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Mobius Dick (2004)

By Andrew Crumey

Review by Dawn Marchpane

Call me: H. An elliptic text message sent to physicist John Ringer kicks off a winding, twisting, Mobius strip of a novel bringing German philosophy and music, particle physics, amnesia, lost love and pub food together for what one presumes is the first time.

The tone is light, though the range of reference is considerable: Crumey (appropriately both a PhD in theoretical physics and literary editor of Scotland on Sunday) takes in Schumann, Schrodinger, Melville and many more at least in tangent, never clumsily, although the dialogue occasionally wanders into the didactic.

A complex plot contemplating eternal recurrence, memory and the nature of reality is handled playfully - though at times I wearied of this endless hall of mirrors, the dodgems and the merry-go-round, and found myself longing for the single channel of the tunnel of love. There's little emotional depth here - if you're looking for a crystalline puzzle of a novel, this is it, but it's hard to be sure if the soul, like Schrodinger's cat, is really in the box.
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