The End Of Mr. Y. Scarlett Thomas

about barnacles and then punched Darwin in the face. This was in 1859. After that, he seemed to retreat into ever more esoteric activities, visiting mediums, exploring paranormal events, and becoming a patron of the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital. After about 1880, he seemed to stop publishing. Then he wrote The End of Mr. Y and died the day after it was published, after everyone else who’d had something major to do with the book (the publisher, the editor, the typesetter) had also died. Thus the rumoured ‘curse’.

      But there may have been other reasons for the idea of the curse. Lumas was an outlaw. He favoured the evolutionary biologist Lamarck (who said that organisms pass on learned characteristics to their offspring) over Darwin (who said they don’t), when even people like Samuel Butler – once described as ‘the greatest shit-stirrer of the nineteenth century’ – were coming around to the idea that we are all, actually, Darwinian mutants. He wrote letters to The Times criticising not only his contemporaries, but every major figure in the history of thought, including Aristotle and Bacon. Lumas became very interested in the existence of a fourth spatial dimension and wrote various supernatural stories about it, somehow managing to upset people who did not believe in the existence of another dimension. His response was ‘But they are merely stories!’, although everyone knew that he used his fiction mainly as a way of working out his philosophical ideas. Most of his ideas were about the development and nature of thought, particularly scientific thought, and he often described his fictional works as ‘experiments of the mind’.

      One of his most interesting stories, ‘The Blue Room’, tells of two philosophers who attend a party in a mansion. Somehow they get lost on their way to play billiards with the host and end up in a blue room in the (supposedly) haunted wing of the house. This room has two doors, on its north and south walls, and a spiral staircase in the middle. One of the philosophers says they should go up the stairs, but the other thinks they should leave via one of the doors. They can’t reach an agreement and instead end up speculating about the existence of ghosts. The first one argues that, as there are no such things as ghosts, they have nothing to fear. The second agrees that there is nothing to fear: he has never seen a ghost, and therefore has concluded that they don’t exist. Satisfied that there are no ghosts, and enthused by their agreement, the philosophers leave the room via the door they came in and try to make their way back to the party. However, the blue wing of the house seems to be arranged in a peculiar way. Once they leave the room they find a corridor leading to a spiral staircase. When they go down it, they end up back in the blue room. When they try the other door, the same thing happens. But when they go up the staircase, they simply find one of the doors. Whichever way they go, they end up back in the blue room.

      There have been a few academic papers written about Lumas as a historical figure, and maybe ten about his novel, The Apple in the Garden. There have been no biographies. Back in the 1990s, a couple of Californian Queer theorists claimed him, or at least his journals, in which one can find, among other things, half-finished homoerotic sonnets about some of Shakespeare’s male characters. But I don’t know what happened to the Queer theorists. Perhaps they lost interest in Lumas. Most people do. As far as I know, hardly anything has ever been written about The End of Mr. Y. What has been written has all been by Saul Burlem.

      ‘The Curse of Mr. Y’ was the subject of Burlem’s paper at the conference in Greenwich eighteen months ago, delivered to an audience of four people, including me. Burlem hadn’t then read The End of Mr. Y, but instead talked about the probable invention of the ‘curse’ story. He had a rough, sandpaper voice, and a slight stoop that somehow wasn’t unattractive. He talked about the idea of the curse as if it were a virus, and discussed Lumas’s body of work as if it were an organism attacked by this virus, destined, perhaps, to become extinct. He talked about information becoming contaminated by unpopularity, and eventually concluded that Lumas’s book had indeed been cursed, not in a supernatural sense, but by the opinions of people who wanted him discredited.

      There was a reception afterwards, in the Painted Hall. It was packed in there: a popular scientist had been giving a talk at the same time as Burlem, and he was holding court in the large Lower Hall, underneath an image of Copernicus. I had considered going to his talk instead, but I was glad I’d chosen Burlem’s. The other people from Burlem’s talk – two guys who looked a bit like a pair of tax inspectors except for their almost white-blond hair, and a sixtyish woman with pink-streaked grey hair – hadn’t hung around, so Burlem and I started on the red wine, drinking too fast, hiding away in the far corner of the Upper Hall. Burlem was wearing a long grey wool trench coat over his black shirt and trousers. I can’t remember what I was wearing.

      ‘So would you read it, then?’ I asked him, referring, of course, to The End of Mr. Y.

      ‘Of course,’ he said, with his odd smile. ‘Would you?’

      ‘Absolutely. Especially after this.’

      ‘Good,’ he said.

      Burlem didn’t seem to know anyone in the Lower Hall, and neither did I. Neither of us attempted to leave our corner and mingle: I’m not very good at it and often offend people by accident; I don’t know what Burlem’s reason was – maybe he just hadn’t been offended by me yet. The whole time I was in the Painted Hall I felt a bit like part of a huge box of chocolates, with the browns, creams, golds and reds of the vast paintings seeming to melt around me. Perhaps Burlem and I were the hard centres that no one was interested in. No one else came to the Upper Hall the whole time we were there.

      ‘I can’t believe more people didn’t come to your talk,’ I said.

      ‘No one knows Lumas exists,’ he said. ‘I’m used to it.’

      ‘I suppose you were up against Mr. Famous, as well,’ I said.

      Burlem smiled. ‘Jim Lahiri. He’s probably never heard of Lumas, either.’

      ‘No,’ I agreed. I’d read Lahiri’s best-selling popular science book about the end of time, and knew he wouldn’t approve of Lumas even if he had heard of him. Popular science can say some pretty wild things these days, but the supernatural is still out, as is Lamarck. You can have as many dimensions as you want, as long as none of them contains ghosts, telepathy, anything that fucks with Charles Darwin, or anything that Hitler liked (apart from Charles Darwin).

      Burlem picked up the bottle of wine, refilled both our glasses, and then frowned at me. ‘So why are you here? Are you a student? If you’re working on Lumas, I should probably know who you are.’

      ‘I’m not working on Lumas,’ I said. ‘I write these little articles for a magazine called Smoke. You may not have heard of it. I’ll probably write one on Lumas after this, but I don’t think that counts as “working on” in your sense.’ I paused, but Burlem didn’t say anything. ‘He’s a great person to write about, though, even on a small scale. His stuff’s pretty compulsive. I mean, even without the controversies and the curse, it’s still amazing.’

      ‘It is,’ said Burlem. ‘That’s why I’m working on a biography.’ After he said the word ‘biography’, he looked first at the ground and then up at the painted ceiling high above our heads. I must have been frowning or something, because when he looked back at me he smiled in a crooked, apologetic way. ‘I hate biography,’ he said.

      I laughed. ‘So why are you writing one?’

      He shrugged. ‘Lumas got me hooked. The only way to write about his texts seems to be to write a biography of his life. It might sell. There’s a vogue for digging up these nineteenth-century eccentrics at the moment and I might as well cash in on it. The department could do with some funding. I could do with some bloody funding.’

      ‘The department?’

      ‘Of English and American Studies.’ He told me the name of the university.

      ‘Have you started on it?’ I asked him.

      He nodded. ‘Yeah. Unfortunately there’s only one biographical detail about Lumas that really does it for me.’

      ‘The punch?’ I suggested, thinking of Darwin, imagining, for some