MOBIUS DICK

'In some ways this is an edgily modern book, with Dick's namesake, Philip K Dick, among its guiding spirits. Admirers of Flann O'Brien's fictions will be struck by the beguiling ways in which Crumey uses unreliable narrators and worlds within worlds. In another sense the novel reaches back to a Rena [...]
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'In some ways this is an edgily modern book, with Dick's namesake, Philip K Dick, among its guiding spirits. Admirers of Flann O'Brien's fictions will be struck by the beguiling ways in which Crumey uses unreliable narrators and worlds within worlds. In another sense the novel reaches back to a Renaissance aesthetic, in which art and scholarship, if not quite the same thing, are mutually adoring twins or lovers in a fable. Refreshingly, this is a novel in which science is a central character rather than a metaphor for something else. That said, it isn't a boffin-fest but a glitteringly original piece of storytelling, unapologetically intelligent, driven by tightly focused narrative skill. It is also acerbically funny, peppered with digs, while an Orwellian irony makes clear that the questions implied are not about some imagined culture, but concern the one in which we wake up every day. There is a winning sense of spaciousness in the writing, a feeling that the words are pouring out spontaneously. This quality is all the more impressive because the ideas are complex: indeed, those of us who are a bit rusty on Heisenberg's interpretation of wave functions may sense we're missing out. And even readers who marvel at Crumey's expansive, frisky prose may feel the allusion to cultural titans becomes a little relentless: Melville, Thomas Mann, Foucault, Nietzsche and Lacan are all name- checked in the first few pages. ("Writing about writers is best avoided," comments Dick's therapist. This isn't advice Crumey would tolerate.) But while Mobius Dick is a work of sophisticated erudition, its playfulness and artistry make it a page-turner, too. It is perhaps the only novel about quantum mechanics you could imagine reading while lying on a beach.' Joseph O'Connor in The Guardian 'Ingenious' is far too pallid a term of praise for this cunningly contrived entertainment, which may sound ponderous in outline but is actually a breeze, by turns slyly comic and oddly melancholy. For most readers, the soundness of its science will be of small consequence; as fiction it is solid plutonium, and unflaggingly enjoyable.' Kevin Jackson in The Sunday Times"