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."

278- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

278-] English Literature

Andrew Crumey

Andrew Crumey

Born in Glasgow in 1961, Andrew Crumey studied theoretical physics at St Andrew's University and Imperial College, getting a PhD for work on nonlinear Schrödinger equations.

A research trip to Poland inspired his first novel, Music, in a Foreign Language, set in an alternative post-Communist Britain. It won the Saltire Society First Book Of The Year Award in 1994 and was quickly followed by Pfitz (1995) and D'Alembert's Principle (1996).

Giving up physics for writing, he was literary editor of Scotland on Sunday newspaper for six years, a time that saw Mr Mee (2000) and Mobius Dick (2004) appear.

Following the success of Sputnik Caledonia (2008) he took up part-time lecturing posts in creative writing at Newcastle University and Northumbria University. He was also a visiting fellow at Durham Institute of Advanced Study.

Music has always been a major influence in his work; The Secret Knowledge (2013) is about a piano piece with that title, and The Great Chain of Unbeing (2018) has an episode featuring Beethoven. That book was shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Book Of The Year award, and paved the way for Beethoven's Assassins (2023).

Analysis

Campus/Academic Novels and 'Built-In' Nostalgia (Corina Selejan)

Narrative Complexity and the Case of Pfitz: An Update for the ‘Systems Novel’ (Toon Staes)

Uncovering Caledonia: An Introduction to Scottish Studies (Milena Kaličanin)

'Everything is Connected to Everything Else.' Holism in Andrew Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia (Sonia Front)

Thinking through Thinking through Fiction: a round table (Amy Sackville)

Harmonic monads: Reading contemporary Scottish fiction through the enlightenment (T.C. Baker)

Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction (Sonia Front)

Reading the Multiple Drafts Novel (Stephen J. Burn)

Scotland as Science Fiction (Caroline McCracken-Flesher)

A Dialogue on Creative Thinking and the Future of the Humanities (Andrew Crumey and Mikhail Epstein)

The representation of science and scientists in British fiction 1980-2001 (Stefania Cassar)

Andrew Crumey

Andrew Crumey is a novelist and critic whose work reflects his academic background in theoretical physics and his interest in the history of ideas. As lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University he is concerned with the philosophy of fiction and the relationship between literature and science.

Born in Glasgow in 1961 he gained his PhD from Imperial College, London, for work on integrable dynamical systems, and was post-doctoral research associate in the department of applied mathematics at Leeds University (1989-92). His first novel, Music, in a Foreign Language (1994), set in a dystopian communist Britain, won the Saltire Society Prize for Best First Book and marked the beginning of a series of works exploring themes in real and imaginary history.

His interest in the philosophes of the 18th century led to the novels Pfitz (1995) and D’Alembert’s Principle (1996); the former a New York Times Notable book, the latter nominated for the Booker Prize. Mr Mee (2000), longlisted for both the Booker Prize and IMPAC Award, combined portrayals of Rousseau and Proust with the story of a lost encyclopaedia describing an alternative universe.

A regular book reviewer for Scotland on Sunday since 1996, he was the newspaper’s literary editor from 2000 to 2006, and has written for other papers including the Guardian, Independent, Telegraph and Financial Times. He has served on various judging panels and advisory committees including the Scottish Arts Council Book Awards and the Macallan Short Story Competition, and has participated in international events such as the Genoa Science Festival and Moscow Book Fair, conferences on mathematics and literature (e.g. MathKnow), and broadcasts including Radio 3 The Essay and the Radio 4 series Relatively Einstein. His fiction has been translated into thirteen languages, and he has been recipient of a Northern Arts Writers Award and Arts Council Writers Award.

His novel Mobius Dick (2004), a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, brought to focus his interest in the scientific and cultural significance of multiple realities (particularly Everett’s Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics). He further developed this in Sputnik Caledonia (2008), for which he won the Northern Rock Foundation Writers Award; it was also shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Scottish Book of the Year, and longlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award.

