Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  'Also,' Robert said, 'everything you do returns to you three times. In other words, if you do something magical you get it back multiplied by three. The problem is sometimes not knowing if what you're doing is good or bad. In magic there aren't easy definitions of good and bad, and you can still make mistakes. It's a tricky business. You can create monsters, if you're not very careful. If you use a lot of energy and find you can't redirect it properly, then you can end up with ghosts and ghouls and magical creatures roaming around. It's unpleasant when that happens, because someone with higher powers has to come and put it right.'

  An owl hooted somewhere outside, and my stomach suddenly felt as if it was a cold dishcloth being wrung out late on a Sunday evening. I looked out of the window and saw that dusk was falling. It had been coming a little earlier every day. 'I'd better get back,' I said.

  He laughed. 'Oh, dear. I've scared you off. Well, you're probably too young anyway. But I can see you have the ability. Maybe when you're older. Will you come back here again on holiday? Bethany would like to see you again.'

  'I don't know,' I said.

  'Well, call on us if you are ever back in the area.'

  Robert started filling his pipe.

  'Will you tell my fortune before I go?' I said, feeling suddenly tearful. 'You did promise.' This was the end of my holiday, and the end of coming to the forest, and I had been too much of a coward even to learn any magic. I really wanted to change my mind, but I knew it was too late. And I knew that my family would never come back. Mum had complained of damp in the house, and my father said it was too remote. I realised that I would miss Robert and Bethany and the way they lived their lives.

  Robert was still standing by the sink. He put down his pipe, turned and looked out of the window for a minute. When he turned back to face me, his eyes had gone a terrifyingly bright shade of green, and his face was set in an unfamiliar way. Before, he had looked like a wise old tree. Now his face was jagged, like rocks cutting through a choppy sea. He looked as if he was in some sort of trance.

  'You will never finish what you start,' he said, in a voice that wasn't quite his own. 'You will not overcome the monster. And in the end, you will come to nothing.'

  This day, I knew, was going to be like any other. Because of the ferry queue it had already begun slightly too late. By the time I'd walked B and driven across Torbay it was always gone ten, but today it was already coming up for eleven and I was still driving. This in itself could be read as a good sign: sometimes the radiator overheated and I had to stop and fill it with Radweld, which made me even later. Usually I'd get an hour's work done before lunch, less if I had lots of emails to read, and the afternoon would then be postponed until after two o'clock, and by the time I'd finished whatever I'd started before lunch and done some Orb Books admin, it would be time to go to the supermarket and drive home. How was I supposed to write a novel with no time at all to write it in? It didn't have to be like this. When I had written the second halves of all my completed novels, time had just bloomed everywhere, even in the darkest corners. I'd write at least 500 words at the kitchen table before walking B in the mornings, and make crazy notes over lunch. I even wrote in the supermarket queue sometimes, using the tiny keyboard on my mobile phone. One day I wrote 7,000 words. But I probably wouldn't get much done on my novel today, especially not with a book review to write.

  The countryside around me looked too bright in the cold February sunshine as I drove across Torbay with the radio on low, wondering about how to begin my review. Oscar loved it when I really trashed a book, and I was sure he deliberately gave me books he knew I'd hate. I'd therefore decided to really go to town on The Science of Living Forever, but I didn't quite know how. It seemed a bit of a soft target. I thought about writing something like Regular readers will know that I should never be provoked on the subject of infinity. But that was way too smug. I'd been writing for the paper long enough now that I could get away with first-person reviews, but there were limits. Perhaps I could make the point that when humans fiddle around with anything natural they completely mess it up, and messing around with infinity would therefore be an infinitely bad idea. There was also Tennyson's poem about the Ancient Greek Tithonus, lover of Eos, queen of the day. Tithonus has been given the gift of immortality so that he can love Eos for ever, but whoever has arranged this has not also given him eternal youth. So he is doomed to age and decay for evermore. The poem opens: The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, / The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, / Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan. / Me only cruel immortality / Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms. Perhaps I'd begin my review with that. But it didn't seem quite right either.

  In Newman's never-ending universe there'd be time to write an infinite amount of novels, and even finish reading all the books I'd ever begun, and all the books I'd never begun. But who'd care about fiction any more? We only need fiction because we die. I turned up the radio when the news came on. A study had revealed that Prozac, taken by forty million people, including my brother Toby, had been working only as a placebo for all this time. As I drove past the Maritime Centre with the sea on my right, I thought again about Rowan. I wither slowly in thine arms. Even if we were both single, he was still too old for me. It was a good thing we hadn't started emailing each other. But perhaps there'd be an email from him this morning; I'd said he should email me any time. And then what would I do? I couldn't ever kiss him again, because I wouldn't be able to leave it there. I couldn't face living through the aftermath all over again.

