Andrew Crumey



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Reviews of Sputnik Caledonia

Yet again [Crumey] has produced a novel that should bring with it a surge of support for his winning a major literary prize. Books Quarterly

Never has astrophysics seemed so touching and funny. Telegraph

Hugely rewarding... lingers long in the mind. Observer

Emotionally powerful and intensely satisfying... a quantum leap forward for the Scottish novel. Scotland on Sunday

Crumey evokes brilliantly a hermetically sealed, paranoid micro-society. Guardian

A warm and moving portrait of Scottish small-town life. Times

The balance between these contrasting worlds is handled deftly. New Statesman

Crumey makes it hang together both as plot and as emotional experience. Time Out (Book of the Week: 5 stars)

This master of making our heads spin has found out how to hit the heart. Asylum

I can't remember the last time I was so reluctant to put a book down. Scotsman

Crumey writes brilliantly about being a boy... A brio of a book. Spectator

Chirpily surreal... a Moorcockian tale of interleaving realities. Times Literary Supplement

An ingenious blend of philosophy, physics and fantasy...immensely stimulating and entertaining. Sunday Telegraph

Reviews of Mobius Dick

Magnificent - it's certainly my novel of the year. John O'Connell, Time Out

The most rewarding book I have read all year. Scarlett Thomas, Independent On Sunday

Brilliant... a triumph of a book and one which will keep you thinking long after you have put it down. Paul Pickering, Daily Express

Sure to be a contender for the Man Booker Prize... a mesmerizing read. Barcelona Review

Like a magical conjuror, Crumey keeps all manner of subjects - chaos and coincidence, quantum mechanics, psychoanalysis, technology, telepathy and much else - whirling amazingly in the air. Michael Holroyd, New Statesman "books of the year"

Written wonderfully... its playfulness and artistry make it a page-turner, too. It is perhaps the only novel about quantum mechanics you could imagine reading while lying on a beach. Joseph O'Connor, Guardian

Plays deftly with the hardest elements of hard science, with the most serious conceits of serious fiction, and with all the ways in which S and F may exercise a reciprocal strange attraction... For most readers, the soundness of its science will be of small consequence; as fiction it is solid plutonium, and unflaggingly enjoyable. Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times

Fascinating and vertiginously entertaining. Sean O'Brien, Times Literary Supplement

Written with impressive brio... combines the intellectual parlour games of David Lodge with the unnerving prescient vision of JG Ballard. Sebastian Shakespeare, Literary Review

Fascinating, erudite and witty. Not only is it a thriller based on quantum mechanics, it covers literature, politics and philosophy. And it even has sex in it too. What more could you ask for? Anna Shipman, The List

Has the whole of history, humanity, philosophy and physics at its radioactive core. Clemency Burton-Hill, Observer

There's a version of you already reading Mobius Dick in a parallel world. Join them. Colin Waters, Sunday Herald

Crumey writes like a dream and dreams like a writer... erotic, subtle prose, imbued with restraint and a touch of jocosity. Tom Adair, Scotsman

Remarkable... a wonderfully lucid and cunning account. Peter Davidson, The Tablet

Marvellous... a book that keeps you on your toes. Alastair Mabbott, The Herald

Intelligent, witty and accomplished. James Wood, London Magazine

Imaginative, erudite and playful... a pleasurable paradox that leaves the reader smiling. Kevin Wood, Yomiuri Shimbun

A delightful mystery... a fascinating novel. Martin Cansdale, Felix

Fantastic (in both senses of the word). Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

Contriving a dizzyingly twisting plot around the paradoxicality of quantum mechanics while happily carrying along a reader with limited scientific knowledge is no mean feat, but Crumey has achieved it in spades. Chris Power, Times

A stimulating ride. Jonathan Gibbs, Telegraph

A brilliant exposition of the possibilities lurking in quantum physics and an aggressive take on how the idea of 'great art' is losing currency. It's an absolute sin that this book didn't win last year's Man Booker Prize. Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski, Independent on Sunday

Full reviews of Mobius Dick:

New Statesman Books Of The Year (Michael Holroyd)
'I have a weakness for Andrew Crumey's novels. I call it a weakness because I've noticed that, when reading them in waiting rooms or on trains, people look up angrily whenever I laugh. There's much to laugh at in Mobius Dick. Like a magical conjuror, Crumey keeps all manner of subjects - chaos and coincidence, quantum mechanics, psychoanalysis, technology, telepathy and much else - whirling amazingly in the air'.

Time Out (John O'Connell)
Andrew Crumey's fourth novel is a multidisciplinary feast of worlds within worlds, texts within texts, invented futures and possible pasts; a formally ingenious novel of ideas which hurls readers around a Mobius-loop rollercoaster - harnessed by trenchant satire and wry comedy, and consoled by a cast of beguilingly antiheroic characters who, more by accident than by design, light our way through the metaphysical fog.
The action is triggered by a mysterious text message - 'Call me: H' - received by a physicist, John Ringer. He thinks it must be from Helen, a woman he once met across a university refectory table, an 'arts' person whose specialism (Thomas Mann) turned out to complement his (Schrodinger, of cat fame) when a coincidnece presented itself: both Mann and Schrodinger did their best work in the course of a stint at a tuberculosis clinic in the Swiss Alps. On such coincidences does 'Mobius Dick' turn, except that it doesn't regard them as such, parlaying them instead into quantum events whose focus is necessarily on multiplicity and reversal. To this end, Crumey alternates a James Bond- style subplot involving Ringer's visit to a sinister nuclear facility in Scotland with excerpts from the work of a (fictional) writer called Heinrich Behring, including accounts of a visit by Schumann's lover to the dying composer and of a summit dinner attended by Schrodinger and his fellow sanatorium-dwelling intellectuals. Before long you start to realise that the book's structure is totally involuted, self-reflecting to the point where it's explicable only in terms of the relationships between its various narrative components. An oblique allusion to Borges towards the end hammers the point home; other antecedents are plainly Pynchon, Barth and Kafka, but also those very British puyrveyors of accessible experimentalism David Lodge and Jonathan Coe. It would be nice to think that this magnificent piece of work stood a chance of winning the Booker. It's certainly my novel of the year.

The List (Anna Shipman)
John Ringer receives an inexplicable text message that reminds him of a long-forgotten lover. On his way to a remote Scottish town to give a talk on quantum theory and mobile phone technology, a further series of coincidences leads him to question just how purely theoretical his findings are. Interspersed with Ringer's experiences are those of unfortunate amnesiac Harry Dick and - amongst other real and imagined historical characters - Schrodinger, who is on holiday searching for the wave equation that will revolutionise physics. As the parallel stories become linked in bizarre and unpredictable ways, with brain- teasing recurring themes and subtle allusions, the implications of quantum computers malfunctioning for the space-time continuum become increasingly relevant. Mobius Dick is fascinating, erudite and witty. Not only is it a thriller based on quantum mechanics, it covers literature, politics and philosophy. And it even has sex in it too. What more could you ask for?

