283- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

283- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey's Novels 

The Great Chain of Unbeing

The Great Chain of Unbeing is the eighth fiction book by Andrew Crumey, published by Dedalus Books in 2018. It was shortlisted for Scotland's National Book Awards (the Saltire Society Literary Awards) and nominated for the British Science Fiction Awards. The title alludes to the great chain of being and the book consists of stories that range widely in theme and style but are subtly linked. The book has been variously interpreted as a short story collection or novel.

Some of the pieces were previously published in different versions. The opening story, "The Unbeginning", first appeared as "Livacy" in the anthology NW15, published in 2007. Nicholas Royle commented then, "Andrew Crumey's unique blend of impenetrable physics and penetrating imagery, in 'Livacy', is as subtle and affecting as the best of his work." Another piece, "The Last Midgie on Earth" (a cli-fi set in a globally-warmed Scotland) first appeared in Headshook, published in 2009. Milena Kalicanin commented on it, "Scotland becomes Crumey's synonym for a postmodern utopia." A piece titled "The Burrows" first appeared in The Seven Wonders of Scotland (2012). Stuart Kelly wrote that it "imagines a subterranean Scotland, simultaneously a new frontier, an exploitable territory, and a metaphysical conundrum" and found it "both intellectually nimble and eminently re-readable."

Reception

Adam Roberts wrote in Literary Review: "Andrew Crumey’s new book is a quasi-novel built out of connected short stories. It’s something for which we English have no specific term, but for which German critics have probably coined an impressively resonant piece of nomenclature (Kurzgeschichtenverkettung, maybe?). It’s as good an example of the form as I know... The Great Chain of Unbeing is unboring, unusual and quite brilliant."

Alison Bell wrote in the Scottish Review of Books: "Crumey has the perfect pedigree for what turns out to be something of a genre-romp through historical fiction, sci-fi, dark comedy and Brooklyn-twang McCarthy era spy thriller... He understands nuclear fission, the Big Bang theory, radio waves, the life cycle of the bed bug, and they’re all here... It’s clever stuff, ingenious, occasionally baffling and deeply satisfying."

Stuart Kelly wrote in The Scotsman: "This subtle stitching is reminiscent of previous works by Crumey. D’Alembert’s Principle was a triptych of stories where things interlinked. Both Mobius Dick and Sputnik Caledonia were again tripartite novellas that by winking between the stories became novels... In “Between The Tones” we meet Conroy, a concert pianist who narrates his life in the style of a Raymond Chandler hard-man."

Conroy also appeared in Crumey's novel The Secret Knowledge. Other names recurring from previous novels include writers Alfredo Galli (from Music, in a Foreign Language) and Heinrich Behring (from Mobius Dick). The book therefore fits T.C. Baker's description of Crumey's work as a whole: "These novels, crucially, do not amount to a sequence, nor is the relation between events in them ever straightforwardly causal. Instead, each novel covers similar ground in a series of overlapping folds, while remaining narratively distinct."

Jack Deighton wrote in Interzone: "His latest novel is unconventional even in Crumey’s terms... What we have here is perhaps a literary expression of sonata form – 'in the development the tunes get mixed up,' but with something to be discovered between the tones yet nevertheless totally accomplished."

 

