This was a satisfying continuation of my 'books to make your head explode' reading series started by Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr. Y. I liked the fact that the utterly bizarre cover image, with its pairs of mirrored characters, is in fact a fairly accurate representation of the plotline of much of the book. The whole thing is dense with cross-references, and yet starts with a character poking fun at the people who treat simple verbal coincidences as profound insights. The 'main' narrative concerns a physicist attempting to prevent a possible breakdown of reality caused by a secret plot to build a network of quantum computers, while another narrative strand (which is possibly a piece of writing by the main protagonist about things he doesn't know yet...) describes the experiences of his double.
Like Music, in a Foreign Language, the novel (or at least part of it!) is set in a parallel universe where Communists came to power in the UK following a German occupation during WWII, and in this book this scenario is extended into the past, with one of the narrative strands being, somewhat confusingly, an account of Schrödinger's discovery of his 'wave mechanics' theory of quantum physics, but one written as a counter-factual fiction in a universe where that did not occur. This allows for the cute observation by the author of the Schrödinger novel that it is set in a world that is "quite deliberately one that could not possibly exist. Who could believe such a thing as a female Prime Minister of Britain, or a movie actor elected President of the United States? It would be hard to be more evidently ironic without lapsing into farce." More seriously, the book ends with the same 'author' criticising 'our' world for being indifferent to truth, with our 'ridiculous and decadent' acceptance of the idea of a multiverse of realities leading to relativist chaos.
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