Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

means to be a true hero from classic myths, stories and fairy tales.’
    My mind was a tangle as I put the book down and picked up my knitting. I had only a small amount of my turquoise wool left, but I stayed up until about midnight making knit-stitch after knit-stitch and purl-stitch after purl-stitch, continuing my K2 P2 rib and wondering why I hated this book so much. No doubt it would give great comfort to people who’d been bereaved, or who were scared of dying. It was certainly very well argued, and the maths made sense, sort of. Perhaps a real scientist would be able to say what was materially wrong with Newman’s theory. I just wondered what the Omega Point’s motivation was in all this.
     
    My turquoise wool had been a Christmas present from Frank and Vi. Claudia, the publishing director of Orb Books and also Vi’s twin sister, had been staying in the holiday cottage in Scotland as well. Things were slightly awkward between us because Orb Books had recently told me they wanted me to focus more on Zeb Ross projects and that they wouldn’t be renewing my contract for the Newtopia books. I’d mentioned this to Vi about a week before Christmas, when Claudia was lying down one afternoon and we were in the kitchen of the holiday cottage making beetroot soup. I explained that Orb Books didn’t feel my own work was ‘commercial’ enough any more and that I was taking too many risks with the genre. Vi had clapped me on the back and said, ‘Good for you. Fuck them. Finish your own book at last. Screw their bottles of oil.’
    This was a reference to Aristophanes’ play The Frogs , which she was re-reading over the holiday as research for her next project. In the play Dionysus goes to the underworld to stage a competition between the dead poets Aeschylus and Euripides to see who is the better tragedian, and who, therefore, should go back to Earth to save Athens. They take it in turns to criticise one another’s work. Euripides says that Aeschylus was too dark, brooding and overwrought, but then Aeschylus proves that any of Euripides’ clever but formulaic stories could be about someone losing a bottle of oil. The point seemed to be that every formulaic story starts with a conflict that’s later resolved – like losing a bottle of oil and then finding it again.
    Vi was grinding pepper for the soup, while I processed oranges into zest, juice and segments. Frank came in for a glass of sherry and then went back to watching the cricket in the sitting room. The dogs were all in front of the fire and Frank’s parrotSebastian was in his cage on the piano. Every so often I could hear him saying half-sense things like ‘He really middled it yesterday’, ‘See you after the break, Grandma’ and ‘One hundred and eighty!’
    ‘If we go along with Nietzsche’s arguments that art and writing should do something much more profound than simply have someone lose a bottle of oil and then find it again, then it is obvious how pointless most stories are,’ Vi said, looking up from the pestle and mortar. ‘They’re just dull repetitions of the same kind of idiot losing the same bottle of oil and then, of course, finding it again and living happily ever after and not being such an idiot any more. But I’m still not sure how, or if, Nietzsche comes into this. I’m not sure what he says about tragedy is quite right. I know you think tragedy is beyond all formula, but I’m not a hundred per cent sure.’
    ‘Why not? In tragedy if someone loses a bottle of oil, it’s a really important bottle of oil and they end up dead.’
    ‘It’s still a formula.’
    ‘But don’t you think it’s significant that the end isn’t happy?’
    ‘But it is happy for Nietzsche. I think that’s my point. He likes it that everyone is cast into primal oblivion.’
    I thought for a second. ‘That is interesting,’ I said.
    The kitchen was filling with the sweet smell of roasting beetroot. Vi kept on grinding the peppercorns, breaking