As Our Tragic Universe is a book about storyless stories, providing a plot summary is next to impossible so I’m going to cheat and use the one from the back of the book this time:

It Kelsey Newman’s theory about the end of time is true, we are all going to live forever.  But who would want that?  Certainly not Meg, a bright spark trapped in a hopeless relationship.  But if she can work out the connection between a wild beast on Dartmoor, a ship in a bottle, the science of time and a knitting pattern for the shape of the universe, she might just find a way out.

Thomas’ novels that I’ve read have never been about the plot so much as they have the ideas contained within it and this one, if you couldn’t already tell from that blurb, is no exception.  In fact, Our Tragic Universe takes this even further by having probably the most plot elements of any of her books so far, none of which really come to anything.  There is Meg’s friend Libby’s unhappy relationship in which she vacillates between her lover and her long term partner, which remains unresolved as the novel draws to a close.  Meg’s own humdrum relationship with her boyfriend, Christopher, which might be a major point in any other book, is a non-issue even after she leaves him in order to concentrate on her work.  Events just sort of take place on the sidelines rather than being important in any way.

Character is similarly unimportant, the most distinctive character in the entire book being Meg’s dog Bess (surely one of the most appealing and lifelike dogs in literature), although an honourable mention goes to Christopher’s brother Josh.  It is interesting that these are both secondary characters however, and none of the people that one might expect to be significant and well developed are particularly distinguishable.

The important part of Our Tragic Universe is the bizarre theories and philosophies that it contains.  With Thomas’ books it is impossible to say at what point unlikely fact becomes improbably theory and improbable theory becomes crazy fiction, but frankly I never care because it’s all so confusing and fascinating at the same time.  In this particular instance, the theory is that at the end of the universe there will be so much energy compressed into such a small space that it will be used to create a new universe in which everyone who has ever lived will exist eternally.  This leads on to questions about the point of existence and the nature of reality and, as in The End of Mr. Y, these theories somehow end up being linked to literature and fiction, what it is and what it does:

In Newman’s never-ending universe there’d be time to write an infinite amount of novels, and even finish reading all the books I’d ever begun, and all the books I’d never begun.  But who’d care about fiction any more?  We only need fiction because we die.

Later on, Meg and a friend debate the comparative merits of unpredictable storyless stories over familiar, formulaic fiction:

You should read Aristotle again, because he tells you not just how to write those bottle-of-oil stories, but proper, meaningful tragedies.  And yes, they’re predictable too, sort of.  But he says that one of the key things the writer has to do is to make the person who hears or reads the story feel astonished, even though the story itself has a formula and is written in accordance with cause and effect.  It’s a great art to make someone surprised to see the picture, and even more surprised when they realise they had all the pieces all along.

This is a rather apt quotation as, abstract as this novel is, it does feel a bit as though Scarlett Thomas essentially writes the same book over and over again, possibly for the very reason that it is the ideas which drive her books rather than the more usual forces of plot and character.  All of the narrators feel as though they are variations on Thomas herself (the author gave up smoking while writing this book and ate a lot of clementines instead, so naturally Meg does the same) and you could replace the name ‘Meg’ with the name ‘Ariel’ in this book and it would slot quite happily into The End of Mr. Y without there being any jarring character differences.  However, strangely, I don’t mind this at all.  Because, as these books don’t feel as though they’re written for plot and characters, I don’t read them for those things.  I read them for the wonderful, imaginative, crazy ideas that Thomas has and that she continues to experiment with and expand with each of her books that I encounter.  These never fail to surprise, for all the reader has the pieces all along.

Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas.  Published by Canongate, 2011, pp. 428.  Originally published in 2010.

Author: Darrell Bain

Published: LL-Publications, 2010, pp. 207

Genre: Short stories

Blurb: Oops! is the third collection of stories by Darrell Bain.  When Cupid and a Gremlin bump heads, the sparks fly in a rare fantasy story by the author.  Other stories in the collection include A Simple Idea, and almost ludicrously simple method of eliminating corruption and idiocy from the political process, one that has been around for centuries but gone unrecognized.  Cure for an Ailing Alien finds a nurse who must come up with a cure for an alien, one whose bodily processes are completely unknown.  You’ll be amazed at her cure!  Retribution is the story of unexpected consequences when alien meets human.  Robyn’s Rock is partially based on a happening in the author’s life during a walk with his granddaughter.

There are many more stories in this collection, all written in the individual style that has kept Bain’s readers coming back for more for the past twenty years.  This is a book to add to your collection, stories by a notable, multi-award winning author.

When, where and why: I was sent a copy of this book to review as part of the Goodreads First Reads programme.  I requested it because I enjoy short story collections and the description made this one sound different and intriguing.  I started it at once, as I think it’s only polite to do so when sent a free book.

What I thought:Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I always have very high expectations of short story collections.  The short story is, in my opinion, one of the hardest forms to write because of the restrictions they impose on the author.  In a novel, there can be passages which aren’t as good, and I might forgive a poorly developed story if the characters are fascinating and come alive, or vice versa.  The novel is long enough that I’ll usually find something about it to enjoy even if one or two areas are a bit lacking.  In a short story, however, lapses like this stick out like a sore thumb.  There is no room to hide and no margin for error.  Consequently, I’m in two minds about Oops! because, on the one hand, the stories all had really interesting ideas but, on the other hand, I thought that the writing, though enthusiastic, was a bit weak and so the concepts were let down.