Contents

Title	Description	Publication history
The Unbeginning	John Wood, a blind cosmologist, describes how his father witnessed an atom bomb test. He has a tribologist friend named Roy Jones.	An earlier version, "Livacy", appeared in NW15: The Anthology of New Writing, Volume 15, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Maggie Gee (2007).
Tribology (or The Truth about my Wife)	In Moscow, Roy Jones is mistaken for an author named Jones, whose writing is praised by critic Richard Sand.	An earlier version, An Expedition to the Taiga, appeared in Magnetic North, edited by Claire Malcom (2005).
Introduction	An interviewer waits to meet Richard Sand at Cafe Mozart. Mention is made (p39) of Heinrich Behring and Alfredo Galli – fictional authors who featured in the novels Mobius Dick and Music, in a Foreign Language.	An earlier version, Meeting Mr Sand, appeared in Gutter 9 (2013).
Fragments of Behring (Four historical sketches)	The pieces are "Silk", "A Room in Delft", "Parable" (about Montaigne), "A Lesson for Carl" (about Beethoven).	"A Lesson for Carl" appeared in So, What Kept You: New Stories Inspired by Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver edited by Tess Gallagher, Claire Malcolm, Margaret Wilkinson (2006).
Singularity	Patrick, a cosmologist and colleague of John Wood (p74), waits for results of a cancer scan. Another patient is Jack Fisher (p71). While waiting, Patrick sees a poster of a Greek island (p72).	An earlier version was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2016.
The Assumption	Jack Fisher and his wife Fi are visited at their Greek island home by Jack's daughter Anna. The novella-length story ends with the words "a great chain of unbeing". It marks the mid-point of the book. The second half is mostly comical in tone and increasingly surreal.
Between the Tones	Surreal comedy in multiple parts about a classical pianist called Conroy (namesake of a character in The Secret Knowledge) who thinks there is a plot against him, led by Richard Sand. Conroy discovers an old memoir by a radio engineer and amateur sf writer who assisted Edwin Howard Armstrong in the 1940s and met Theodor Adorno (a philosopher fictionally portrayed in The Secret Knowledge). The engineer also met Heinrich Behring (who was writing a novel about Beethoven) and was hired by the Rosier Foundation (a name from Mr Mee and Mobius Dick) for an obscure assignment possibly involving nuclear weapons.
Fragments of Sand (Six little pieces)	The pieces are "The Post Artist", "Bug", "The Burrows", "Scenes from the Word-Camera", "The Last Midgie on Earth", "That Place Next to the Bread Shop".	"The Last Midgie on Earth" appeared in Headshook, edited by Stuart Kelly (2009).[20] "The Burrows" appeared in The Seven Wonders of Scotland, edited by Gerry Hassan (2012).
Impossible Tales	Harry Blue, a "freelance philosopher", meets Richard Sand at Cafe Mozart. Sand is working on a translation of Alfredo Galli's Racconti Impossibili, or "Impossible Tales" (a book mentioned in Music, in a Foreign Language). The story is intercut with a science fiction story about the drug-taking crew of a "space trawler", and the storylines come together at the end.
The Unending	Fantasy about a child born like a plant into a world of ice.	An earlier version, "Water of Life", was published in the Sunday Herald (2009).

 

282- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

282- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey's Novels 

The Secret Knowledge

The Secret Knowledge (2013) is the seventh novel by Scottish writer Andrew Crumey. It was his first since returning to his original UK publisher Dedalus Books, and was awarded a grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Part of the writing was done while the author was visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. It was longlisted for the Guardian's "Not the Booker" prize.

Synopsis

In 1913, composer Pierre Klauer envisages marriage to his sweetheart and fame for his new work, The Secret Knowledge. Then tragedy strikes. A century later, concert pianist David Conroy hopes the rediscovered score might revive his own flagging career. Music, history, politics and philosophy become intertwined in a multi-layered story that spans a century. Revolutionary agitators, Holocaust refugees and sixties’ student protesters are counterpointed with artists and entrepreneurs in our own age of austerity. All play their part in revealing the shocking truth that Conroy must finally face – the real meaning of The Secret Knowledge.

Themes

Some of the action is set in Scotland at the time of the Battle of George Square. Other parts are set in France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the United States.

Specific reference is made to the socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, who appear as characters in the novel. A chapter set on Capri and based on Benjamin's love for Asja Lacis is written in the collage style of One Way Street. Benjamin's suicide at Portbou is also made part of the plot.

The novel is, in part, concerned with the concepts of the multiverse and quantum suicide, which have featured in previous novels by Crumey, and in articles and conference talks. Reference is made to motifs from Crumey's earlier novels, particularly the Rosier Corporation which appeared in Mobius Dick. The missing wife of pianist David Conroy (called Laura) appears to be the same character of that name, who appeared in Mobius Dick and is referenced again in The Great Chain of Unbeing.

Reception

Publishers Weekly called it an "intelligent work of speculative fiction" with "heavy-handed melodrama" in places, but said "the philosophical questions the book raises are clever and insightful."

Reviewing it for the Historical Novel Society, Lucinda Byatt wrote: "Whether this qualifies as historical fiction is a moot point: it’s set in multiple pasts... Described as an “intellectual mystery”, the book explores the illusion of progress in history, perhaps also in our individual lives, a tribute to Benjamin’s own theories. Interestingly, the women are the most coherent and linear characters: Yvette and Paige, in particular, but even the historical figure, Hannah Arendt, who appears in the book alongside Theodor Adorno.

The Sunday Herald reviewer Lesley McDowell called it a "novel of ideas... more accessible than some may expect, and more gripping and more encompassing, too."

James Smart wrote in The Guardian, "With its enthusiasm for secret societies and acts that echo through time, The Secret Knowledge mines the fruitful ground between Cloud Atlas and Foucault's Pendulum, but fails to reach the heights of either. The dialogue can be tooth-wrenchingly annoying... but some scenes – a febrile union meeting, a loaded meeting between rival pianists – are wonderful."