Teaching on the MA and PhD creative writing programmes at Newcastle University since 2007, he has a particular interest in the theories of Bakhtin and Benjamin. In 2010 he conducted an AHRC-funded practice-led research project, “Quantum Suicide: Walter Benjamin and the multiverse”, centred on Benjamin’s interest in Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-81), whose pseudo-scientific cosmology of multiple realities and alternative histories was equivalent, in Benjamin’s view, to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, and should be seen as a product of nineteenth-century capitalism.

During his time at IAS, Andrew Crumey will work on a novel arising from this research, and wishes in particular to study the concept of “prophecy” as it arises in fiction and science.

277-] English Literature - Andrew Crumey

277 - ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey 

Andrew Crumey (born 1961) is a novelist and former literary editor of the Edinburgh newspaper Scotland on Sunday. His works of literary fiction incorporate elements of speculative fiction, historical fiction, philosophical fiction and Menippean satire. Brian Stableford has called them "philosophical fantasies". The Spanish newspaper El Mundo called Crumey "one of the most interesting and original European authors of recent years."

Life and career

Crumey was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and grew up in Kirkintilloch. He graduated with First Class Honours from the University of St Andrews and holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Imperial College, London. His thesis was on integrable systems and Kac-Moody algebras, supervised by David Olive.

Crumey's first novel, Music, in a Foreign Language, won the Saltire Society First Book Award in 1994. Its theme of alternate history was inspired by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

His second novel Pfitz was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year" in 1997, described as "cerebral but warm and likeable". The sequel, D'Alembert's Principle took its title from a principle of physics.

Crumey was a regular book reviewer for Scotland on Sunday from 1996 and became the newspaper's literary editor in 2000. He won an Arts Council of England Writers' Award, worth £7,000.

In 2000 Crumey's fourth novel Mr Mee was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award. He followed it with Mobius Dick, described by Joseph O'Connor as "perhaps the only novel about quantum mechanics you could imagine reading while lying on a beach."

In 2003 Crumey was selected for Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists", but had been incorrectly submitted by publisher Picador, being over 40 at the time.

In 2006, Crumey became the fifth recipient of the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award for Sputnik Caledonia, which was also shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Scottish Book of the Year.

In 2006 he became lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University. In 2011 he was a visiting fellow at Durham Institute of Advanced Study, then became lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria University. It was during this time that he wrote The Secret Knowledge, published in 2013.

His PhD students at Newcastle and Northumbria Universities have included Alex Lockwood, Guy Mankowski and John Schoneboom

He has an interest in astronomy and in 2014 he published on the subject of astronomic visibility and Ricco's law.

His short story Singularity was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2016 and later published in The Great Chain of Unbeing.

In 2017 he was a contestant in the St Andrews team on BBC Two's Christmas University Challenge.

In 2018 The Great Chain of Unbeing was shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Award. 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.'

In 2023 he published his ninth novel, Beethoven's Assassins, described in The Irish Times as "a deliciously intellectual, ambitious book that explores time, metaphysics, narrative and pretty much everything, all at once."

Critical reception

Jonathan Coe described Crumey as "a writer more interested in inheriting the mantle of Perec and Kundera than Amis and Drabble... Crumey seems so untouched by the post-war British tradition that he simply writes as if it never existed."

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945, commenting on unorthodox approaches to genre fiction by writers including Crumey, Frank Kuppner and Ken Macleod, said "Andrew Crumey is one of the most innovative and engaging Scottish writers to emerge out of this context in the last twenty years. His speculative fiction has a strong European and global dimension, drawing on the influence of Borges, Calvino and Milorad Pavic in its intricate, nested narratives, non-linearity, and ludic encyclopaedism."

In Twenty-First-century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices, Daniel Lea put Crumey in a list of "post-postmodernist" British writers that included Iain Banks, Bernardine Evaristo and Neil Gaiman, characterised by an "intermingling of genre and literary fiction."