Let me start out with what I liked about this book.  Firstly, I thought that the plot ideas were fresh and interesting, and you can see from the blurb how wide-ranging they were.  Darrell Bain obviously has a very active imagination and I would guess that there are still many other stories lurking in his mind.  I particularly enjoyed Robyn’s Rock, a tale about a girl who has picked up a rock which enables her to predict future disasters, and Samantha’s Talent, a story about a girl who can speak to animals (although chapters have no place in a short story).  I also really liked the little introductions and concluding notes from the author which accompany each story, explaining how he came to write it.  It gives an insight into the author’s way of thinking which is unusual and refreshing.

There were some bits of writing which were well executed, especially Bain’s characterisation of disobedient tractors in Coyote Scare, which:

…I swear were sentient and spent the nights conniving with each other about what kind of trouble they would get me into and how much blood they could make me shed the next day, I had an awful experience on one.  It had nothing to do with any of the tractor’s moving parts, those that spent their time lying in wait for me to come close enough to get bitten or chewed or gouged or gnawed on.  Tractors are savage and evil and should be sold with guards whose duty it is to threaten them with both barrels of a twelve gauge shotgun the minute they get out of line. (p. 40)

Unfortunately, I found this amusing style to be the exception rather than the rule.  I could tell from the writing that Bain obviously really enjoys what he does, but his skills are somewhat lacking.  Dialogue in particular was weak, stilted and unbelievable.  Also, I don’t think I’ve read a story since I was five years old which ends ‘And they lived happily ever after’ in a non-ironic way.  At least two of these do, from what I remember.  I’m all for happy endings, but there are much more elegant ways to express this or indeed demonstrate it so that I can work it out myself without having to be so direct and unimaginative.

The other problem is the editing.  While grammar errors are pleasingly few and far between, there are a few continuity problems which a decent editor should have picked up on.  Perhaps the most glaring was in The Furniture Formula, where cave woman Uga, when her husband dismisses her interior design ideas, says:

All right, but I’ve decided I’m going to sleep on the saber tooth tiger skin for a while.  You can sleep on the bear skin by yourself. (p. 120)

And yet, after caveman Ug agrees for the furniture to be moved:

Uga then moved back to the saber tooth tiger skin and slept with Ug. (p. 120)

How can Uga move back to the saber tooth tiger skin if she’s been sleeping there all along?  The close proximity of these sentences to one another on the same page highlights the issue rather unfortunately.  Nonetheless, with some more careful editing and tightening up of the writing this could be an enjoyable story collection, although probably not one for me.

Where this book goes: I keep all ARC copies that I am sent (well, a grand total of two so far) because I’m very grateful to have received them.

Tea talk: I’ve recently been given an individual coffee filter and some posh ground decaff as I’ve recently lost my long-cultivated resistance to caffeine (sob).  It’s wonderful as, while cheap ordinary coffee is tolerable, cheap decaff is utterly vile, so I’ve been enjoying being able to drink coffee again.

I feel slightly guilty about not giving this book a good review, as I was sent a free review copy through the Good Reads First Reads programme. I really wanted to like it and be able to say nice things about it, but sadly I can’t. This book should have been given a subtitle; it should have been ‘The Breaking of the Shell: How to Improve your Life and Relationships through Active Listening and Responding to your Emotions’. This book was not a novel, but a poorly disguised self-help book masquerading as a novel to lure poor, unsuspecting people who usually wouldn’t touch such a book with a bargepole (such as myself) into reading it.

Perhaps because the storyline isn’t the main point of this book, it is neither very interesting nor particularly tightly written. At times, such as in the case of the dictaphone, it contradicts itself: Alexander initially listens to the recording in order to hear his father’s declaration of love and yet, when listening to the recording on a later occasion, is surprised to hear the very same at the start of the tape as he hadn’t realised it had been recorded. The character of Helen is introduced without any explanation: she is living with Alexander so I assumed she was his wife, then his girlfriend when that didn’t quite work out, until the first person narrator finally sees fit to tell the reader who this person is (his ex-wife, it transpires). Her characterisation is also inconsistent with what the reader is told: Alexander reports that ‘Helen One’ was dejected and self-doubting, whereas ‘Helen Two’ who emerges after the divorce is confident and bright, but it is impossible to tell the difference between the two Helens when reading through the before and after narratives. The miraculous changes in Alexander are similarly underwhelming and unapparent. It is difficult to see ‘the incident with the garden shed’ (yes, those are the exact words used) as the root of all Alexander’s problems when the author has gone to great lengths to establish that his problems with emotions started before this point and moreover when the ‘incident’ is forgotten and never referred to again for fully half the book. His putative change back into someone who is in touch with his emotions also fails because he isn’t enough of a bastard beforehand for this to be anything spectacular; he’s just a bit misguided and whiney. The lack of any particularly dramatic change in any of the characters means that there is no interesting and satisfying dénouement to this book. Instead, it just sort of peters out long after the time when it should have been put out of its misery.

Apparently the exciting climax of this book is supposedly the earth-shattering discovery that listening to other people and engaging with them makes the world a better place and people happier with each other and themselves (something I’m fairly sure most people could tell you without the aid of this book). At the point when this was discovered any attempt at plot that was anything other than a demonstration of how this system works disappeared entirely. Instead, the reader is treated to descriptions of parents listening to their children, businessmen listening to each other and ultimately the government listening to the people, which is admirable but really not very interesting. Had the narrative up to this point been particularly engaging I might have been able to forgive the new age, touchy feely instructions for self-discovery and the incredible lack of subtlety with which the author set about grinding his own personal axes. As it is, I was left disappointed.

The Breaking of the Shell by Barry Durdant-Hollamby.  Published by the art of change, 2010, pp. 334.  First edition.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.