Guardian (Joseph O'Connor)
It is recounted by the Romantic painter, Benjamin Haydon, that Keats once proposed a scornful toast: "Confusion to the memory of Newton!" When his drinking companion, Wordsworth, sought an explanation, Keats muttered a slander that still festers in some innocent hearts: "He destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism." For many imaginative writers, especially in the English-speaking world, scientific ignorance has long been translated into starry-eyed bliss. This fine novel by Andrew Crumey belongs in a more intellectually engaged tradition. It's science fiction, Jim, but not as we know it.
John Ringer, a physicist, receives an ambiguous text message on his mobile. It might be from a one-time lover; he isn't sure. Despite being a professional scientist, he can't figure out how the callback feature on his phone works - an endearing trait, as well as a plot hinge. Whatever its source or meaning, the communication sets off a chain of odd events and ostensibly unrelated narratives. Before long, these different stories and time zones are being subtly intermingled, revolving around each other in a mysterious dance. We get Ringer's reminiscences of a fantastically cerebral love affair ("predicated on German philosophy"), an account of the last days of the composer Schumann, and the fumbling attempts of amnesiac Harry Dick to write autobiographical fiction.
Coincidences, analogies, flukes and recurring motifs begin to loop the disparate elements together, until we realise, about a third of the way in, that the Ringer story is perhaps being composed by bed-bound Dick. Each storyline is written wonderfully and is nearly always convincing, even as what is happening becomes curiouser and curiouser.
This contrapuntal form, with its contrasting tones and voices, gives an almost musical dimension to the organisation of the novel. Crumey knows that structure can be part of a novel's allure: you find yourself drawn into the cavernous architecture of his wonderland, a dreamscape of shifting realities, quantum computers and "vacuum energy". False memory and telepathy thicken the plot. People vanish before each other's eyes. Proust's fiction was actually written by Flaubert. The United Kingdom was once invaded by Germany but is now called the British Democratic Republic. One thinks of Stephen Hawking's remark about the quantum multiverse: there could be a parallel world in which Belize is winning all the Olympic gold medals.
In some ways this is an edgily modern book, with Dick's namesake, Philip K Dick, among its guiding spirits. Admirers of Flann O'Brien's fictions will be struck by the beguiling ways in which Crumey uses unreliable narrators and worlds within worlds. In another sense the novel reaches back to a Renaissance aesthetic, in which art and scholarship, if not quite the same thing, are mutually adoring twins or lovers in a fable. Refreshingly, this is a novel in which science is a central character rather than a metaphor for something else.
That said, it isn't a boffin-fest but a glitteringly original piece of storytelling, unapologetically intelligent, driven by tightly focused narrative skill. It is also acerbically funny, peppered with digs, while an Orwellian irony makes clear that the questions implied are not about some imagined culture, but concern the one in which we wake up every day.
There is a winning sense of spaciousness in the writing, a feeling that the words are pouring out spontaneously. This quality is all the more impressive because the ideas are complex: indeed, those of us who are a bit rusty on Heisenberg's interpretation of wave functions may sense we're missing out. And even readers who marvel at Crumey's expansive, frisky prose may feel the allusion to cultural titans becomes a little relentless: Melville, Thomas Mann, Foucault, Nietzsche and Lacan are all name- checked in the first few pages. ("Writing about writers is best avoided," comments Dick's therapist. This isn't advice Crumey would tolerate.) But while Mobius Dick is a work of sophisticated erudition, its playfulness and artistry make it a page-turner, too. It is perhaps the only novel about quantum mechanics you could imagine reading while lying on a beach.

Sunday Times (Kevin Jackson)
Science fiction is the literary genre of choice for nerds, geeks and smelly, socially inadequate obsessives: so say the prigs, who will go on to add that the 'science' in SF is preposterous (often fair comment, usually quite irrele-vant) and the 'fiction' puerile (sheer ignorant bigotry, if we're talking about, say, H G Wells or J G Ballard, Philip K Dick or Thomas M Disch). You can see why mainstream publishers tend to fight shy of the damning label - why, for instance, you will search in vain for the words 'Science Fiction' anywhere on the dust jacket of Andrew Crumey's novel Mobius Dick. Well, hard cheese on the marketing department. Not only is Mobius Dick plainly legible as SF all the way through, and splendidly venturesome SF at that; it is also a novel that plays deftly with the hardest elements of hard science, with the most serious conceits of serious fiction, and with all the ways in which S and F may exercise a reciprocal strange attraction.
Crumey's book is fiendishly hard to summarise, mainly because it is set in a number of different worlds, none of which is entirely watertight - which is to say, reality-tight. In one reality a theoretical physicist, name of John Ringer (Crumey himself holds a PhD in that demanding discipline), sets off on a quest to a remote part of Scotland, where an American corporation has built a secret facility devoted to harnessing 'vacuum energy' and thus building a global communications system which will 'make the Internet look like pigeon post'. This gizmo has one wee drawback. If it malfunctions, it might split the universe into an infinite number of multiverses. Literally anything would become possible somewhere or some-when, so that the fictitious characters of one world could be real in another, and vice versa. Hold that giddy thought for a moment.
Meanwhile, in another reality, a man called Harry Dick wakes up bewildered in a hospital bed, and is told by his mildly sinister or utterly ludicrous therapists that he is suffering from AMD (Anomalous Memory Disorder), possibly caused by exposure to some new form of communications technology (aha!), the victims of which are haunted by memories of things that never happened. As part of his cure, he is encouraged to try some creative writing. He complies, and writes a story about a theoretical physicist, name of John Ringer, who . . . and so on.
A couple of further realities are now shuffled into the pack: extracts from novels by a 20th-century German author, Heinrich Behring: The Angel Returns (which is about the dying Robert Schumann) and Professor Faust, which bears a striking resemblance to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, save that its leading character is Schrodinger - the very scientist who gave us physics' favourite feline, Schrodinger's cat. (If you remember your Horizon documentaries, this is the pussy who is left simultaneously alive and dead after a cruel experiment, and thus gives rise to speculation about alternative realities. See the review of The Coma) An autobiographical postscript from Herr Behring tells us of how he came to write these works, in the momentous years when Goebbels led Germany on a war of conquest, heroically resisted by the British Democratic Republic.
Is that all, you may be asking? Not remotely. These highly reflective narratives also include a letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne (there are Moby Dick jokes throughout - the first chapter is entitled 'Call Me: H', a cute text-message spin on 'Call me Ishmael'), disquisitions on Jung and coincidence, Nietzsche and eternal recurrence and a parody of outlandish Literary Theory that, in the end, Mobius-strip-like, turns back in on itself. As do many other components: once finished, the book invites you to head right back to the beginning and reread the same events in a wholly different light. 'Ingenious' is far too pallid a term of praise for this cunningly contrived entertainment, which may sound ponderous in outline but is actually a breeze, by turns slyly comic and oddly melancholy. For most readers, the soundness of its science will be of small consequence; as fiction it is solid plutonium, and unflaggingly enjoyable

Independent On Sunday (Scarlett Thomas)
Quantum theory is a slippery fish indeed. Back in the days of Newtonian physics, you knew where you were. You knew where something had been and, therefore, where it was going, thanks to the laws of motion. Newton's deterministic cause-and-effect universe was just a giant piece of clockwork, ticking along in a manner unchanged since the act of creation - the first winding of the big clock. But quantum physics - the study of sub-atomic matter - says differently. When you look at the microscopic world you find almost nothing that can be explained by cause and effect. Instead, matter behaves both as waves and as particles; does crazy stuff at random; can possibly travel faster than the speed of light and, crucially, does not 'really exist' until you look at it. This uncertain place, where observer meets matter in the quantum world, has led to some of the most profound metaphysical speculation in the history of science. Some arguments suggest that a particle is both everywhere and nowhere until it is observed; in a superposition, or a smearing, of all probabilities. This is the 'wavefunction'. Somewhere in the middle of this novel, the protagonist John Ringer is trying to explain all this to a journalist, who, incidentally, may or may not be a parallel universe version of his lost lover Helen. He describes the wavefunction as a big book containing all the possible stories about certain characters. 'Out of all the possible stories in the book, my observation selects just one. This is called a quantum jump. As soon as you take the tiniest peek, the wavefunction collapses, leaving you with a single story.' But what if, as Hugh Everett asked in 1957, the other possibilities don't simply disappear? What if, at the point when the wavefunction collapses, the universe (or, more accurately, 'multiverse') splits into alternate realities? If this is true then there are worlds out there in which Germany won the war; worlds in which you have six fingers, or are really called Tim. (If you're thinking, 'But I am called Tim', then you are obviously already in this world.) If the multiverse theory is correct (and it has never been disproved) then every novel in this world faithfully recreates a reality somewhere else. Think about it. Nothing is real, or, perhaps, everything is. In this novel there looms a huge particle accelerator that may accidentally smear 'reality', causing these kinds of alternate possibilities to exist simultaneously. Blossoming around this centrepiece are a physicist who sees visions of himself in the future, a patient in another world suffering from Anomalous Memory Disorder, where people from our world keep creeping into his (his psychologist writes off Thomas Mann, Schumann and Flaubert as 'Penis Man', 'Shoe Man', and 'Flow-Bear' - all 'false' memories) and the other-world novels of Heinrich Behring, including 'Professor Faust', a story in which Schrodinger goes to the mountains to think about his wave equation. With kaleidoscopic themes, including Jungian psychoanalysis, coincidence, inversion, cycles, Vedic philosophy and the nature of writing itself, this novel was initially rather puzzling but, ultimately, turned out to be the most rewarding book I have read all year. Mind bending? Yes. Delicious twist? Yes. What else do you need?