Sputnik Caledonia

Sputnik Caledonia (2008) is a novel by British writer Andrew Crumey which won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, the UK's largest literary prize at the time.

It depicts a Scottish boy who longs to be a spaceman, is transported to a parallel communist Scotland where he takes part in a space mission to a black hole, and returns to the real world in middle age, possibly as a ghost. The novel is in three “Books”, with the central one (set in the alternate world) being longest, predominantly serious in tone, while the outer sections are shorter and more humorous. The title refers to the Russian Sputnik program and the alternative name for Scotland, Caledonia, suggesting the idea of Scotland as a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

The book was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, losing to Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture. The other shortlisted authors were Mohammed Hanif, Adam Mars-Jones and Toni Morrison. It was also shortlisted in the fiction category of the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards, losing to James Kelman's Kieron Smith, Boy.

Plot

Book One

Robbie Coyle, nine years old at the start of the book, lives in Kenzie in Scotland's Central Belt in the early 1970s. He dreams of going into space; but because of his father's anti-American, pro-Soviet views, he wants to be a cosmonaut rather than an astronaut. He picks up an Eastern European radio station called Voice of the Red Star, imagines it to be a telepathic signal from another planet, and begs to be taken there.

Book Two

Nineteen-year-old Robert Coyle lives in the British Democratic Republic – a Communist state founded after the overthrow of Nazi occupation in the “Great Patriotic War” – and has arrived at the Installation, a secret military base in Scotland, to take part in a space mission. A strange new object has been detected in the Solar System, believed to be a black hole, and the volunteers are to explore it telepathically. Robert has confused memories of the time before his arrival, and the reader is left guessing the connection between Books One and Two. Perhaps the Robbie of Book One has been transported to the other world as he wished; or perhaps the Robert in Book Two is a “parallel” version of the younger Robbie in Book One. The Installation itself is like a “black hole” in the sense that people arrive from the outside, but nobody ever seems to leave - except perhaps in death.

Book Three

In a present-day recognisable reality, Robbie's parents from Book One are now pensioners. Their story alternates with that of “the kid”, a runaway 13-year-old obsessed with science fiction stories such as Doctor Who, and with the idea that “in an infinite universe everything is possible”. He meets a middle aged man (“the stranger”) who claims to be a spaceman on a mission. The stranger could be the parallel-world Robert grown older - or a terrorist engaged in identity theft. Resisting logical resolution, the novel reprises and reworks themes that have recurred throughout the course of the book, creating an aesthetic unity that is emotionally ambivalent: a juxtaposition of the comic tone of Book One with the dark pessimism of Book Two.

Reception

Jonathan Coe called Sputnik Caledonia "the most impressive achievement yet from a still undervalued writer: in its combination of dystopian science fiction with warm but unsentimental childhood memoir, it struck me as being firmly in the tradition of - and worthy of comparison with - Alasdair Gray's Lanark."

In The Scotsman David Stenhouse wrote that Sputnik Caledonia was one of "very few" Scottish literary works that "actually does come close to 'envisioning' an alternative version of Scottish statehood".

Ken MacLeod called it a "very fine novel", adding "it looks like SF. But it can't be read as SF... In Sputnik Caledonia, the parallel world is a metaphor of what is lost in every choice. That's why the book is literary fiction and not SF, and is all the better for it."

Critical analysis

David Goldie in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945 considered Sputnik Caledonia "reminiscent of Gray's Lanark in the way it doubles its central character, Robbie Coyle, a Scottish boy fixated on space exploration, with Robert Coyle, trainee cosmonaut in a parallel British People's Republic, contrasting homegrown Bildungsroman with dystopian counterfactual history."

Lisa Harrison compared Sputnik Caledonia with Matthew Fitt's But'n'Ben A-Go-Go. "Their fictive worlds are Scotland, though not as we know it - they each present a Scotland stripped of stereotyping, thus reformed and redefined through fiction."

 

281- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

281- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey's Novels 

 Music, in a Foreign Language

Music, in a Foreign Language is the first novel by physicist Andrew Crumey, published by Dedalus Books in 1994. It won the Saltire Society First Book Award for that year, in a ceremony broadcast on STV.

It is an alternate history novel that imagines Britain occupied by the Nazis during World War 2, becoming a communist state afterwards. The central character, Charles King, is a physicist and musician involved in a dissident journal. His story is embedded within that of a narrator writing in post-communist times. Crumey has said that inspiration came from the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory, and eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. The title comes from a poem within the novel, written by a character in response to one by C.P. Cavafy.