  After recycling one of last week's car park tickets, I spent the morning at what had become my usual desk in the library, writing my review. It had once been Rowan's usual desk, but I'd taken it over. Oscar only ever had an 800-word space to spare, which often shrank as advertising came in. His assistant Justine spent most of her time sourcing cheap pictures to go with the reviews. The year before, I'd reviewed a book in which a scientist had used slicing ham as a way of explaining dimensions. The ham is three-dimensional, she'd said; and the slice is two-dimensional. It drove me mad. Two-dimensional 'objects' cannot exist, cannot be; however thin something is, it still has three spatial dimensions. I'd spent half the review explaining why it was impossible to experience a two-dimensional world, especially if one was attempting to travel from a three-dimensional world made of ham. Justine had come up with a nice image of a hock of ham, which she'd placed alongside an image of the scientist and a caption: 'The universe is not ham'. I remembered checking and checking that review, worried that I'd got something wrong, and nervous about criticising a real scientist for not being scientific enough. For weeks afterwards I feared the email I'd get from her, putting me straight. But nothing ever happened. I also imagined my father reading my review and being proud of me, but as far as I knew he never read the literary pages of any newspaper.

  The Newman review came far more easily than I'd thought. I ended up just summarising his argument, which, like most long and complicated things, including great tragedies and anyone's life story, sounded far more crazy and improbable in 800 words than it ever could in 80,000. In the end the book trashed itself. I told myself I was glad to be done with it; Newman's simulated post-universe, a ghost ship at the end of time, was really giving me the willies. But in fact, I wasn't really done with Newman at all, since I was wondering if I could further trash his ideas in fiction. The post-universe wouldn't work in a Zeb Ross novel, but it could easily become a sub-plot in my 'real' novel. Having some characters trapped in a frozen moment at the end of time was certainly way better than having them trapped in a sauna.

  After I'd filed my review and been across the road to the cheap café for lunch, it was half past two. I logged onto my Orb Books email account and read the two proposals that had come in for Zeb Ross novels. One of the proposals was from someone I remembered from the last Torquay retreat, Tim Small, a faded-looking man in his mid-forties who'd relocated to Dartmouth ten years bef
ore with his wife Heidi who worked as an accountant at the Yacht Club and was having a long-term affair. The locals who responded to my poster in the Harbour Bookshop only came for six days. On the seventh day I worked with the ghostwriters individually on their particular project, which could be a Zeb Ross novel, a Pepper Moore novel or the next instalment of the Vampire Island series. The first six days were the same for everyone: an intensive trawl through Plato, Aristotle, Vladimir Propp, Northrop Frye, Joseph Campbell, Jung and Robert McKee. I gave students their own pair of Orb Books scissors, because there was so much cutting up and rearranging of bits of paper: so much fiddling with archetypes, complications, resolutions and helpers. The scissors had been my idea. So had the whole Vampire Island series, although I didn't work on it very much.

  Tim was the only local student who'd ever had an idea with the potential to work in the Zeb Ross format. He'd wanted to write about a Beast of Dartmoor, and although he'd had in mind a middle-aged, cuckolded protagonist, I'd taken him aside and told him that if he made it a teenager then it was something we'd probably consider. The whole class had been excited about Tim's Beast. How do you end a story about a Beast? We'd discussed that for hours. Chekhov said if you have a gun in a story it needs to go off. If you have a Beast in a story, does it need to 'go off' too? When? How? I was ashamed because I loved these discussions, with their implied neat and tidy narrative symmetry and clever devices, all endorsed by great writers. My novel, my bloody albatross, The Death of the Author, deliberately had no such symmetry, and I was constantly in turmoil because one minute it would have too much narrative: people desperately in love, or waking up from their comas, or lying in ditches contemplating great life changes and so on—just like a formulaic genre novel—then I'd fiddle with it and it would die: a species extinct before it has even begun. In order for a new species to evolve, an already existing species has to split in half, and somehow—genetically, or geographically—members of these halves must stay separate and not go on any dates or have sex for a few hundred or thousand years. If I had my formula fiction and all its dominant genes trapped on one side of a mountain range, and my novel on another, maybe my novel would have a chance to make it. I sighed and unbended a paperclip someone—probably me—had left on the desk. It snapped, and I was left with two useless bits of metal that I was reluctant to drop on the floor. I put them in my pocket. Tim's proposal seemed pretty good, so I sent a note to Claudia recommending that we consider it at the next editorial board in March. The other proposal was about a girl who eats her own parents, which I rejected.

  At about three, my phone vibrated. I guessed it was Oscar calling from the paper; but all I ever got on my phone's display was Withheld number, regardless of who was calling. As I hurried out of the library I wondered what was wrong with my review. Oscar was only in his early fifties, but acted as if he was a grumpy old man and all his reviewers were his naughty grandchildren, or his wayward pets. He only ever called if there was a problem, and he always smoked on the phone, suck, suck, pause, although on the few occasions I'd been to his office there was no evidence of his smoking anywhere.

  'I thought you weren't there,' he said in his mild, clipped Caribbean voice. 'I was about to give up on you.'

  'I'm at the library. I can't answer the phone inside or the librarians get really upset and shout at me.'