Observer (Clemency Burton-Hill)
'A novel that has a mirrored double personality at its heart should be called Mobius Dick,' Andrew Crumey informs us helpfully, after his protagonist wonders if 'some imaginative novelist could conceive a logical scheme linking everything... some grand unified theory in which [people] would be quantum resonances'.
Mobius Dick has more than a mirrored double personality at its heart; it has the whole of history, humanity, philosophy and physics at its radioactive core. Crumey traverses time, space and multiple universes to develop a new paradigm of causality and explain, basically, why a random text message can generate all manner of emotional, epistemological, ontological, transcendental and dialectical chaos. (Or, in layman's terms, what hap pens when a misdirected text prompts you to think it might be from somebody you were once in love with and then makes you think you see them disappearing round a street corner.)
John Ringer is a professor of theoretical physics who 'inadvertently' stumbles into a literature seminar called 'Vicious Cycloids'. Annoyed by its 'parade of coincidences masquerading as insight', John is, nevertheless, dogged by its question of whether history is hinged on chance and coincidence and whether events are as random as they seem.
This follows his receipt of a text which simply says: 'Call me: H.' Having once loved a Helen, he obsesses that it might be from her - all the way to Craigcarron, where he's to give a lecture and meet an old student who works at the nuclear plant there. The same student divulges Craigcarron's plan to build a network of quantum computers to create instantaneous and total global communication. Ringer worries this would be preposterously dangerous, because, harnessing the energy of the vacuum between reflective plates, the potential production of a non-collapsible wave func tion corresponding to a high-energy photon could wreak all manner of havoc on the universe.
(Just in case you're having trouble remembering your Copenhagen Interpretation, let me refresh your memory. When waves are measured, they mysteriously 'collapse' in a quantum jump; thus, an electron is everywhere and nowhere until it interacts, leaving its footprint on the universe. Two conflicting stories can therefore be true, because when the universe splits after any event, what is 'real' depends on your frame of reference.)
But the wave function must collapse and, if Ringer's fears are justified and some 'stubborn, vacillating, recalcitrant' wave refuses, the hall of quantum mirrors will mutate from a device for communication into one of confusion and chaos. 'Its trapped, rebounding particles would be ghosts and vampires, oscillating eternally between one universe and the next, bridging worlds and confounding them.'
And what would it take to lead to disaster? Nothing so monumental, apparently, as a stray hair. The earth, the planet, 'perhaps even the very cosmos itself', would become 'make-believe, a joke'. What's more, it could be happening already and we wouldn't even know about it. Cue spooky music.
Spliced into John's story are alternative narratives of music, madness, memory, mobiles, Mann, Melville and, er, whales; none of whose relevance is quite grasped until the novel's apocalyptic resolution. But forget collapsible wave functions; Mobius Dick is so self-referential it threatens to collapse in on itself. Crumey is a talented writer and a major brain, but he will need to turn his hand to something non-scientific soon in order to prove he can transcend science faction.
Then again, this may just be the green-eyed gripe of someone who abandoned physics with unbridled glee after GCSEs. Because despite the exegesis of dialectical matrix mechanics (do I sound like I understand it yet?) Mobius Dick is quite lighthearted and fun, beginning with a text message and ending with an old chestnut. 'How vivid it all was,' he writes. 'How soon the dream is finished.'
Dream? Well, it's good to know that even scarily intelligent theoretical physicists can't get themselves out of some narrative dilemmas.

Sunday Herald (Colin Waters)
IN a parallel universe I'd probably start this review differently, but then parallel universes are contrary things. If you accept the 'many worlds' theory of quantum physics, then there may be a world near yet far from ours in which Goebbels led the Nazi Party, Thomas Mann was a flop novelist, and Erwin Schrodinger died of TB before he could revolutionise quantum mechanics. Such an alternative reality is proposed in Andrew Crumey's novel Mobius Dick, an unashamedly brainy treat.
During the course of Mobius Dick, the reader encounters a swathe of scientific theories semi-familiar from sci-fi: Schrodinger's Cat, the butterfly effect, and all manner of quantum quirkiness.
The book begins with professor of theoretical physics John Ringer receiving a text message: 'Call me: H.' Ringer suspects this is a former lover, Helen, who he has not seen for 20 years. Has the text been floating in the ether for two decades? (Is it credible Ringer would have the same mobile number for so long?)
The text triggers a memory of their first meeting: she was reading Doctor Faustus, he Quantum Fields In Curved Space. Their talk pivots on coincidence and the possibility the universe is a 'simulation in a cosmic computer'. As often happens in novels of ideas, conversations are less dialogues than expositions of conflicting arguments. Crumey, however, injects just enough of a human element into the conversation to prevent this becoming a dramatised textbook: 'At the time this interested him less than the cut of Helen's blouse, but the gist was that reality is a creation of the mind.'
Their conversation ranges far and free setting up the themes the novel probes: are coincidences just coincidental? Do parallel universes exist? In what ways does literary and scientific fame differ? And most crucially, does she fancy me?
Ultimately Mobius Dick is less concerned with the immortality of the individual through his genius than the destruction of humanity through its stupidity. Interestingly, it's often the men of genius who facilitate the deadly expression of that stupidity - think Einstein. The added twist is that Ringer is part of a reality that has already happened, with one reality writing itself over the top of another like a multi-dimensional layer cake. As reality unravels, Ringer tries to make sense of it all with the help of Laura, a journalist who happens to be Helen's doppelganger.
In its preoccupation with doppelgangers and predestination Mobius Dick continues the argument of James Hogg's Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner - Ringer means 'a double' and sounds a little like Wringham who was Hogg's 'hero' - but with science and not religion setting the philosophic boundaries of the debate.
There's no room here to do justice to the density of ideas Crumey unpacks with admirable lightness. Suffice to say, there's a version of you already reading Mobius Dick in a parallel world. Join them.