Crumey explained a further reason for his choice of setting in an interview. "The most significant was a research trip I made to the University of Wroclaw in Poland, whose Institute of Theoretical Physics was situated in what, until only a few years previously, had been the local Communist headquarters. There was still much evidence of the former occupancy, and this labyrinthine building captured my imagination. But the only way I could bring it into my own domain, was to imagine such a building existing in Britain."

Music, in a Foreign Language was published in the United States in 1996 by Picador USA. Translated editions were published in Greece, Denmark, Italy, Russia, Taiwan and Romania.

The book shares its title with a 2003 album by Lloyd Cole.

Reception

Kirkus Reviews called it "a genuine novel of ideas, more than a little disorienting in the early going, as we labor to understand how its several parts will intersect—and surprisingly stimulating and exciting, as we see how Crumey imperturbably puts it all together. A formidable debut, from a writer whose possibilities, so to speak, seem virtually unlimited." Publishers Weekly called it "a thought-provoking but somewhat too ambitious debut."

Brian Stableford, in The A-Z of Fantasy Literature, called it "a polished exercise in postmodern/metafiction set in alternative world". The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945 commented on the "inventive intertwining of science with literary and musical culture" in both Music, in a Foreign Language and Crumey's later novel, The Secret Knowledge. The book has been described within postcolonial scholarship as a "mock dystopia". Hartmut Hirsch related it to the theories of Michel Foucault, calling the novel "a spatial utopia that, at the same time, is a heterotopia... By giving Britain the characteristics of a socialist regime, one historical and cultural space is superimposed on another to produce a third, heterotopian space, which defamiliarizes Britain as well as socialist regimes in general. A fragmented history of this alternate Britain is reproduced in a text which is itself fragmented... The intertextual references to Borges, Svevo, Calvino and Eco are clear."

Pfitz

Pfitz is a 1997 novel by Scottish physicist and author Andrew Crumey. It concerns an 18th-century German prince who dedicates his life to the construction of imaginary cities. The name Pfitz is taken from an inhabitant of one of the prince's fanciful cities, Rreinnstadt.

In 1997, the book was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times. In that newspaper Andrew Miller said it, "makes for rewarding reading – cerebral, adroit, not afraid to take chances but never allowing itself to be seduced by theory, by mere cleverness."

It was published in Germany as Die Geliebte des Kartographen ("The Cartographer's Lover") and was the subject of a prize-winning television feature by Eva Severini.

In 2013 the Scottish Book Trust selected it as one of the 50 best Scottish books of the last 50 years.

Critical analysis

Mark C. Taylor related the multiple "authors" in Pfitz to complexity theory. "Pfitz is not just about emergent complexity but is a brilliant enactment of it. One of the strategies Crumey and his coauthors use to generate complexity is to create multiple self-reflexive loops by folding authors and readers into each other until the line separating them becomes obscure."

Stephen J. Burn sees Pfitz, Tom McCarthy's Men in Space and David Mitchell's Number9dream as examples of a subgenre he terms "multiple drafts" novels, with Pfitz being "the earliest—and arguably the most representative—example of this form." Burn's term "multiple drafts" is borrowed from Daniel Dennett's model of consciousness. Burn writes that Pfitz shows "evident familiarity with Daniel Dennett's work" and says it "might be considered to provide the hidden internal blueprint for different levels of the novel's action."

Toon Staes sees Pfitz as a "systems novel", a term coined by Tom LeClair who applied it to writers including Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and Ursula Le Guin. In Staes' usage, "systems novels feature multiple nonlinear and fragmented narrative strands that gradually fix the reader's attention on a network of relationships," with Pfitz being "an interesting test case."

Colin Manlove described Pfitz as a "'postmodernist' fantasy" with "a vision of a universal machine of wheels and cogs that churns out infinite textual universes, each of which has no 'reality' as we commonly know it."

 

280- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

280- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey's Novels 

Mobius Dick

Mobius Dick (2004) is a novel by Andrew Crumey. It features an alternate world in which Nazi Germany invaded Great Britain and Erwin Schrödinger failed to find the wave equation that bears his name. This world becomes connected to our world due to experiments with quantum computers. The title parodies Moby-Dick.

The science-fiction plot centres on a mysterious mountain hospital in the Scottish highlands. Interweaving tales re-write the historical stories of Robert Schumann's stay in a similar clinic in Endenich and Schrödinger's visit to the Alpine sanatorium of Arosa, both of which echo the situation in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Connections are drawn from the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, particularly The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.

