of the 2nd part. The alternate reality is interesting, and the parallels to stories of life behind the Iron Curtain are clear. The 3rd part leaves the reader with a lot to debate in terms of what actually has happened. These are all positive points. It just felt that the writing and the characters so wonderfully drawn and captured in the 1st part get lost in the more strident, even stream-of-consciousness latter sections. The new characters in these sections just don't have the same depth. That said, it did leave me still thinking about it for several days and wanting to talk about it with others.½

You can tell that the author studied Theoretical Physics to doctorate level. But don't let that put you off.

The first section is a beautifully rendered depiction of Scotland in the 1970s, where young Robbie Coyle is just beginning to get to grips with socialism, Top of the Pops, Dr Who, girls and The Meaning of Relativity by Einstein. Terrifically funny and achingly sad by turns, the first section ends with Robbie's first snog in the church hall storeroom.

Part two takes off into a parallel universe; recognisably still Scotland but bizarrely different, an alternative reality in which Robbie is suddenly ten years older and on the short list for a space mission planned to explore an approaching black hole.

The dislocation and night-marish qualities of this section echoed Alasdair Gray's Unthank, and the world Andrew Crumey creates is just as completely realised, deeply detailed and surprisingly tangible as that which Duncan Thaw inhabits.

Then we are back in the present-day and what seems to be normal life. Robbie has vanished from the narrative and it is not until near the end of the book that we discover what has happened to him. There are hints about the middle section and more puzzles to come, leaving the reader to tease out their own interpretation of events. I suspect this may frustrate some readers, but I have a feeling that Sputnik Caledonia will come to be regarded as one of the essentials of Scottish literature.

A great book !! Great characters, an unpredictable developement and an interesting structure, reminding of Calvino, Borges (widely quoted) and Perec.

Crumey produced another great reading, reminescent of Borges, witty, and enthralling.

Is Pfitz the consumate storyteller or a brazen liar? In the end it doesn't matter, because the stories he tells are spellbinding and leave us wanting to know everything. Part love story, part philosophical discussion on planning the perfect city, this book makes you question all the stories you've ever heard. Andrew Crumey takes his usual themes and weaves a brilliant tale.½

Imagine a puddle of water as a form of alien life - how would that life form think? What would they make of us humans? How would they communicate? These are just a few of the philosophical queries propounded by Andrew Crumey's characters as he re-works the the lives and imagines the conversations of the famous French philosophers - D'Alembert, Diderot and Julie de Lespinasse. It made my head hurt when I first read it, but the questions, answers and characters kept me coming back time after time; this book is a conundrum and a delight to read.

funny, romantic, enlightening