Scotsman (Tom Adair)
ANDREW CRUMEY WRITES LIKE A dream and dreams like a writer inspired to make mischief about the difference between writing and dreaming. You enter his novels knowing that when you exit them you may find yourself doubting whether the thing we know as the novel - or even the self you believe you may be - are definable or real. Mobius Dick is therefore a disturbing pleasure and sometimes and a puzzle, a fictive slice of cockahoop daring. A read that is always demanding attention.
Then again, we've been here before, which is one of the jokes of Mobius Dick. Readers who've dallied with Crumey's previous novels will know that, like Russian dolls (or Chinese whispers), events and time shifts are often concealed or unreliable. The voice on the page may be who or what it says it is - or not. The narrator may actually be a character invented by one of the novel's other characters, a ghost from the distant past, or a glimpse of the future. Which voice do you trust? Which events are real? The answer is: none. All are concoctions (or putative versions?) of the author - and vivid products of his imaginings. Which, like all imaginations, alters reality as we know it.
"She was asking me (as was usual at such moments) what I was thinking about. So that I quickly had to make up some suitable reply." This, the opening paragraph of Crumey's debut novel, Music in a Foreign Language, gets to the point: we are all deceivers, life being full of casual fictions, aimed at silencing or pleasing. In a sense you feel his novels are "suitable replies" to the questions he toys with.
Mobius Dick begins straightforwardly. A theoretical physics professor, John Ringer (will he, you wonder, end up dead? Is he dead already? Is he someone else's doppelganger? ) receives a mystery message on his Q-phone: " 'Call me: H.' Nothing more. No indication of who H was, or how he was supposed to get in touch. Only a 'user not found' when he hit 'reply'. Immediately he thought of Helen."
Helen turns out to be his ex-lover, a long-ago fling. But perhaps what the message meant was: 'Call me regarding H'. Some important news. Even a chance to meet again, he thinks, his excitement ill-concealed.
Are we on the verge of a tale of romance? Perhaps a quest tale; even a metaphysical thriller? Then a third thought occurs to Ringer: the call is probably ... a stray text, a wrong number. A tiny, trivial piece of another person's existence that had inadvertently dropped itself into his, forcing him to make sense of it. We are a species of pattern finders. Evolution made us so.
And so, in the novel's very first pages, we learn to trust its central figure. A man of reason. Probabilities and patterns shape his universe. Drawn into his ordered world, we engage with memories of his early encounters with Helen, their tentative courtship, exchanges of knowledge (she is a student of German literature, he an enquirer into the work of the physicist Schrodinger, who derived the basic rule of quantum mechanics). So far, so simple. Helen mentions Thomas Mann, one of whose characters, in the novel The Magic Mountain, went to a TB clinic in Switzerland. Ringer remarks on the coincidence - for Schrodinger, while vacationing at a similar TB clinic in the Alps, had made his fundamental breakthrough. Is this coincidence or fate? The question stalks much of Crumey's work. Are we fixed in our course, or subject to random interventions that alter the pathways of cause and effect? But just when he latches you on to his philosophical wavelength, Crumey distracts you again, draws you into the blossoming love affair.
Finding such links was no more than an erudite form of flirting - "'Nietzsche lies behind Doktor Faustus', [Helen] told him gravely, and while her face was lowered he divined, like a faint galaxy, the protrusion of a nipple beneath her red pullover."
You are hooked; the characters breathe: "Leaning towards him over the table... he could smell her perfume. A loose lock of hair on her bare neck invited the correcting stroke of a finger... They could have debated whether Beethoven and Einstein really had anything in common beyond a shared aversion to hair combs, but it was time to try and move beyond ideas."
THIS IS erotic, subtle prose, imbued with restraint and a touch of jocosity to defuse the charge of lust. Its telling paradox lies in the fact that what we are moving beyond is the couple's intense relationship - that ideas are where the action is.
Thus Ringer's teasing fixation with long-lost Helen becomes a key strand in the book's interweaving of what is remembered, what is imagined and what is real. It shares the torchbeam of Crumey's scrutiny with passages from the (invented) fictional works of Heinrich Behring, published post-war by the (also invented) Cromwell Press, in the British Democratic Republic. Thus the historic past is rewritten.
From this point on the novel adopts recorded events - invoking Schumann, Liszt and Goethe - who in his writings has Helen woken from the Trojan dead - the lost love (of Goethe) raised from the past.
This eerie parallel with Ringer's apparently resurrected lover hints at time-shifts in the offing.
Thus, enter Carl Jung and Erwin Schrodinger, and the 20th-century physicists Bohr and Heisenberg. Ringer courts Helen with his discourse on Heisenberg's version of the uncertainty principle. From this they move to the doctrine of quantum mechanics and its inception. It's stirring stuff that risks the reader's disaffection, and Helen's patience. Then the plot deepens.
To add to the tales of Ringer and Helen, and that of the physicist Erwin Schrodinger in Switzerland (as told by Heinrich Behring, which incorporates a character instrumental in Mobius Dick's unexpected - and satisfying - conclusion), we have the memory twists, writ large, of Harry Dick. False Memory Syndrome is Harry's supposed condition. He scribbles notes about what he knows - a stream of subconsciousness - and one of his doodles of memory coughs up a character called John Ringer. A putative fiction? With still two thirds of the book to go, the reader's world is decisively flipped.
For from that point forward, the characters' pasts and futures converge. Ringer's "time- present" takes us to Scotland, meeting a "Helen" who isn't Helen, becoming involved at the edge of experiments in the Highlands that may collapse the space-time continuum of the universe. Science fiction? Science fable? Orwellian nightmare? Huxleyesque myth? The point of this novel, in part, is to question the very pigeon- holing of science, art and life. Crumey revels in the confusion and conflation of such distinctions. At times the detail (scientific, historic, artistic) feels overwhelming, as though the carcinogenic footnotes have taken over the textual body.
However, the author's daring and aplomb is thrilling throughout. Difficult time-shifts and altered states of dubious consciousness are handled with assurance. Jokes and lampoons are in good supply. The writing exhilarates at its finest, and keeps you afloat the rest of the way.

The Tablet (Peter Davidson)
Andrew Crumey's remarkable new novel is a set of interlocking narratives about perception, fiction and reality: a narrative of John Ringer, a physics professor, who travels to a remote remote research station at Ardnahanish in the Scottish Highlands, eventually to meet his death in the works of a machine for the creation of parallel universes. The story of a man called Harry who awakes from anmesia in an experimental psychiatric hospital, who is compelled to write the story of the physicist as part of the 'writing therapy' forced on him by the terrible, ragged writer-in- residence.Intercut with these narratives are extracts from the works of Heinrich Behring, the titanic German novelist of a twentieth century where Thomas Mann abandoned fiction after the failure of his first novel, where the Nazis successfully invaded Britain to be defeated in turn by the forces of a united Soviet Europe. Behring's works are ghosts of works by Mann - Professor Faust, a fictionalisation of the inception of Schrodinger's theory of the cat in the box which can be simultaneously alive and dead; The Angel Returns, a fiction of Robert Schumann in his madness receiving supernatural dictation of the twelve-tone music of the early twentieth century. The only communication possible between these worlds (where events are each other's imaginations, where histories are the narratives written by inhabitants of parallel worlds while in states of amnesia , psychosis or dream)is the interrupted reductio ad absurdum of written communication: the text-messages sent to the mobile phones of other universes. Crumey gives a wonderfully lucid and cunning account of this sequence of intersecting realities, realities governed by the abstract rules of theoretical physics. "If Ringer's fears were justified, then Don's immaculate hall of mirrors would be a device not for global communication but for universal confusion. Its trapped, rebounding particles would be ghosts and vampires, oscillating eternally between one universe and the next, bridging worlds and confounding them." Later John Ringer, as the texture of his reality grows thin and gappy, realises that "his life's book had cracked ajar to reveal a looping narrative, a jumbled story. This was the only sense he could make of it: his other self was a fiction, and so, by the sublime symmetry that guides all science, he too muct be fiction." This (accurate enough) estimate of the status of Crumey's characters is revealed to the reader about half-way through the narrative - so what is it that keeps that reader turning the pages (sometimes frantically) until the end? Partly it is a matter of the sheer elegance of Crumey's narrative: despite their blatant status as fictions, each of his realities encapsulates a credible world, each has a driving plot that will not let the reader go. Whether we are poets, scientists or theologians we are driven by an instilled desire to make order, to make sense of the narratives unspooling on the page - the more that the author insists that we are reading fabrications, lies, impossibilities, the more he goads us to try to resolve these irreconcilable events into a single 'truth', however provisional. Such a possibility is only held out to Crumey's protagonist in the moment of his dissolution, "and on the small planet that now melted as swiftly as a snowflake, none survived who might read it." At that moment he has half an intuition that there exists, somewhere beyond and operating in the dark, "Life, creator of worlds." And the reader finally has a sense of coherence and closure beyond all the postmodern intersecting worlds, even if we regognise in Crumey's epilogue that our own reality is a risible, improbable fiction.