It was longlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Reception

A Companion to Crime Fiction describes Mobius Dick as a 'metaphysical detective story', comparing it with Kobo Abe's Inter Ice Age 4 and Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 'linking apocalyptic science fiction and metaphysical detective/mystery stories through antiphonal narratives, alternating "science" and "mystery" to yield reciprocal modes of displacement.'

Mr Mee

Mr Mee (Picador, 2000; Dedalus Books, 2014) is a novel by Andrew Crumey, his third set wholly or partly in the eighteenth century (following Pfitz and D'Alembert's Principle). It has three alternating story-lines: one featuring a pair of 18th-century French copyists, and two with modern protagonists - elderly Scottish book collector Mr Mee and university lecturer Dr Petrie. The lecturer's strand is serious in tone. Dissatisfied with his marriage and suffering ill health, he muses on French literature and becomes infatuated with a student. The other two strands are comic. The copyists become guardians of an esoteric encyclopaedia, and Mr Mee wishes to find it. He turns to the World Wide Web (still fairly new at the time of the novel) and discovers pornography and drugs, with farcical consequences.

The copyists, Ferrand and Minard, are based on two men mentioned briefly in Rousseau's Confessions. Their fictional versions – described by one critic as "something of an eighteenth-century Abbott and Costello"[1] – resemble the title characters in Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet.[2] The lecturer Dr Petrie thinks Ferrand and Minard never existed, comparing Rousseau's Confessions to Proust's In Search of Lost Time - something that appears to be a memoir but is really a novel.

The copyists' encyclopaedia is the work of Jean-Bernard Rosier, a character from D'Alembert's Principle. The name recurs in subsequent Crumey novels: The Rosier Corporation in Mobius Dick, the Rosier Foundation in The Great Chain of Unbeing.

The first chapter of the novel includes a version of the Monty Hall problem, presented as a letter from Rosier to D'Alembert about a hostage whose life depends upon choosing which cup a ring is hidden under. Chapter 8 has a version of the unexpected hanging paradox and also alludes to the uncertainty principle and measurement problem.

The name Mr Mee may be a pun on "me", reflecting the novel's concern with truth and authorship in first-person writers such as Rousseau and Proust. It might also hint at encyclopaedist Arthur Mee, or the novel's year of publication, MM in Roman numerals. The title was changed by some foreign publishers: the Italian translation was titled Il professore, Rousseau e l'arte dell'adulterio; the German edition was Rousseau und die geilen Pelztierchen.

Reception

Booker Prize judge Roy Foster wrote in the Financial Times: "We ended with a shortlist to be proud of, and a magnificent winner in Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, but I still think regretfully of a few that got away (some only just)... Andrew Crumey's Mr Mee is wildly expansive and generally light-hearted: it weaves together the story of an octogenarian Scottish scholar discovering sex through the internet, with an 18th-century French whodunnit about a lost philosophe encyclopaedia and a dying academic's obsession with one of his students. The French element is a triumph in itself, but each story is reported in a perfectly manipulated voice, the deadpan humour never wavers, the cross-references thicken intriguingly, and in the end all the tangled threads resolve into a beautifully executed pattern which is oddly moving.[3]

Miranda Seymour wrote in the New Statesman: "Andrew Crumey is one of the most original novelists around. I wish that Mr Mee, in which he mixes together murder, fairy tales, Rousseau, pornographers and the internet to dazzling effect, had made it on to the Booker list. It deserved a place there.[4]

Reviewing Mr Mee in The Washington Post, Andrew Ervin noted the similarity between a line near the start of the novel and the opening of Borges' story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius": "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of an encyclopaedia and a mirror". Crumey's character says, "I owe my discovery of the Xanthics (and hence of Rosier’s Encyclopaedia) to the coincidence of a flat tyre and a shower of rain." Ervin wrote: "Borges lurks in the shadows of Mr Mee, and he becomes the reader's Virgil, an essential guide through an abyss of literary references, allusions and constructs. Although his name remains unuttered through the vast majority of the book, other historical figures do turn up as characters, minor plot functionaries and tongue-in-cheek jokes on the part of the author. Rousseau plays a sizable role in the goings-on, and Diderot turns up to tremendous comic effect. The works of Kafka, Kant and especially Proust, among many others, line up for inspection before it's over... It's the rare novel that makes you want to begin anew as soon as you've finished the last page."[5]

In Scotland on Sunday, Ruth Thomas wrote: "My own sympathies lay with the dying lecturer, whose story is the least contrived of the three, and whose character the least like a caricature. His infatuation with his student, although rather sickening and Humbert Humbert-like, also reveals a real sadness and emptiness at the core of his life, and this is poignantly and delicately written. Similarly, Mr Mee's incompatibility with the 20th century, let alone the 21st, is at times a very moving portrayal of the way old people's needs are overlooked by society. In common with the others, Mr Mee has a strong voice, full of enthusiasm and passion for life - or at least, his interpretation of it. And this is ultimately how the whole novel comes across - an odd story, occasionally a little hard to stomach, but told with such energy and conviction that you can't help admiring it."[6]

