When these outrageous claims were first made (in the Daily Worker Literary Supplement), I confess they caused me considerable unease. For I suddenly wondered if this strange, unconscious replication – albeit so feeble and imperfect as to be discernible only to experts – might somehow be a manifestation of the very plurality of worlds my novel jokingly posited.
Could there be a universe in which Thomas Mann genuinely found fame? Might there even be some telepathic means of communicating ideas between his world and ours?
It is the kind of hypothesis that would have appealed to Otto Hinze: the kind we must reject at once. My critics attack me with a coincidence I cannot deny. I vigorously refute the significance they attach to it. Do these critics prefer many-worlds theory to Marxist-Leninist historiography? No: let them fall silent.
With all its patent impossibilities, my novel can only be a work of fiction, and to think otherwise is folly. History, like gravity, has laws that cannot be resisted. In his Dialectics of Nature, Engels wrote: ‘For one who denies causality, every natural law is a hypothesis.’ In a world where everything is considered a mere state of mind, we would be reduced to relativism and chaos.
And if that sounds too abstract, let me be more specific. I have already mentioned the labour camp, but have said little about it, since the most fitting memorial for those who perished there is reverent silence. Nevertheless, I shall mention a single incident among countless horrors that occurred there. It was during the particularly severe winter of 1943, when many prisoners who had hitherto proved so stubborn in their struggle for survival finally surrendered to the temptation of death, expiring in unusually large numbers from typhus, malnourishment or pure despair. My work party was ordered to bury a day’s worth of victims, and after turning the rock-hard earth we prepared to dump the laidout row – their emaciated faces bearing a look of enviable calm – into their communal grave. But as snow began to fall gently all around us, I saw that one of the dead men appeared strangely discontented with the peace he had been granted. His lips were moving. He was a corpse filled with the horror of continued existence.
I called out to the guard: ‘This man is alive!’ The guard, irritated by my interruption of the cigarette that so pleasantly occupied his attention, commanded me to shut up and dig, calling me a lazy swine. ‘But he’s alive,’ I repeated, ‘it’s the truth!’
The guard came and looked at the figure on the ground. Like me, he saw the twitching lips, the pleading eyes, the desperate attempt to summon forth pity in a place where such weakness was ruthlessly banned. Too obscenely indifferent even to be prepared to put a bullet through the sick man’s head, the guard instead jabbed me harshly with his rifle butt. ‘Here there is no truth. Dig!’
I had learned a simple and terrible formula from that uniformed youth with his smouldering cigarette. Truth is hope. Hell is the place where all truth is abandoned.
I grant that there are many truths: those of lovers or of poets, of physicists or of ship builders. To say that there are many is not to say there is none. The camp existed: I am its witness. I never knew the name of the man I saw buried alive, his lips still trying to frame a cry for help as the earth was piled upon him. But I know he was a creature with thoughts, feelings, dreams; not some philosophical enigma, some fiction easily erased. The only person who could have believed otherwise was the guard, and only because at that moment, halfway through his cigarette, it suited him.
Imagine a world where the guard’s indifference to fact became the norm. Would it not be the subtlest and most terrible hell of all? Are you not glad the revolution succeeded, and that we do not live in the sort of world the Nazis wanted; one where people quietly accept that since every newspaper lies, it is best to read none? Are you not glad that evolution is after all still taught, and that people cannot do a university degree in astrology? Are you not relieved that scientists do not advocate a multiverse of realities; that university professors do not claim a pop song is worth as much as the symphonies of Beethoven; and that political leaders – holding offices bought for them by big business, and considering themselves personally guided by divine right – do not wage war against helpless nations whose dictators are fictions, possessing weapons of mass destruction that are fictions? Is it not a blessing that the world I have described, and its characters, are but a fable?
Forget them now. Unless all that was ever thought or written has life in some Platonic heaven, they are no more than pictures on a screen, shadows soon to fade. See: already the film is winding itself to an end, we count the final moments of the reel. Three, two, one … then nothing.
How vivid it all was. How soon the dream is finished.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He read theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University and Imperial College in London, before doing post-doctoral research at Leeds University on nonlinear dynamics. He is the author of seven novels: Music, in a Foreign Language (1994), Pfitz (1995), D’ Alembert’s Principle (1996), Mr Mee (2000), Mobius Dick (2004), Sputnik Caledonia (2008), and The Secret Knowledge (2013). His novels have been translated into 14 languages.
Mobius Dick was both a critical and commercial success.
Here are a few comments:
‘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.’
Michael Holroyd in The New Statesmean’s Books of the Year
‘... the most rewarding book I have read all year’.
Scarlett Thomas in The Independent on Sunday
‘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.’
James Wood in The London Magazine
‘Andrew Crumey 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.’
Sebastien Shakespeare in The Literary Review
‘There’s no room here to do justice to the density of ideas Crumey unpacks with admirable lightness.’
Colin Waters in The Sunday Herald
‘It would be nice to think that this magnificent piece of work stood a chance of winning the Booker. It is certainly my novel of the year.’
John O’Connell in Time Out
‘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. 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.’
Joseph O’Connor in The Guardian
‘... a fascinating and vertiginously entertaining novel’.
Sean O’Brien in The Times Literary Supplement
‘Crumey is a talented writer and a major brain.’
Clemency Burton-Hill in The Observer
‘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.’
Jonathan Gibb in The Daily Telegraph
COPYRIGHT
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,
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email: [email protected]
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ISBN printed book 978 1 909232 93 8
ISBN ebook 978 1 910213 05 6
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email: [email protected]
Publishing History
First published in 2004 by Picador
First Dedalus edition in 2014
First ebook edition in 2014
Andrew Crumey © copyright 2004
The right of Andrew Crumey to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Printed in Finland by Bookwell Ltd
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.
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