The Herald (Alastair Mabbott)
Forty-five years after C P Snow's famous complaint about the deep divide between the arts and the sciences, physics has never been sexier to book-buyers.
We can all recount fragments of Einstein, whom we think we can just about grasp, and make vague allusions to the more mind-bending theories or his successors, whose talk of multiple dirnensions and an infinity of alternate realities is at least exotic, if still incomprehensible to most. The mysteries and paradoxes of quantum theory open up exciting new opportunities for authors who can actually understand them.
Such creatures are rare, at best, but Andrew Crurney fills the bill. A prize-winning novelist, his CV also boasts a PhD in theoretical physics. Described as "a literary Escher'', he's used his previous four novels to play games with narrative and tinker under the very hood of fiction itself.
His earlier works have, among other things, explored the French mathematician D'Alembert's definition of knowledge and described the quest for an ancient book that could disprove the existence of the universe.
In Music, In A Foreign Language, Crumey had his narrator create the plot, while suggesting he may have stolen some of it from an Italian surrealist. Pfitz concerns a prince who designs an imaginary city and ropes his subjects into building it, a project that includes inventing the people and making up the literature they produced.
Clearly, Crurney, who has had the adjective "post-modern" thrown at him more than once, has read his share of Borges. But this is a literary deconstructor and fantasist who has thrown the head-spinning logic of Heisenberg and Schrodinger into the mix, too. The main storyline of Mobius Dick follows a physics professor named John Ringer, who, against his rational, hard-nosed judgement, allows a trail of unrelated signs to lead him to an arts faculty lecture tying together Moby Dick, Schumann, Lacan and geometric curves called cycloids in a series of tenuous links. To the professor, it's all very silly and arbitrary. Yet his name is Ringer and the trail to the lecture was set off by a message on his phone. He seems to suspect on one level that he's a character in a book to be pushed around at the author's whims. "Life is not a novel," he protests, "except for those vain enough to consider themselves creatures of art." Authorial puppet or not, he's obviously in the grip of some force beyond his control. Reality is doing strange things and Ringer's tale, as he heads for a meeting at a remote nuclear facility, is intertwined with others.
There's a marvelous chapter, for instance, from the memoirs of Bettina von Arnim, in which the nineteenth-century socialite visits a sanatorium where the dying Schumann has been incarcerated by an obstructive charlatan called Richarz and, in a nice touch, invents 12-tone serial music.
Somehow, the barriers between alternate universes, past and present, reality and fiction, are breaking down. Events are foreshadowed, themes recur before they occur and, as in the lecture Ringer scoffed at, links begin to form between hitherto unrelated historical characters.
It's a bookt hat keeps you on your toes, but, perhaps giving way to the law of entropy, much of its energy dissipates in an overlong chapter about Schrodinger towards the end. Crurney has trouble getting back on track for the ending after that.
Still, Mobius Dick's power doesn't come from the denouement, or the reader's connection with the characters (which there isn't, much), but from disorientation of the previous 300 pages - the sensation of being spun around to the point of dizziness in a hall of distorting mirrors and being told to find your way out.

London Magazine (James Wood)
'A book is not an isolated being', wrote Jorge Luis Borges. 'It is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.' In his previous work, most notably in 2001's Mr Mee, the Scottish novelist Andrew Crumey has taken Borges' words as his guiding principle. Now, in Mobius Dick, he expands on Borges' dictum, creating a challenging and entertaining novel that is crammed with ideas. At a very basic level, Mobius Dick could be read as science fiction or a detective story. But these tags would simply be a means of trying to tie down a work that ultimately defies categorisation. A quick resume of the first few chapters gives a flavour of Crumey's technique: John Ringer, a lecturer in physics, receives a mysterious text message on his mobile phone. He attends a lunch- time lecture on Moby Dick, given by a hopelessly - and hilariously - pretentious colleague from the literature faculty. He thinks about an old lover, about the physicist Schrodinger and the works of Thomas Mann, then again about the text message. Crumey then transports us into a book within a book, into the English translation of a German fiction about Bettina von Arnim, Goethe's lover. The characters in this book debate the relationship between Brahms and Schumann. Then it's back to John Ringer, his mysterious text message and his former lover, and her study of German literature - including Lotte in Weimar, which is about one of Goethe's lovers reminiscing in old age. Crumey sets up endless connections, coincidences, which are variously significant or irrelevant, as John Ringer notes in the first chapter - 'Coincidences only mean what we want them to.' What makes Crumey's work exceptional is its inclusive nature. There seems to be no end to the connections, to the possibilities he creates. At the level of detective fiction, we have John Ringer trying to find out who sent him the text message and what is going on inside the sinister nuclear facility at Craigcarron in Scotland. As science fiction, we are offered the prospect of a method of communication 'that'll make the internet look like pigeon post', but using unstable and potentially lethal technologies. Around, between and behind these narratives are reflections on the nature of chance, desire, mobile phones, advanced physics and full Scottish breakfasts. Covering this much ground, Mobius Dick might be heavy going, but Crumey's dry humour and restless curiosity drive the book forward. Priss Morgan the Writing Therapist, is the book's comic gem, burdened with all the self-obsession and ignorance of the career 'Creative Writing' tutor: 'I do short stories ; I've had seventeen published to date. So you see, I really am a genuine writer.', or, 'reading other writers isn't important ; when I did my MA in Creative Writing, we only read one novel, and that was to turn it into a film script.' There are nods to Borges and Calvino in the narrative technique, and perhaps the Hesse of Steppenwolf ; but Crumey's work is wholly original, not least because he uses his close knowledge of physics both as subject and as part of the story-telling process. Crumey's work refuses to move simply from A to B; instead, like light refracted through a prism, he moves from A to B, revealing all of the colours of the spectrum in the process. When John Ringer steps into the vacuum array at Craigcarron, he discovers a constantly shifting series of possible pasts and futures, meeting one of his futures in a room that cannot itself stay in one state for more than a few seconds: 'The bed was making and unmaking itself like rapidly melting and recongealing wax; the planks of time and space had come apart, dividing him between its separate pieces.' In Mobius Dick, the narrative becomes a series of coincidences that we interpret as we wish, and all things are real only insofar as we want to see them that way. Under the skin of this teasing lurks a concern for the reputation of artists, and the role of chance in building the career of great musicians and writers. If Brahms had been ugly, would he have stayed playing the piano in a brothel? If Buddenbrooks had sold poorly, would Thomas Mann ever have been heard of at all? Andrew Crumey's work has been highly praised and not widely enough read for too long. In all the possible futures that exist for this intelligent, witty and accomplished writer, a wider readership should be more than just a matter of chance.

Daily Express (Paul Pickering)
When I was revising for my finals I found myself in a cubbyhole with a physicist who at first resented my presence until, as I was trying to learn quotes from Marlowe and he w restled with finite probabilities, we discovered a mutual interest in the Kray twins and would wander off to look up the court case together.
Somewhere around Jack The Hat McVitie being concreted into the Bow flyover he started to explain the basis of Einstein's theories to me: "Imagine the universe as a five- pointed star with all the points being the Bow Flyover. . ." until I had the same brow- furrowed expression as dear Ronnie and Reggie in the famous David Bailey picture. I now cannot think of quantum theory without seeing those hard-boiled eyes looking at me, daring me not to understand.
The same thrillingly fearful confusion descends in Andrew Crumey's brilliant new novel, which has double personality at its core. John Ringer is a professor of theoretical physics who "by chance" stumbles into a literature seminar called V icious Cycloids. He is appalled by its "parade of coincidences masquerading as insight". But, after he leaves, he cannot get rid of the question of whether we are governed by chance and coincidence and that everything is as random as it seems.
All this might be put down to donnish indigestion, except he has received a text w hich says: "Call me: H." He once loved a girl called Helen and he is convinced it is from her as he travels to the highlands of Scotland to give a lecture and meet an old student who works in a nuclear plant.
The student tells of a plan at his Craigcarron plant to build a network of quantum computers for instant global communication. Ringer knows this will be terribly dangerous because, harnessing the energy of the vacuum between reflective plates, the potential production of non-collapsible wave function corresponding to a high-energy photon could wreak all manner of havoc. When w aves are measured they collapse in a quantum jump, thus an electron is everywhere and nowhere until it interacts, leaving its footprint on the universe. For the writer, two conflicting stories can be true because w hen the universe splits again, after any event, what is real depends on your frame of reference. Confused? Most people outside physics departments and certain mental hospitals are.
And as far as I know, the Krays never used the quantum theory in general or this Copenhagen Interpretation in particular as a defence for slaughtering Jack the Hat and being home with their mum at the same time, taking tea. Wave function MUST collapse or the planned hall of quantum mirrors at Craigcarron will become a device where "rebounding particles would be ghosts and vampires, oscillating eternally between one universe and the next, bridging worlds and confounding them." But this is not all.
We have allusions to Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Foucault and Nietzsche, coupled with an energy which makes this a real page-turner. People vanish before each other's eyes and Proust's fiction was actually written by Flaubert.
AMONG all this are the fumbling attempts of Harry Dick (a reference to writer Philip K. Dick) to write fiction.
Coincidences and chances come together until we realise that the Ringer story is being composed (or not) by the bed-bound Dick.
But the narrative is always convincing. Mobius Dick is a triumph of a book and one which will keep you thinking long after you have put it down. Ringer is thoroughly entertaining in this wonderfully baffling novel. I can see Ronnie and Reggie staring at me right now. . . I do understand, boys. Honest.