Hilary Mantel wrote in the New York Times: " In a novel so cerebral as Mr. Mee, it would not be surprising if the characters were paper-thin and the jokes a species of facetious quibbling. But Crumey is a sensitive writer, and he creates an unexpected amount of sympathy for both the wistful Dr. Petrie and the awesomely naive Mr. Mee. He has a sharp wit and taps the sort of deep, rich vein of comedy accessible only to authors who respect their own characters... Fans of Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn will relish this novel's puzzles and paradoxes, its unfolding and ingenious designs. Yet it is never hard going, always good-humored, jaunty and sometimes enjoyably silly. Crumey is a confident narrator, and his book has a heart as well as a brain. It is not only an intellectual treat but a moving meditation on aspiration and desire."

In 2003 Hilary Mantel was a judge of Granta's "20 best British writers under 40", along with Ian Jack, Robert McCrum, Nicholas Clee and Alex Clark.[8] Crumey was selected on the strength of Mr Mee, but on being told, immediately pointed out that although the book was published before his 39th birthday, he was now over 40, hence ineligible.[9] Two other writers were then found to be ineligible as well, and all three had to be replaced on the list. Ian Jack later wrote, "That meant the published list included three names we'd previously ruled out - three writers who, after a little flurry of phone calls between the judges, moved up in our ranking from "Quite Good" to "Best". There can be no more telling illustration of the arbitrariness of literary lists. I write this as a comfort to those who fail to get on them, and a caution to those who do."

Critical analysis

Timothy C. Baker commented on the use of Gothic tropes such as found manuscripts in the work of Crumey and other Scottish writers. "Use of such tropes can be limiting... In other texts, however, including Gray's Poor Things, Crumey's Mr Mee, and A. L. Kennedy's So I Am Glad, each of which embeds Gothic elements in another genre or mode, the trope exceeds these limitations and allows for a greater reflection on the relationship between language and experience."

 

279-] English Literature, Andrew Crumey

279- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey 's Novels 

Beethoven's Assassins

Beethoven's Assassins is a novel by Andrew Crumey, nominated by publisher Dedalus Books for the 2023 Booker Prize. It imagines Beethoven being commissioned by a masonic lodge to write an opera about the Order of Assassins, called "The Assassins, or Everything is Allowed". The opera's subtitle comes from "Nothing is true and everything is allowed", which was the Assassins' secret doctrine according to Beethoven's acquaintance Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall.

The novel has multiple storylines set in different time periods with real-life characters including Therese van Beethoven (wife of Nikolaus Johann van Beethoven), Anton Schindler, J.W.N. Sullivan and Katherine Mansfield. The storylines vary in tone from comic to serious.

The first storyline is narrated by Beethoven's sister-in-law Therese and is comic. The second is narrated by a modern-day professor writing an article about "Beethoven and Philosophy". His work is interrupted by the pandemic and he starts writing about the troubles of his elderly parents during lockdown. After the pandemic he goes to a writing retreat in a Scottish country house where he resumes the Beethoven article.

There are other storylines set in the same house at different times. In 1823 the house is owned by a retired colonel connected to the masonic lodge who commissioned the opera. In 1923 the house is a psychiatric hospital visited by J.W.N. Sullivan, who in real life was an expert on Beethoven and physics. Sullivan investigates a woman able to recall past lives, and learns about the opera.

In Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, Sullivan argued that art is a kind of knowledge, different from scientific knowledge and complementary to it. Beethoven's Assassins develops this theme. The plot involves meserism, clairvoyance and psychic healing, mentioning Beethoven's connections with practitioners such as Johann Malfatti and Ludwig Schnorr.

Reception

Ruth McKee wrote in The Irish Times: "a deliciously intellectual, ambitious book that explores time, metaphysics, narrative and pretty much everything, all at once."

The Financial Times described Beethoven's Assassins as "an ambitious, entertaining novel full of comic brio", concluding, "Beethoven’s Assassins is impeccably ambitious, reliably entertaining and a little over the top."

The Scotsman called it "a brilliantly well-informed 200-year history of philosophy, science, music and mysticism, touched with an edge of Da Vinci Code hocus pocus," and remarked on "the sheer fun and narrative energy of Crumey’s writing, the skill and insight with which he conjures up each of his narrators from the repellent to the poignant, and the huge ingenuity with which he interweaves their stories."

