Ariel's life is not ideal. Her professor, (one of the few men ever to have owned a copy of The End of Mr Y), has vanished, she's having a sordid affair with an older married man, and she lives is an unheated flat, with a suicidal closet gay German for a neighbour. If this doesn't sound like much fun, you'd be right. Except, the book is now in Ariel's hands, and curse or no curse, she cannot resist reading. When she finds that a single, vital page, is missing, it stumps her progress until it too lands in her lap, via another of those synchronous events without which few works of fiction would ever proceed. Once Ariel has the missing information, things really kick into high gear. What Lumas discovered, was a way to access another dimension. Not in a physical sense, but rather through journeys into the sub-conscious mind of the individual voyager, and via the minds of others, back in the real world. Journeys, which can apparently be in both space and through time. Lumas named this Matrix-like world the Troposphere, and thought it was his private playground. In the many years since he died, (the presumption is that he became lost inside his own mind), others have discovered the existence of this Mindspace. Notably, an abandoned US military project, closed down when dozens of children died, which is now being surreptitiously continued by two rogue agents. As we piggy back along with the narrator, we find that the Troposphere is actually made from human consciousness, a collective as Jung postulated, which the authors, Lumas, Manto and Scarlett Thomas herself, use as an allegory for books; devices which allow access to the thoughts and beliefs of others. Along the way, we encounter the god of mice, Apollo Smintheus, a former priest called Adam, and a rather sinister pair of dead children. Sometimes the story veers slightly too far into the realms of intellectualism, with frequent references to Derrida, Heidegger and Baudrillard, but is always yanked back to less cerebral entertainment, which does not require a degree in philosophy to enjoy. Indeed, there are many clever, though-provoking questions posed by or to the central character; Did Einstein create relativity by thinking it in existence? What if it's the future that creates us not the past? And do all probabilities collapse into one definite reality on observation, or exist all at once, each within its own universe?

I enjoyed this book a lot, although moreso at the beginning than at the end. I would have preferred a deeper exploration of the darkness suggested by several plot elements, and an ending which lived up to my expectations. However, this is purely personal preference and does not detract from the overall quality on offer here. In summary, The End of Mr Y is a charmingly different work, which is well worth tracking down. Albeit at your own peril.