Times Literary Supplement (Sean O'Brien)
A central concern of Andrew Crumey's novels is the attempt by characters to create their own worlds or define this one. His second book, Pfitz (1995), begins with the ambition of an eighteenth century prince to create an entire city on paper. The novel's central characters are workers on literary and cartographical parts of the project, driven to conflict over their own subcreations, so that the imagined world becomes indistinguishable from the allegedly real thing.
The obvious Borgesian pedigree of this is offset by the strange, innocent dryness and down-to-earthness of Crumey's humour, whose distinctive Scottishness comes to the fore in Mr Mee (2000). Here Ferrand and Minard are used as bumbling clowns who unwittingly account for Rousseau's paranoia: thus scholarship may be misled by accidents of which it is quilte unaware. Mr Mee, an octogenarian Scottish literary gentleman who has somehow missed out entirely on the Fall, pursues his enquiries into their lives by means of the internet, happily mistaking ponnography for an enigmatic form of education. At the local university an embittered academic (a Rousseau specialist) is attempting to seduce the very student who is the naked object of Mr Mee's innocent scrutiny via her webcam. She is reading the academic's book on Ferrand and Minard.
The bracing clarity of Crumey's writing, his wit and his assured handling of multiple plots, are sustained in Mobius Dick, though the comedy is in slightly shorter supply and more harshly rendered in this more sombre and, as it were, mildly apocalyptic book. The thernes of history, causality, coincidence, the nature of fiction, books within books, subjectivity and sexual discontent recur. So does the world- making motif. In place of a paper city or the internet, Crumey offers a machine, the Vacuum Array, which is equivalent to the mind of God. A kind of late-night extrapolation from German Philosophy, quantum physics and postmodernism, the idea manages to be both ridiculous and terrible. This mirror-lined portal to the multiverse would seem to have a major drawback: if it exists, none of its users is equipped to survive the experience. The possibility of the device's non-existence is not a way out of the nightmare it proposes, since (in a logical progression from Crumey's previous work) all possible combinations of the actual and the imagined are in play, so that, for example, the device can presumably also be imagined as consuming the book which Crumey has written about it.
The cumulative blend of parody and horror produces eerie moments which recall 'straight' science fiction like A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, and Mobius Dick could also come under the heading of "novel or ideas", a form allegedly rare in British writing. But in the latter respect there are problems, which in one sense have less to do with ideas than with style.
While Crumey can write with striking elegance and concision at times, his language seems to have grown steadily plainer. It would be unfair to attribute this tendency to his background as a physicist or his work as a teacher, but his presiding concern with clarity and pace (which might commend him to science-trained readers distrustful of fiction other than that of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett) seems also to exclude much sense of texture. The strength is clarity of exposition: the drawback is the risk of philosophical caption-writing which invokes by contrast some of the book's presiding figures. The work of Thomas Mann hovers in the ether of Mobius Dick. A Swiss sanatorium is the setting for one of the plots, where Schrodinger struggles for the idea which will make his name. Mann is cited as a novelist of ideas, the author of The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus, while elsewhere in another subnovel, written in a parallel universe, the incarcerated Robert Schumann writes the as-yet incomprehensible music of Schoenberg/Leverkuhn.
But Mann's rendering of fictive time, and his politely insistent establishment of a heavily furnished three-dimensional world, stand in imposing contrast to Crumey's efficiency. For Mann, realism seems a guarantee of novelistic good faith; for Crumey, it is just an available mode, not especially interesting in itself (less interesting than the picaresque), and while it would be wrong to say that Crumey lacks an interest in character, economy rather than idiosyncrasy is the rule in Mobius Dick. It may be true for this novel that the human medium itself has grown thinner, but there are moments when, as in much science fiction, character seems a necessary evil.
The faults in Mobius Dick can be read as both evidence of the times in which it is written and as part of a critique of those times. Postmodernity figures as a cultural irritant to the author, it seems - but he himself is driven by an anxiety about a general audience's presumed impatience with anything long, difficult or inhospitable to sentimental self- identification. When the central character, the physicist John Ringer, randomly sits in on a lecture on Moby-Dick, he is not merely bored, but contemptuous of the lecturer's use of coincidental association of ideas rather than argument. This is balanced by Ringer's later discovery that 'fact and logic [are] in peril' from the mysterious Rosier Foundation. Equally alarming is the hospital writing therapist, who explains that on her MA writing course the actual reading of books had no signifance compared to knowing your market, and that since she has never heard of Thomas Mann he cannot have been any good. The therapist may herself be a figment within tne collapsing lavers of the text and of Ringer's identity, but like the lecturer she is a softer target here than in life. And yet the reader who dissents from Crumey's judgement will have to admit that such are recognizable parts of the world. In their way both these characters are giving the last rites to the humanistic seriousness of which they are respectively contemptuous and wholly ignorant. They arre not monsters but mediocrities. Equally, though, Ringer himself is a hollow man, showing little commitrnent to the European traditions of science and philosophy whose product he is, and bluntly telling a potential lover that he has never got on with novels because they tell him what he already knows.
Science itself is under threat, with evidence massaged to encourage investment in the Rosier Foundation's world-devouring secret project as it takes shape in a soon-to-close nuclear power stationt in Scotland. The mad-science plot seems to call for the intervention of professor Quatermass, being simultaneously melodramatic and compelling and introducing to this fascinating and vertiginously entertaining novel a note of desolate eloquence as hard to take seriously as to resist - which, in a sense, is Andrew Crumey's verdict on the present and perhaps on fiction itself.

Literary Review (Sebastian Shakespeare)
ONE MORNING THEORETICAL physicist John Ringer, sitting at his desk in his university, receives a cryptic text message. 'Call me: H'. Who is H? His ex-lover Helen? Or is it a wrong number? So begins this highly inventive and oddly compelling novel, which encompasses parallel universes and parallel narrators. Andrew Crumey takes risks with his story by combining a multiplicity of genres - sci-fi, thriller, fantasy, farce; but somehow he carries it off. He teases us with scientific puzzles and paradoxes, entertains us with the elasticity of his plot, and before too long the reader begins to doubt his own grasp on reality.
Ringer is invited to the Scottish highlands to give a lecture at a remote research facility that is dedicated to investigating a new kind of communications technology based on the laws of quantum theory It makes the Internet look like the pigeon post. Ringer is worried about the unstable nature of the new technology, since harnessing 'vacuum energy' might split the universe into a multitude of worlds and the people in it into a multitude of selves. And that is what comes to pass. When he arrives in Scotland he spots his old lover Helen walking down a street - or at least her doppelganger.
It is hard to summarise the story any further because there isn't just one plot - there are several. Interspersed with Ringer's story is the tale of Harry Dick, who is hospitalised after an accident and is suffering from memory loss. Creative writing is part of his therapy and he writes short stories featuring (yes, you've guessed it) a physicist called John Ringer. Is John Ringer a creation of Harry's? Are Harry and Ringer one and the same? Or do they coexist in different worlds?
In a further twist, there is another series of chapters, supposedly written by a twentieth- century German novelist, Heinrich Behring, and devoted to real-life geniuses - Schrodinger, Schumann and Nietzsche. They explore theories of eternal recurrence, quantum mechanics, particle theory, and so on. Each narrative thread stands alone but there are echoes throughout the book, with myriad jokes, puns and meaningful (or meaningless) coincidences. They add up to a clever brain-teaser, written with impressive brio. The epidemic of Anomalous Memory Disorder, a condition associated with mobile phones or watching too much television, sounds frighteningly plausible. Victims experience a flash of memory that is vivid and detailed and yet completely false.
Andrew Crumey, who has a PhD in theoretical physics, manages to make complex ideas seem simple, and he has that commodity so rare among sci-fi writers - a sense of humour. He has already won critical acclaim for his earlier novels and deserves a wider readership. This novel combines the intellectual parlour games of David Lodge with the unnerving prescient vision of JG Ballard.