  Our conversations usually began in this way, with him telling me off and me saying something amusing about the librarians, who had never, in fact, done anything amusing at all. Most conversations in publishing were vaguely Alzheimic, because everyone suffered from over-thinking and over-reading and no one could remember if this was the first time they'd said something today, or the fifteenth, and whether it was true or made up. You can identify someone who works in publishing because they tell every anecdote as if for the first time, with the same expression as someone giving you a tissue that they have just realised has probably already been used.

  'Well, never mind about that.' He sucked and paused. 'This is your strangest trick yet.'

  'What is?'

  'This review you've sent me. What were you thinking?'

  'You didn't like it?'

  'I did like it. It's pretty good. Very funny. What a nutter this Kelsey Newman is.'

  'So...?'

  'Well, you've baffled me this time,' he said. 'You novelists are all the same.'

  I couldn't imagine what I'd done.

  'This book was published in 2006. Sometimes we're a bit late with a review, but never two years late. Where did you find it?'

  'You sent it to me. Didn't you?'

  Obviously he hadn't.

  'Don't be so silly,' he said. 'You novelists don't know the difference between fiction and reality; I've always said so. But don't worry, I won't write you off as insane this time. It's not the first time someone's reviewed the wrong book, after all. Don't bother to review the book I did send, though. It's too late now, and some extra advertising has come in for the next few weeks.'

  'God, I'm so embarrassed,' I said. 'I'm sorry. I don't know how ... I mean, it's weird. I don't know what happened.' As well as being embarrassed, I'd just lost about £400, as well as all that time on Sunday that I could have spent writing my novel.

  'It's a shame, really. It was a good review. Still, it's given me an idea that you might like. We should put these books under the microscope, I think. Enough bloody people read them ... I've got the proof of the new Kelsey Newman book here somewhere. It's out this month. It's not the kind of thing we'd normally review, but since you've read the other one ... What's the new one called? What does the blurb say? Hang on.' There was the sound of paper being shuffled around, and then more sucking and pausing. 'Oh, here it is. Second World. It's got quotes on it from a couple of wackos—oh, and one from your friend Vi Hayes. She says it "provides a blueprint for living based on what we have learned from the most well-loved fiction". You could just review it—same sort of style as the one you sent today—or, if you felt like it, I could send you all the New Age, self-help, blueprint-for-living-style books I've got in the cupboard and you could do a two-thousand-word feature on this kind of phenomenon and the way these nutcases write about...'

  Some deep part of my brain now started speaking to me in a calm voice, as if it was talking me—or, I guess, my ego—down from a thin ledge on a tall building. Say no. Say you'd rather starve. Write your novel. Don't bring yet another species of commercial writing into its fragile ecosystem. Say no. No. No. No.

  'That's such a good idea,' I said. 'The feature, I mean. It would be...' I remembered last time I was in Arcturus, a New Age book and crystal shop in Totnes. I'd gone there to buy a birthday present for Josh and decided to browse some of the other crazy books while I was there. At the time, I was writing the third book in my Newtopia series. In these novels, which were set roughly fifty years or so in the future, a corporation has colonised everyone's unconscious, so that people have two lives: one in the 'real' world, and another in a fantasy realm accessed via a chip in their brain. This alternative world has its own currency, fashions, language and conventions, and although many years ago people had to sign up for user accounts and choose to log into them, by the time my novels took place people had no choice about it: everyone was simply microchipped at birth. Also, everyone was by then unaware that they were living two lives. The chip in people's brains was programmed to make the best use of the mind's down-time, and the minute someone's brainwaves slowed down—during sleep, on a coffee break or simply between thoughts—they would be switched over to this alternative world, which I had called Newtopia.

  The whole series had been inspired by a news story I'd seen where two fat people were divorcing in real life because their thin online avatars had both married other thin avatars that stood in place of other real-life fat people. I'd wondered what would happen if it became so normal to have this kind of second life that people were unaware they were even having one. In my Newtopia novels, a girl-hero discovers The Truth, which is more or less t
o do with something called the Corporation, which has colonised everything in sight and beyond, and then she sets about finding other people who Know. Between them they find a way of hiding their unconscious selves on the edges of the cells in the mobile-phone network, although they can't do this for long each time before they are discovered. They have adventures and relationships between the two worlds, with various dramas to do with unconscious betrayal, confused identities, awakenings and the rising arc of the greed and power of the Corporation. In the third book I thought I'd explain exactly how this unconscious world was structured, and I'd had some crazy ideas about the Corporation colonising something like the astral plane. I knew nothing about such things, but Arcturus was full of books about the astral plane.

  Two women had come into the shop just after me. They browsed the astral plane books too, before moving on to books about co-dependency and 'not loving too much', photographing your own aura and developing magical powers. 'I'll get you this one, love,' the older woman said to what must have been her daughter, probably in her thirties. The younger woman was holding about three other books and had just opened her purse. 'I've got five pounds left on this credit card,' she said. 'And about seven pounds fifty on this one. So if you get me that one as well, then...' 'I'll get you two, love,' the older woman said. 'And then we'll get the bus back. I know you need them.' What were these four life-changing books? I never got to see.

  'I've got it!' I said to Oscar. 'I'll do like a first-person thing.'