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 scarlett thomas 'the end of mr y' interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.A word to the Ys. "I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them," says Scarlett Thomas, whose obsessions, judging by her seventh book, The End Of Mr Y, include quantum physics, post-structuralism, homoeopathy, evolutionary theory, theology and the origins of consciousness. Oh, and mice gods, road trips, Victorian fiction and debasing sexual encounters. Beginning in Kent and ending somewhere on the perimeter of thought itself, narratives don't come much more high concept than this. "My novels are high concept," Thomas agrees. "I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life."  Ariel Manto, the novel's heroine, is similarly focused on big ideas. A PhD student researching thought experiments, her supervisor has been missing for a year when she discovers a rare and supposedly cursed book, The End Of Mr Y, written by Thomas Lumas, a 19th-century novelist and scientist. This chance find sets her off on two journeys: one through southern England, and the other into a four-dimensional plane of existence called the Troposphere. The idea for the Troposphere came from Thomas's research into the zero-point field, the sea of electromagnetic energy that quantum theorists posit fills the vacuum of space. "Someone did this experiment where they kept cutting bits from a fish's brain, but it could still remember things, and there was some speculation that maybe memory was stored outside the mind. It was the moment when I wondered what it would be like to go surfing in this place that really enabled me to build the Troposphere." The end result is a novel that exerts a thriller's grip while spewing bleeding edge scientific theory and brain-warping paradoxes from every chapter. "The Zen Buddhist part of me is kind of compelled by things that don't make sense," Thomas explains. "I've read too many koans." Thomas' theological knowledge helps fuse the supposedly antinomical areas of religion and quantum physics to unique effect, which begs the question: after winding up at the beginnings of consciousness, where does a novelist go next? "I did wonder about that when I was writing the novel. But actually the ending only shows you can have all the meaning you want but all it gives you is stories - like the Genesis story - that are always fiction, and always disconnected from fundamental passion and experience. So there are loads of places to go next. Tragedy, love, passion, the end of the universe… It's all coming soon."
Chris Power
The End Of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas, out now published by Canongate.
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