Bent Sorensen bracketed Crumey with another physicist-turned-novelist, Alan Lightman, and discussed their move from science to literature using Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of "field", "position-taking" and "gatekeeping". Sorensen wrote that Crumey was "opposed to the postmodern epistemology when asked to define his world-view in philosophical terms... his fictional practice, however, can still fairly be characterized as postmodern."

Timothy C. Baker described Crumey's novels as "monadological", citing Deleuze's reading of Leibniz, and observing that "The relation between [Crumey's] novels is unusual: five of his 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."

Cultural theorist Sonia Front wrote, "The notion of parallel universes seems to be Andrew Crumey's favourite physical theory... His writings can be seen as a multiverse themselves, with the characters reappearing to live an alternative world-line in another novel."

Florian Kläger sees "a self-reflexive cosmopoetics of the novel" in the writings of Crumey, Martin Amis, John Banville, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson.

Works

Music, in a Foreign Language (1994)

Pfitz (1995)

D’Alembert’s Principle (1996)

Mr Mee (2000)

Mobius Dick (2004)

Sputnik Caledonia (2008)

The Secret Knowledge (2013)

The Great Chain of Unbeing (2018)

Beethoven's Assassins (2023)

  

276- ] English Literature - William Boyd

276- ] English Literature

William Boyd

Best Selling Author and Screenwriter

William Boyd is the author of seventeen novels, including A Good Man in Africa,  winner of the Whitbread Literary Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection. William Boyd’s new novel The Romantic is to be published on 6th October 2022.

The World of William Boyd

A St James’ art dealer with a penchant for postwar British painting finds terrifyingly new horizons opening up for him in East London, in William Boyd’s savagely funny new series.

Adventures in the Human Heart

William Boyd talks to Sam Leith from The Spectator, about his latest novel The Romantic which is about the incredible life of Cashel Greville Ross born in 1799.

The Romantic – Press reviews

Boyd is as magically readable as ever, and, as always with his whole life novels, there is an invigorating air of spontaneity ― Telegraph

The Romantic is certainly a crowd-pleaser, an old-fashioned bildungsroman that kicks off in the early 1800s and follows the hero, Cashel Greville Ross, through a long and peripatectic life . . . Boyd knows how to time the hights and lows, how to blend triumphs and tragedies, personal and historical . . . genuinely poignant and wise ― Sunday Times

Picaresque . . . these is a cornucopia of fine things here . . . The Romantic, always enjoyable, ranks with two of his best: The New Confessions and Any Human Heart. Both were intelligent and engrossing, novels you lived with. Both told a fine story very well. The Romantic does just that ― Scotsman

If it’s true escapism you’re after, William Boyd can always be relied upon to transport the reader from reality and his next offering, The Romantic, another epic that follows Cashel Greville Ross from 19th-century Country Cork to Zanzibar via Oxford and Sri Lanka, offers a wonderful literary getaway as the nights draw in ― Vogue, A Most Promising Page-Turner of the Season

A globe-trotting adventure through the 19th century ― i, Best Books for Autumn

Boyd’s pile-up of set piece escapades offers a huge amount of fun ― Daily Mail

One of our best contemporary storytellers ― Spectator

What could be more reassuring in troubling times than a new William Boyd novel?  ― Sunday Telegraph

Picaresque, big-hearted and moving, this is Boyd at the top of his game ― Guardian

This breakneck pace seems to be a function of Boyd’s exceptional imaginative facility, which sees him just as irresistibly drawn to new ideas as his hero is. Boyd, too, is the romantic. And yet there’s something irresistible about that energy – Financial Times

William Boyd at his boy’s own, balloon-flying, continent-hopping, historical name-dropping Boydiest. Our hero is Cashel Greville Ross, born in Co Cork in 1799, whose life spans swooping geographical leaps and great historical transformations. Think the Napoleonic battles, railways, Romantic poets, the source of the Nile, flushing loos, love affairs and pure, pure escapism ― The

THE ROMANTIC, published 6th October.

