Our Tragic Universe - Scarlett Thomas

From the gimmicky but desirable black-edged pages & gilt-patterned cover onwards, this book had a strangely powerful effect on me. On finishing it I found myself holding it longingly, wanting to extract more meaning from it and thereby connect with an imagined alternative self who could have written something like it - probably a simple reaction to the number of characters in the book who are writing books or reflecting on the nature of narrative, but one that was later revived when I noticed some points of connection between my own life and the author's.

Much of the book is explicitly about narrative structure. The heroine, Meg, has stalled on her 'literary' novel while successfully churning out genre fiction, but wants to get away from the formulaic and go back to exploring the unfathomable: "I want a tragic universe, not a nice rounded-off universe with a moral at the end." I couldn't quite decide how well I felt the balance was maintained between the 'traditional' and 'storyless' ("closer to a snake letting go of itself") elements of the narrative - there was a strongly plotted containing story with some predictable dramatic developments but there were also deliberately unresolved loose ends, some striking non-sequiturs & red herrings (like the teasing remark that "all stories with animals in them put the animals in peril"), and perhaps most refreshingly, space for reflective dialogue. I liked the idea of 'cultural premonitions' (where, for example, the only narrative direction for an 'unsinkable' ship is downwards...) and the description of modern Westerners aspiring to become fictional characters, and (like a woman playing hard to get so that her 'knight' has a dragon to slay) choosing to act like a character whose story ends in the way they want. In contrast to this, Meg appears to do a reasonable job of taking her own advice - by the end of the book she is (in what is ironically a positive heroic plot development which seems likely to lead to both career success and love!) on the path to becoming an anti-hero - a fool or hermit - spending time immersing herself in hobbies such as jam-making and sock-knitting purely for the experience of doing so.

I'm sure I didn't get everything out of this book that a more sophisticated reader might have done, but I loved it and I'd like to read more of her work.