Meg is a writer of formulaic genre fiction and newspaper book reviews who harbours dreams of a proper, serious, literary novel... but deletes more than she keeps. She's obsessed with the idea of a storyless story, of breaking away from the archetypal plot structures that define the majority of successful fiction and finding something "super-authentic and with so much emotional truth that none of it seems like a story at all". When given a pop-science book about the potential resurrection of everyone who's ever lived at the end of the universe, Meg at first scorns the concept... but then begins to look at ways of incorporating it into her novel. Meanwhile, a number of other stories are happening all around her. A wild, wolf-like beast is terrorising Dartmoor. An old acquaintance stands on the verge of Hollywood stardom via Anna Karenina. Meg's whiny boyfriend Christopher is doing her nut in, and the older man she secretly fancies is giving her very confusing signals. All her friends are having affairs, a mysterious ship in a bottle washes up on the beach, and knitting socks is far more difficult than it looks.
Has Scarlett Thomas succeeded where Meg seems unable? Is Our Tragic Universe a truly storyless story? It certainly comes close. It feels real and "super-authentic" - so much so, I wondered just how much was autobiographical. It contains a great deal of "emotional truth", the kind that has you thinking about your own life and the decisions that shape it. And it doesn't feel much like a story... at all. Yet it has the page-turnery drive of a thriller even though very little happens. And as anyone who's read Thomas's earlier books (The End Of Mr. Y, Popco, Going Out, Bright Young Things) will know, this writer has a style that sucks you in and swallows you whole. Not for everyone then, but for anyone who likes to think from time to time.
