Books: Inside the being of Mr Y

For her seventh novel, the still-young British writer Scarlett Thomas subverts Shakespeare's classic play-within-a-play structure to write a novel called The End Of Mr Y about a cursed book called The End Of Mr Y. People read that book, written by Thomas Lumas in 1893, and they seem to disappear. So when Ariel Manto, a bored and lonely PhD student finds a rare copy of this demon title in a second-hand store she decides she has to finish it. So far, so Stephen King (actually it's more like Dean Koontz, if anything) - but The End Of Mr Y is saved from being an absurd sci-fi literary in-joke (of, say, the type Jasper Fforde endlessly churns out), or a B-grade horror/thriller that runs out of steam, by Thomas's ability to stitch together an intriguing plot with aspects of romance, suspense and philosophy. Loads and loads of philosophy.

Do not be put off if you don't know your Heidegger from your Kant (or if your whole idea of the lineage of famous thinkers has come from Monty Python's "The Philosopher's Drinking Song"). Thomas's research never makes the finished text stumble or slow down; she manages occasionally to be deep, but is often poking so much fun at the subject that the novel just cracks along.

Ideas of mortality and time/space-travel are pursued in the book-within-the-book; Manto learns to enter the Troposphere, meaning she can jump, portal to portal, between bodies, entering human forms and even a horny house cat. Bodies become vehicles to step back in time, to explore and seek. And while the action hots up and the pace excites, the theory is brilliantly layered, crucial to both plot and point.

Thomas is using the novel as a metaphor for the thing that keeps her, or any writer for that matter, in business: reading. Her lead character is bored by real life. Paying bills and running out of money is not exciting, but getting caught up in a good book is. Devouring literature for knowledge is one thing, but it is still a form of escapism. No matter how heavy the text, the reader is still entering one world in favour of another. Thomas takes this conceit to its literal, literary extreme.

The title contains its own, fairly obvious, double-meaning. Towards the end of the book Thomas even suggests po-faced that critics won't get the extra meaning. By this point, however, it is clear she is having fun with this existential take on the nature of fiction and creation.

It helps that she has the storytelling instincts of a Donna Tartt or John Colapinto and the descriptive powers of a Zadie Smith. The End Of Mr Y could have been one big meta-joke. But it is much better than that - a science-fiction/ fantasy book that even haters of the genre would be lucky to discover.