Culture

Author: Scarlett Thomas, Publisher: Canongate, (4/5).


Inside this teen-fantasy-adventure-esque cover (complete with cool black edged pages) is a story about Meg, a freelance author struggling to survive by teaching writing classes and reviewing popular science books. All the while she is trying to write her ‘real’ novel, a task she seems unlikely to complete, living in a damp house and trapped in a dead relationship with the temptation of an impossible affair.
Having the protagonist as a creative type with DRAMA is a little clichéd but this book is one of the good ones. Meg being a writer allows for the narration to give insight into narrative structure itself and also a poetic view of the world. I’m sure it has a lot to do with Thomas’s skill as writer, but it feels natural when lines like “The grey afternoon was curling into evening like a frightened woodlouse” are scattered throughout the prose.
The characters and situations all seem to serve, almost entirely, as a vehicle for Scarlett Thomas to tell us all sorts of interesting things. This sometimes comes across as a little like a lecture, but makes sense as the people Meg surrounds herself with are all historians, aspiring philosophers and writers themselves. From what I have learnt from this book, I now feel like I could hold solid conversations about the Titanic, cultural premonitions, and the lives of Chekhov and Tolstoy. Trust me, that short list doesn’t even come close to summarizing the breadth of ideas Thomas has researched and snuck in for your pleasure. Subjects that I didn't care for or assumed I knew enough about, like tarot cards and OCD, were interesting and compelling when woven into the story as they were.
I found that when I tried to pick at faults in this novel, they justified themselves within the logic of the story, either by being representative of the story-less nature of real life or a clever bit of structural metaphor. For example, I was a little bothered by how nearly all of Meg’s friends end up knowing each other independently from her, but this web of people (and more importantly the stories they tell) build around Meg to comprise the final section.
Basically, what I have described here is a sometimes-poetic encyclopedia. But that’s just what surprised and interested me about this book I guess. On top of this there is a good story and it is plenty compelling. Scarlett Thomas is a damn fine writer; you should read this book or one of her others that’s earned a place in the bestseller lists.