From one of Britain’s best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set in the 19th century

The Romantic

A new “whole life” novel from William Boyd, the author of Any Human Heart. Set in the 19th century, the novel follows the roller-coaster fortunes of a man as he tries to negotiate the random stages, adventures and vicissitudes of his life. He is variously a soldier, a lover, a husband, a father, a bankrupt, a friend of famous poets, a writer, a jailbird, a farmer, an African explorer – and many other manifestations – before, finally, he becomes a minor diplomat, a consul based in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary) where he thinks he will see out the end of his days in well-deserved tranquillity. This will not come to pass…

Spy City – all six episodes streaming now on Britbox.

AFM: Edgar Ramirez, Gugu Mbatha-Raw to Star in Isabel Coixet’s Romance ‘Nobody’s Heart’

The film — about love and loss in 1930s Portugal — is being introduced to buyers at the online AFM by WestEnd Films.

Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet (The Bookshop, Learning to Drive) has cast the duo of Edgar Ramirez (The Girl on the Train, Joy, Jungle Cruise) and BAFTA nominee Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Misbehaviour, Belle, The Morning Show) in her next feature.

Nobody’s Heart, adapted from bestselling author and screenwriter William Boyd’s short story Cork, and based on the life of celebrated Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, is described as a “beautiful, poetic story of love and loss” set against the backdrop of Lisbon in the 1930s. WestEnd Films has launched international sales on the project.

The film follows Lily after the sudden and devastating death of her husband. She inherits his cork factory and begins to form an unexpected, highly charged relationship with his enigmatic co-worker, igniting repressed imagination and passion, and discovering unknown truths about both herself and her late husband.

 “This is a fascinating, twisted and sexually charged love story between two characters sharing a unique passion with the background of Portugal in the 1930s,” said Coixet. “After reading William Boyd’s script, I completely fell in love with the story and I know there’s a hunger out there for stories like Nobody’s Heart.”The film will begin shooting in January in Portugal. WestEnd will be introducing the film to buyers at AFM Online where it will show a video presentation. CAA Media Finance is representing North American sales.

“Nobody’s Heart is a rich, evocative and moving drama, and we know Isabel Coixet will elevate the film even further with her eye for nuance and beauty,” said WestEnd managing director Maya Amsellem. “At WestEnd, we have a continued focus on female-centric narratives through our WeLove brand, and this is a great example of the type of story audiences want to see more of.”

By Alex Ritman

A producer, a novelist and an actress – all leading secret lives. But what happens when the trio’s private worlds begin to take over their public ones?

Happy paperback publication to Trio, the Sunday Times bestselling novel from William Boyd

One Night in Nihonbashi by William Boyd

RESTLESS has been chosen as one of four novels for the Duchess of Cornwall’s new Instagram-based reading group, I’m delighted to report. This is the hardback cover of the 2006 first edition, published by Bloomsbury. RESTLESS was my 10th novel and followed ANY HUMAN HEART (2002). I had done a lot of research into WW2 espionage for Any Human Heart and had stumbled across the extraordinary and pretty much unknown account of British espionage in the USA before Pearl Harbor. British agents, instructed by Churchill, tried to manipulate US media to encourage the States to join the war in Europe. They were very ingenious and very successful. Sometimes you get lucky as a novelist! This was a gift from the literary gods. And this the background against which the story of the young British spy, Eva Delectorskya, plays out. Restless features on @duchessofcornwallsreadingroom for two weeks from February 12.

Restless

A Good Man in Africa, first edition hardback. Published 40 years ago this week in January 1981. Still in print in the UK, USA, Canada, France, Germany, Spain.

cover2

08.22-william-body-book-jac

GOOD MAN IN AFRICA was published by Hamish Hamilton. This photograph was taken by the late, great JERRY BAUER (1934-2010). It was the first official publicity photo designed to accompany my debut novel. Jerry became a friend and took jacket/publicity photos of me for decades. The last one was on RESTLESS (2005). Jerry made photographing writers his unique speciality. Over the years he photographed everybody: Samuel Beckett, Muriel Spark, Alberto Moravia, Simone de Beauvoir etc etc. His amazing archive can be accessed via Jerry.bauer.photos@gmail.com. HINT — someone should produce a book of them….