Yomiuri Shimbun (Kevin Wood)
Andrew Crumey has clearly taken the dictum "write what you know" to heart, and with his PhD in theoretical physics and job as literary editor at a major weekly newspaper, Scotland on Sunday, what he knows makes for a interesting mix.
In his fifth novel, Mobius Dick, Crumey combines quantum theory with literary and scientific history to produce an imaginative, erudite and playful novel of alternate realities peopled by such historical luminaries as authors E.T.A. Hoffman, Herman Melville and Thomas Mann, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composer Robert Schumann and scientist Erwin Schrodinger.
When Scottish physicist John Ringer receives a mysterious text message--"Call me: H"- -on his new "Q-phone" he wonders if it could be from his former lover, Helen.Visiting a former student at a secretive research center, Ringer is offered a chance to work on a new kind of communications and computing technology based on quantum theory and meets Helen's double.
Things get progressively stranger and more mysterious for Ringer as coincidences mount and his memory starts to play tricks.
Ringer's story is intercut with excerpts from a metafictive novel supposedly published in 1949 by Cromwell Press in the British Democratic Republic. Heinrich Behring's The Angel Returns relates a visit by Goethe's mistress to Schumann in a mental hospital and a capsule history of Schumann and his wife, Clara, in which Brahms appears as Clara's lover.
Next, in another narrative thread that could be part of Ringer's world, Behring's "reality" or another metafictive excerpt, we meet accident victim Harry Dick who may be suffering from false memory syndrome along with partial amnesia. He meets a fellow patient named Clara and a writing therapist who has never heard of Mann or Gustav Flaubert.
Another supposed excerpt from a Behring novel Professor Faust deals with Schrodinger's sojourn at a Swiss rest clinic where he has come to meet his lover and search for a scientific theory that will make him famous.
Crumey shuffles these four threads until the cards blur together, handling the deck like a professional sharp. Themes examined include causality, dualism, the differences between what is real, what is remembered and what is imagined, and particle/wave quantum theory.
It sounds heavy, but the author leavens the heady mix of provocative ideas and twisting, tailswallowing plot with a generous measure of humor that runs from goofily sophomoric to cleverly self-referential. In the opening chapter, Ringer stumbles on a literary lecture titled "Vicious Cycloids" that absurdly cross-references Moby-Dick, the works of Schumann, Hoffmann and Mann. Ringer scoffs at the false significance given to coincidences in the arts, musing: "No doubt some imaginative novelist could conceive a logical scheme linking everything: Hoffmann, Schumann, Schrodinger, Mann. Some grand unified theory in which Helen and Ringer would be quantum resonances...a narrative inevitability." Mobius Dick is a pleasurable paradox that leaves the reader smiling, if a little dizzy.

Felix (Martin Cansdale)
This is a book about a quantum physicist called John Ringer. It's also a book about the last days of Schumann, an amnesic hospital patient called Harry Dick, and the winter in which Schrodinger discovered his famous equation. Not satisfied with all this, Mobius Dick also considers reality, coincidence, and causality.
In a nod towards one of the many other works discussed in this book, the four threads are carefully interwoven. At first, the subplots seem like distractions, with no explanation of why the next chapter is a seemingly irrelevant tale of a nineteenth century composer. As it becomes apparent that the stories are linked, the question of why they are there is replaced by a delightful mystery of what they mean. The interplay of the plot strands is clever and effective. Rather than have a main story with the others adding something to it, each depends on the others in a complicated symbiosis. The themes of the book are introduced by Ringer, disdained with cool scientific clarity, and then picked up and enlarged by other characters.
The main 'Ringer' plot concerns thriller-like events at a research station in the Scottish Highlands. In spite of this, it has a meditative feel given by Ringer's frequent reminiscences and philosophical daydreams. The tempo of the book comes more from movement between stories than from John Ringer's adventures.
The tones of the stories are captivatingly varied. Ringer interacts with others, but the story barely seems to leave his own train of thought. Schrodinger talks, observes and experiences more vividly, while Harry's amnesic confusion gives a completely different confused and superficial air to encounters with his therapists.
According to a review of Crumey's last novel, Mr Mee, "the deadpan humour never wavers." The one criticism I have of this book is that I spent 100 pages wondering whether it was meant to be funny. The author seems to be making sly digs at 'unscientific' modes of thought, by putting idiotic remarks and unfounded conclusions into the mouths of artists and psychologists. Would a 'writing therapist' really tell a patient that she was only working in a hospital because there was no money in short story writing? Would a psychologist, in what seems to be the near future, really jump straight from the name 'Thomas Mann' to phallic associations, or ask an amnesic patient to guess what symptoms they might have been showing before the accident which robbed them of their memory? It's not really clear if these attacks are meant to amuse, or are part of rather clumsily executed caricatures. Fortunately, this problem becomes less noticeable as the stories progress.
John Ringer uses an analogy to describe Schrodinger's equation, and how it relates to the real world. He compares reality with a giant book, containing all possible stories. The appeal of Mobius Dick comes from an inversion of this image. Of the stories contained within the book, which are 'reality'? Are the stories all 'true' in the framework of the book, or is one somehow more real than the others? Throw in quantum mechanics with its probabilities, wave-particle duality and other common-sense defying concepts, and you get a fascinating novel.

Barcelona Review ('JA')
Intellectually stimulating thriller/sci-fi/historical fantasy/philosophical novel - the best I can do to summarize this intriguing new novel by English author Crumey (Pfitz, 1995; Mr Mee, 2000) - which is sure to be a contender for the Mann Booker Prize. Multiple themes and plot directions are at play - causality and coincidence, parallel universes, fictionalized historical encounters, the relevance of books, the key to creation, etc - with quantum physics forming the loose structural thread. It may sound daunting, but it's not: the thriller element keeps one turning the pages; the sharp, clear prose and flashes of satire are a delight; and the story - and stories within stories - make for a mesmerizing read. Mobius Dick begins with John Ringer, a physics professor, reading a text message on his Q-phone that he is unable to understand. It merely says, "Call me: H." But who is H? He thinks of a lover from many years ago named Helen, but that doesn't seem likely. He tries to read his phone menu to understand how to trace a call but fails, and inadvertently stumbles across the university itinerary, which announces a lunchtime talk to be given by an English professor, titled "Vicious Cycloids." He attends the talk and gets angry at the woman's forced interpretation of a passage in Moby Dick, "with its facile relativism, its denial of objective certainty, its intellectual game playing" (the joke being that this could apply to Mobius Dick). Shortly thereafter, Ringer is invited to the north of Scotland by an ex-student, Don Chambers, to give a talk on one of his physics papers. Chambers, now working at a nuclear power facility that is about to become defunct, tells Ringer that although the plant is closing it will soon convert into a huge physics research center with loads of money backing from U.S. entrepreneurs. He hints that their work involves "harnessing vacuum energy," and he promises to let Ringer in on the project if Ringer will "adjust" some figures in his paper to appease the money backers. The principal goal is the creation of a quantum computer, which would "make the Internet look like pigeon post." As Chambers says: "The smartest people have already given up on superstrings and black holes . . . the smart guys have gone inside the wire." They have already begun to create the energy vacuum chamber, the Vacuum Array, involving something like a vast array of mirrors, serving as a portal of sorts to the universe. Ringer points out the danger of the project; i.e., at such uncharted energies, quantum theory itself might be altered. It could create all sorts of havoc if something were to go wrong - parallel universes, past/future collisions, unpredictable quantum wave behavior, people meeting their double: a totally confused universe in short. Chambers refuses to listen to his old professor and simply declares: "I want you to be with me, not against me." While Ringer is staying in the small Scottish village of Ardnahanish (where Herman Melville once stayed) near the research plant, he sees a woman who he thinks is Helen - and indeed there are many similarities - but this woman is Laura, a journalist, looking to find out why so many people are sick in the area. Ringer, in order to get close to her, decides to tell her everything he knows about the research project, and he attempts an explanation in layman's terms. An old hotel outside the village has been converted into a heavily guarded mental hospital, and they both vow to get inside somehow, knowing it must be related to the quantum project. As we follow Ringer on his quest, his story is intercut with the English "translations" of extracts from the novels of one Heinrich Behring. Also spliced in is the story of Harry Dick. As one might surmise from the title, the multiple stories reflect and coil around on each other. The story of Harry Dick begins in a hospital. He has had an accident and doesn't remember his past. The female Dr. Blake - ambitious to promote her discovery of AMD (Anomalous Memory Disorder) - is "treating" Harry. In a humorously satiric touch, a "writer-in-residence" at the hospital is assigned to Harry. She gives him blank paper on which to write, and dumps the contents of her purse on his bed, telling him to make a story of what he sees. (She mentions that in her M.A. writing program it was more important to "know your market" than to read books; she has never heard of Thomas Mann, and concludes he must not have been too important.) Harry has no concept of time or who or where he is. But he will indeed fill in the blank pages, and in them he writes of one John Ringer. Thus begins one parallel: that between Ringer and his old lover Helen; and of Harry Dick and Clara, another patient he meets at the hospital. Meanwhile, in the novel extracts of Heinrich Behring, we read of Goethe's mistress, Bettina von Arnim, and her visit to Robert Schumann in a mental hospital, where he is composing the as yet incomprehensible music of Schoenberg/Leverkuhn. We get a 'history' of Schumann (and his wife Clara), in which Brahms appears as Clara's lover and Joseph Joachim as her friend. Elsewhere we follow the physicist Erwin Schrodinger, who plans a rendezvous with his lover in the Swiss sanatorium where he was once a tuberculosis patient. She doesn't show but he ends up with the head doctor's wife, Frau Schwarkopf; although his principal reason for checking into the sanatorium is to wrestle into being the idea that will make his name. Much table conversation ensues, covering Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Byron's Manfred, Goethe, Thomas Mann, Schopenhauer and others. Also produced is a letter by Melville written to Nathaniel Hawthorne while Melville was staying in Scotland in search of his ancestors - all names which crop up and spiral around each other throughout the book. In one sense Mobius Dick is an old-fashioned "hall of mirrors" novel, but it is taken to new and daring heights. The whole quantum physics debate sounds plausible enough in this world of Star Wars and cyberspace - OK, it's ridiculous, but we can suspend disbelief anyway. What is the next step after all? As convoluted as the plot is, the novel is a success because whether the author is talking about a quantum physics equation or Schumann's madness or the cat theory of Schrodinger or an addled B & B hostess or an overly ambitious physicist who now speaks like an American businessman - it's all equally engaging and entertaining. Ringer's story finds its dynamic conclusion. But in a postscript by Heinrich Behring, we have the ending which will stick with us. I dare not give it away, except to say that it leaves the reader questioning the universe in which he finds himself. A fitting blurb for the book could be the conclusion of Melville's letter to Hawthorne: What worth is a book, if it be not aflame with madness? Are the scriptures not filled with divine folly? And if my words offend you, then you have not understood them. There is a wisdom that is madness: I have seen it here in Ardnahanish, in this ancestral land of ghosts and spirits. Hail, friend!