The Herald (Glasgow) commented, "Beethoven's Assassins may be a gloriously multi-faceted puzzle-box of a novel, but even those anticipating a dense, abstruse intellectual exercise of interest only to literary theorists will find themselves drawn in by its well-drawn characters and emotional weight... Beethoven's Assassins is that refreshing thing, a novel of ideas with all the intrigue and momentum (and occasional red herring) of an absorbing mystery, underscored by a dark, ironic sense of humour."

Paul Griffiths wrote in Literary Review, "Crumey gives each of his chapters its own period and central character, and flips from one to another with the dexterity and humour of a champion juggler. Matters of art, science and philosophy are deftly discussed and sometimes linked to each other within the narrative."

The Spectator judged Beethoven's Assassins "great cerebral fun, with its quantum physics, telepathy, time travel and fraying of fact and fiction. But all this is its own misdirection... The writing here about the soul-grinding nature of the bureaucracy surrounding illness and death is chillingly good. The questions the novel poses about science and aesthetics (is Einstein as good as Beethoven?) pale in comparison to the rawness of the loss it depicts with the same scrutiny as an equation or a late quartet."

The Historical Novel Society said, "This is a book to appeal to readers who enjoy time-travel, mystery, illusion – and no clear-cut answers."

The Crack said, "Beethoven's Assassins is a huge knickerbocker glory of a novel that weaves together history, art, science, music, and more. Philosophical, but funny with it."

Connections with other books by Crumey

Beethoven's Assassins features the Coyle family (Joe, Ann and their son Robert) from the fictional town of Kenzie. The same names appeared in Sputnik Caledonia, but with different storylines. The writer Heinrich Behring figures in Beethoven's Assassins as a disciple of George Gurdjieff, having previously appeared in Mobius Dick and The Great Chain of Unbeing. Beethoven's Assassins also mentions the encyclopedia of Jean-Bernard Rosier, first mentioned in D'Alembert's Principle and Mr Mee. The discussions of music in Beethoven's Assassins echo similar thoughts in Music, in a Foreign Language and The Secret Knowledge. Timothy C. Baker has said of Crumey's novels that they "do not amount to a sequence, nor is the relation between events in them ever straightforwardly causal. Instead, each novel covers similar ground in a series of overlapping folds, while remaining narratively distinct." Crumey has stated, "There is no consistent whole – the 'story of everything' is self-contradictory."

D'Alembert's Principle (novel)

D'Alembert's Principle (Dedalus Books, 1996) is a novel by Andrew Crumey, and the second in a sequence of three set wholly or partly in the eighteenth century (the others being Pfitz and Mr Mee). It is in three sections, subtitled "Memory, Reason and Imagination". The U.S. edition was subtitled "A novel in three panels". It has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Italian, Turkish and Romanian. It prompted El Mundo (Spain) to say "Crumey is one of the most interesting and original European authors of recent years."

The first section, recursively titled "D'Alembert's Principle", is a historical fiction depicting Jean le Rond D'Alembert, featuring his unrequited love for Julie de l'Espinasse, and describing the principle of physics named after him. The second section, "The Cosmography of Magnus Ferguson" is a speculative fiction about interplanetary travel by an eighteenth-century Scotsman. The third section, "Tales from Rreinnstadt", is a Menippean satire featuring the setting and title character from Pfitz.

Themes

Stefania Cassar has contextualised D'Alembert's Principle as one of a number of British novels from the 1980s and 90s that portrayed science and scientists in the light of ongoing cultural debates. "D'Alembert's Principle, Mendel's Dwarf and Three Times Table... illustrate how some of our most basic ideas about 'science', 'nature' and 'literature' are historically constituted, and explore how these underlying cultural assumptions can inform and/or influence even the most apparently 'objective' and 'factual' scientific inquiries. Xorandor, ThreeTimesTable, and D'Alembert's Principle are set in societies where powerful elements and/or influential figures attempt to reinforce and police the boundaries between science and the humanities, between reason and the imagination. All three novels insist that such attempts to carve out definite boundaries are misguided, limiting and ultimately doomed to failure... criticism of science from the perspective of the humanities can expose the limitations of the assumptions that under lie the two-cultures model and bring to light fresh ways of perceiving the literature-science relation."