@penguinukbooks @aaknopf @curtisbrownbooks #agoodmaninafrica #julietnicolson @vikingbooks

My Trio talk with Francine Stock 2.30pm Saturday 28th November. Not to be missed!!!

Cold War spy-thriller, Spy City. Starring Dominic Cooper as a British spy in Berlin during the summer of 1961. The summer before the Wall went up.  Coming to a TV near you soon.

William Boyd in conversation with Douglas Rae at the 2020 Petworth Festival.

Trio review from the Sunday Times.

‘Trio is about double lives. Three characters are central to it: Talbot Kydd, a middle-aged film producer; Elfrida Wing, a novelist with writer’s block; and Anny Viklund, a glamorous young actress. What brings them together is the making of a film in Brighton in high summer 1968.

The late 1960s have been enjoying something of a literary vogue this year: vibrantly chronicled in Craig Brown’s Beatles biography, One Two Three Four; gaudily resurrected in David Mitchell’s novel Utopia Avenue. Trio’s return to the period has a triple motive: to let the sunshine in again on its psychedelic euphoria, to highlight its political hinterland, and to spotlight gay liberation after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.’

William Boyd’s new novel, Trio is out now.

This exhilarating and tender novel set in the summer of 1968 asks: what makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn’t?

Reviews

Trio is about double lives. Three characters are central to it: Talbot Kydd, a middle-aged film producer; Elfrida Wing, a novelist with writer’s block; and Anny Viklund, a glamorous young actress. What brings them together is the making of a film in Brighton in high summer 1968.

The late 1960s have been enjoying something of a literary vogue this year: vibrantly chronicled in Craig Brown’s Beatles biography, One Two Three Four; gaudily resurrected in David Mitchell’s novel Utopia Avenue. Trio’s return to the period has a triple motive: to let the sunshine in again on its psychedelic euphoria, to highlight its political hinterland, and to spotlight gay liberation after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.

The film, with its camply whimsical title, “Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon”, and the banana-yellow Mini in which its lovers zip around Brighton, her purple kaftan glinting with tiny mirrors, his cerise hussar’s jacket matched by red boots, snazzily evokes the era. As William Boyd’s earlier fiction has shown — his depiction of the electric excitements of the 1920s Berlin film world in The New Confessions (1987), his ironic take on Hollywood in his short story The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’ (1995) — cinema fascinates him.

Trio sends an affably satiric shimmer over the making of its film, with the never-nonplussed Talbot adroitly manoeuvring his way through a maze of complications: ceaseless rewrites, grotesque miscastings, preposterous demands from investors, an absconding key performer.

Some of the figures involved seem like comic stereotypes from central casting: Dorian Villiers, a booming thespian trying to reboot his career; Sylvia Slaye, a cleavage-and-wink sexpot from saucy 1950s screen romps, now amply past her curvaceous prime. But the plot keeps things moving along entertainingly. At the same time, deeper concerns are broached.

An epigraph from Chekhov, “Most people live their real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy”, indicates Trio’s main theme: duplicity. Simulation, an essential component in film-making, pervades the book. Fraud, chicanery, covert theft, surreptitious adultery and fake friendship lurk. Names can’t be taken on trust. Rousingly billed as Troy Blaze, the film’s lead is Nigel Farthingly from Swindon. The film-maker exotically upgrades from Reggie to Rodrigo. Jacques Soldat, a preening Parisian intellectual, was once Mehdi Duhameldeb.

Talbot, a closeted homosexual, has another name too. As “Mr Eastman”, unknown to the wife he has lived with in “manufactured intimacy” for 26 years, he keeps a clandestine flat in Primrose Hill where he can photograph male models found by placing coded ads in magazines. Leading a double life, he approvingly notes that “there were two words in Japanese to describe the self . . . a word for the self that existed in the private realm and another, completely different, word for the self that existed in the world”.