Observer Summer Choice (Jonathan Coe - paperback edition)
It's odd to find yourself quoted on the front of a book when you haven't read it yet. But after enjoying all his other novels, I've been putting off Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey (Picador pounds 7.99) until the moment is right. He's a rare and valuable writer, someone who pushes away at the limits of the novel form without neglecting his huge gifts for humour and storytelling. And I always learn some science from his novels, too.

Independent on Sunday (Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski - paperback edition)
When physicist John Ringer receives a text message from someone called simply 'H', he immediately wonders if it's from a former lover, Helen. Later, having travelled to Craigcarron nuclear power station in the far north of Scotland for discussions about some revolutionary technology, he meets a woman who he's sure is Helen; but she's a journalist called Laura, investigating why so many people in the area have become sick. Haunted by his old flame and disturbed by hallucinations, Ringer wonders if the work at Craigcarron might be dangerous: the deployment of quantum computers like this, he once theorised, could lead to 'reality' breaking down. While these events unfold we are also presented with chapters authored by one Heinrich Behring, a character writing in the British Democratic Republic in 1949; and the tale of a hospitalised man called Harry suffering from memory loss. Behring's tales offer subtly warped versions of history as we know it; Harry's tale always feels like it's leading back towards Ringer. Both strands let Crumey develop ideas raised in the main 'Ringer' narrative (although it's questionable whether you can call it that by the end of the book). This is a brilliant exposition of the possibilities lurking in quantum physics and an aggressive take on how the idea of 'great art' is losing currency. It's an absolute sin that this book didn't win last year's Man Booker Prize.

Guardian (Nicholas Lezard - paperback edition)
Different novels have different effects on us. This one gave me the willies. In fact, it is still giving me the willies. Let me explain how. Jung, you may recall, dreamt of a figure with the wings of a kingfisher; later, he found the body of a kingfisher, an extremely unlikely occurrence in Zurich. This led him to propose the idea that coincidences are not simply matters of chance: he dreamt of the kingfisher figure because he was going to see it in the future. In other words, the future influences the past. I have always been inclined to dismiss this idea, except for a laugh. But the notion, and the anecdote, surfaces in this novel; as, indeed, does the suspicion that reality is breaking down, may already have broken down, without our knowing it, and for sound scientific reasons. Well, if not sound, then at least plausible: Crumey has a PhD in theoretical physics, after all, and if he says that one of the reasons our minds are going is new- fangled mobile-phone technology, I for one am not going to raise any objections (it engagingly begins with a forty- something-year-old physicist frustrated by the menu on his new mobile). Anyway, this novel was beginning to rattle me, so well was it doing its job. It was about a third of the way through, the point where Crumey decides to start letting you in on how horribly strange everything is going to get, that I thought I'd pause and put on a CD. It was a compilation I had not yet got round to listening to yet, despite owning it for two years. I glanced at the book to remember my place and noted that it was at the section which began with an extract from an imaginary novel, Professor Faust . That it is Professor Faust and not Doctor Faustus , even though its plot recalls Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain , is an important plot point. I looked at the CD box to see who was playing; it was the German avant-garde band, Faust. It is the only song of theirs in the house, and I had never heard it before. At which point, now quite fully convinced that the universe was unravelling around me, and that this fantastic (in both senses of the word) and mindbending novel was actually a sober, factual account of what was going on, I stopped listening to Faust and had a nice cup of tea. It's a few days afterwards now and I'm almost, but not entirely, over it. Crumey is the kind of novelist who does a nice line in metafictions: the creation of imaginary worlds which make you look up from the page and question this one (he's even taken the name of a sinister character in a previous novel of his and given it to a sinister corporation here). This makes him sound like Borges or Calvino, and in a sense he is, but with hard science to back him up. Or, to put it another way, the book exists in two superimposed states, like a particle at the quantum level. Just as Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead until you open the box and find out, so Mobius Dick is both science fiction and literature (although, as I've said, I'm not sure about the "fiction" part of that) until you read the book and make your mind up. You may decide it is both, which scarcely seems possible, but as the book is about non-collapsible wave functions - don't worry, you'll get the hang of the jargon - this seems quite appropriate. Novelists who think that injecting a bit of quantum physics into their work is a spiffy way of raising the intellectual stakes are not exactly thin on the ground. Neither are those who make reference to Melville, Nietzsche, the invention of atonal music, Thomas Mann, Flaubert, etc. But Crumey brings all these elements together, and for good measure throws in some bitingly funny jokes about critical theory, writing therapy and - a masterstroke, this one, because he makes it very crucial to the plot -the way that no one can remember the name of Scotland's First Minister. The only flaw in the book is the title, but even that is necessary.

Telegraph (Jonathan Gibbs - paperback edition)
When the physicist John Ringer receives an anonymous text message saying "Call me: H'', he thinks it could be from his former lover Hannah. What follows is a playful piece of scientific and literary conjuring, with Schrödinger, Schumann and Melville all folded into three increasingly bizarre interlocking narratives. The central plot hangs on a quantum computer buried deep under a Scottish mental hospital that Ringer fears might just produce "the biggest bang in 14 million years'' - or, worse, entangle our reality with other possible realities, turning "the planet, perhaps the very cosmos itself, into a joke, which God alone might laugh at''. The author has a PhD in theoretical physics, so you feel you're in safe hands, even as he leads you on a merry dance through the madder fringes of scientific conjecture. I'm not sure my grip on non-collapsible wave functions was any firmer by the end of the novel, but it was certainly a stimulating ride.

Times (Chris Power - paperback edition)
Contriving a dizzyingly twisting plot around the paradoxicality of quantum mechanics while happily carrying along a reader with limited scientific knowledge is no mean feat, but Crumey has achieved it in spades. A mysterious text message from a lover not heard of in 20 years sends the physicist John Ringer on a journey that takes in Schumann, Melville, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Schrodinger and the artistic failure of Thomas Mann. On finishing this novel one is keen to return to the start to admire just how intricately it all ties together. But don't worry if you simply don't have time: you will in some alternate universe or other.