An unnamed character at the end of the first section of D'Alembert's Principle proposes a probabilistic theory of physics different from D'Alembert's deterministic one. This character reappears in Mr Mee as Jean-Bernard Rosier. The Rosier Corporation is important in Mobius Dick, and the Rosier Foundation is mentioned in The Great Chain of Unbeing. Like the three parts of D'Alembert's Principle, the novels themselves are loosely connected and readable in any order. T. C. Baker calls this structure "monadological", observing that "five of [Crumey's] seven novels explore, in various ways, the legacies of Enlightenment thought, often drawing upon the same ideas and figures. These novels, crucially, do not amount to a sequence, nor is the relation between events in them ever straightforwardly causal. Instead, each novel covers similar ground in a series of overlapping folds, while remaining narratively distinct."

Reception

Merle Rubin wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "Writing in the inventive, playful tradition of Calvino and Borges, Mr. Crumey blends history, fantasy, fable and metaphysical speculation in a confection that is at once elegant, provocative and thoroughly entertaining."

Lucy Atkins in The Guardian called it "The literary equivalent of an Escher" with "no identifiable end or beginning."

Kirkus Reviews said, "Once the reader's head stops spinning from trying to follow the intricate mechanics of the tale here, there is much to be enjoyed and admired. Still, Crumey's effort doesn't measure up to its less fragmentary predecessors."

Erica Wagner wrote in The Times: "The three sections are loosely linked; they seem to orbit each other like bodies in space, their paths never crossing but never separate, either. Crumey's writing has a fastidiousness and dry humour apposite to his 18th-century setting, and a dreamlike structure reminiscent of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. This clever, deceptive novel sets out to prove that rationalism is an emperor without any clothes and succeeds by doing what all fine writing should: reawakening in the reader a sense of the deep mysteriousness of life."

Ray Olson wrote in Booklist, "Proceeding from poignancy to awe to hilarity, the three parts constitute an intellectual treat that admirers of Borges and philosophical sf master Stanislaw Lem, in particular, should appreciate."

Carolyn See wrote in The Washington Post, "This is a postmodern novel. More specifically, it's made up of a novella, a doodad in the form of an account of interplanetary travel, and a third narrative that, if it weren't already labeled as postmodern, could best be described as a shaggy dog story."

Sybil Steinberg wrote in Publishers Weekly, "The loopy dialogue between Pfitz and Goldman is reminiscent of the Tortoise and Achilles sections in Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. Crumey is described as a postmodernist, but he isn't anything so terrifying: he's simply reviving that old Enlightenment pastime, the philosophical jeu d'esprit."

Tobias Jones wrote in The Observer: "Deliberate confusion and incoherence are the ingredients of Crumey's third novel. D'Alembert believes he has found a 'mathematical formula by which all the contradictory affairs of men' are 'reduced to a single principle'. It is a historical triptych, travelling between different characters, narratives, and even planets; but as it moves from Memory to Reason and then Imagination, the theory breaks down into chaos."

Tom Deveson wrote in The Sunday Times, "This is a highly polished fable, which sustains its learning with wit and zestful confidence."

Alice Thompson wrote in The Scotsman: "This makes for a disjointed but challenging read, for Crumey is experimenting with various forms of fiction: the fiction of history and science, of philosophy and of the imagination. D'Alembert's fictional memoirs are an expertly structured, moving account... "The Cosmography of Magnus Ferguson", in contrast, is a kind of Swiftean satire of various branches of philosophical thought... In his final section, Crumey uses the sensuality of the empirical world. His language becomes more richly descriptive... Like Crumey's giant astronomical clock, marking time of the universe, his ambitious novel works. It doesn't stop ticking."

Boyd Tonkin wrote in New Statesman, "Growing lighter as it builds, the whole book adds up to a scorching critique of pure Reason. A shame, then, that Crumey gets lost sometimes in the dry abstractions of Enlightened prose."

Susan Salter Reynolds wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "a principle, a vision and a story combine to create a portrait of the 18th-century European mind stretched thin between the heart and the stars."

Ann Irvin wrote in Library Journal, "D'Alembert's Principle is actually three stories, including the title story, "The Cosmography of Magnus Ferguson," and "Tales from Rreinstadt." Each represents an aspect of D'Alembert's definition of knowledge: memory, reason, and imagination. The stories are set in the 18th century, when D'Alembert worked with Diderot on his famous dictionary. The first story uses D'Alembert's memories to illustrate his great success with mathematical theories but his failure in love. The second story, representing reason, is an exploration of empiricism. "Tales from Rreinstadt" is narrated by Pfitz, the beggar who also appeared in Crumey's earlier novel, Pfitz, while Pfitz is temporarily imprisoned by a wealthy jeweler. Crumey, a Scotsman, has cleverly interwoven aspects of human thought with entertaining stories. The details and tone of the stories aptly convey the tenor of 18th-century rationalism. For academic and public libraries where intellectual fiction is enjoyed."