Talbot’s situation is paralleled by those of Elfrida and Anny. The former, whose talent has dried up as her eagerness for drink has welled up, is concealing an alcoholic lifestyle that begins with breakfast tipplings of vodka slyly stored in Sarson’s White Vinegar bottles. Anny, sustaining her equilibrium with Equanil pills, is struggling to hide the return of a nightmare from her past: her ex-husband, now a terrorist hunted by the FBI.

In a thriller-like narrative about an insurance expert obsessed with armoury, Boyd’s 1998 novel Armadillo explored the urge to feel safely shielded and the way a social carapace can become more encumbrance than protection. Trio treats the same themes in a more relaxed style. Although one of its storylines takes a darker turn than might have been expected, its prevailing tone is jaunty and its conclusion optimistic. Full of neat phrases (“Brighton’s gull-clawed air”) and quirkily funny scenes (between takes naked actors in a porn film grouse about the rise in local vandalism), it’s an elating read.

Review from the Sunday Times.

Viking £18.99 pp345

275- ] English Literature - Chris Cleave

275- ] English Literature

Chris Cleave

Born                            14 May 1973 (age 52)

London, England

Occupation                 Writer

Language                    English

Alma mater                 Balliol College, Oxford

Subject                        Literary fiction

Notable works            Incendiary

The Other Hand 

Biography

Cleave was born in London on 14 May 1973, brought up in Cameroon and Buckinghamshire, and educated at Dr Challoner's Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied experimental psychology. He lives in the UK with his French wife and three children.

Writing

Cleave's debut novel Incendiary was published in twenty countries and has been adapted into a feature film starring Michelle Williams and Ewan McGregor. The novel won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. The audiobook version was read by Australian actor Susan Lyons.

His second novel, The Other Hand, was released in August 2008 and was described as "A powerful piece of art... shocking, exciting and deeply affecting... superb" by The Independent. It has been shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Book Awards in the Novel category. Cleave was inspired to write The Other Hand from his childhood in West Africa. It was released in the US and Canada in January 2009 under the title Little Bee.

Gold, his third novel, was called "bold and brave" by The Observer.

Cleave is a columnist for The Guardian in London. From 2008 until 2010 he wrote a column for The Guardian entitled "Down with the kids".

Bibliography

Novels

Incendiary (2005) The Other Hand (2008, Sceptre), published as Little Bee in the United States and Canada.

Gold (2012)

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (2016)

Short stories

"Quiet Time"

"Fresh Water"

"Oyster"

Incendiary (novel)

Incendiary is a novel by British writer Chris Cleave. When it was first published in the summer of 2005, it garnered international headlines for the eerie similarity of its plot to the 7 July 2005 London bombings in England carried out on the same day it was published. It won the 2005 Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award. A 2008 film with the same name was based on it.

Narrative

The novel is written as an epistolary first-person novel, in which, the main character, a young mother, writes a letter to Osama bin Laden after a London incendiary bombing.

Plot summary

A young mother's life is blown apart when her husband and four-year-old son are killed during a bombing at a football match. Following this, the young mother falls into a depression. While the young mother tries to battle her depression, she also must fight the guilt of committing adultery the same day of her son's and husband's death.

Critical reception

The Washington Post called it "A mezmering tour de force". New York Times said it was "As benefits good genre fiction, Cleave's characters are sustained, driven and informed by the plot, which dictates and governs all".[1] It also is considered to be "strong, intelligent, heart-breaking and realistic. The author said that principally, the novel is about the feelings of a mother for its children and the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

Film adaptation

For the movie, see Incendiary (film).

The film, loosely based on the book, was released in the UK on Friday, October 24, 2008. It was directed by Sharon Maguire and starring Michelle Williams in the main role, supported by Ewan McGregor as Jasper Black, and Matthew MacFadyen as Terrence Butcher. Unlike the book, the film received poor reviews, receiving 23% of approval in the site Rotten Tomatoes.