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| Interview with Scarlett Thomas by Danuta Kean When I was 12 my father said to me, ‘You think too much.’ Like thinking was a fault. The incident came to mind as Scarlett Thomas recalled her own childhood in the airy kitchen of her Canterbury terrace. At 12, the author of The End of Mr Y sat on beanbags in her parents’ sitting room listening to their friends – cultural theorists, academics and radical activists – argue about Foucault, feminism and Thatcher. In such an atmosphere, the only sin the intellectually precocious teenager was in danger of committing was thinking too little. I have to admit, I felt envious ‘There was a sense that anything could be said,’ she recalls. ‘It wasn’t that rarefied Oxford kind of intellectual situation, where someone would sit very calmly and talk about philosophy or that kind of thing. It was much more eclectic and eccentric. It felt like it had a real energy.’ The recollection helps explain why Thomas is one of Britain’s most unusual as well as gifted writers under 40. Her fans include Douglas Coupland, Jonathan Coe and a generation of blogging hip-litters from 3:AM Magazine to Bookslut. Her four literary novels (three crime novels were published by Hodder at the end of the 1990s), fizz with ideas that range from the angst of modern living and gender politics through post-structuralism and vegetarianism to maths and homeopathy. They have been described by critics as everything from ‘blueprints for a revolution’ to a ‘passport into the world of mind-bending science.’ They also achieve a rare feat in literary fiction: they push intellectual boundaries, which, according to Jonathan Coe, put ‘flesh and bone on intellectual ideas,’ without ever compromising plot. ‘You have to get the plot right because otherwise nobody gets pleasure from the book,’ she says as an aside during a long explanation about self-criticism. Her hit rate with the zeitgeist is startling. Bright Young Things (Fourth Estate, 2001), about a group of twentysomethings stranded on a desert island after answering an ad in the Media Guardian, anticipated Big Brother. Going Out (Fourth Estate, 2002), combined the themes of millennial angst with media saturation and alternative therapy as our paranoia about allergies to everything reached a peak. PopCo (Fourth Estate, 2004), about Alice Butler, a puzzle developer at a cool toy company commissioned to create a ‘killer’ brand for teenage girls, appeared as the anti-branding movement went mainstream. In The End of Mr Y –which marks Thomas’ switch to publisher Canongate – PhD student Ariel Manto finds herself in possession of a cursed book that leads her on a trip through human consciousness to God, Derrida and some very startling mice. It was published this past summer, as the debate about free thought and fundamentalism heated up. |
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