Strange Horizons, March 18, 2013
Reviewed by Matthew Nadelhaft
I’d like to find something good to say about Toh EnJoe’s “A to Z Theory.” It’s rooted in a tradition I enjoy, the absurdist meta-fiction of Stanislaw Lem, Italo Calvino, and J.G. Ballard. Done well, these literary experiments can be dazzling.
The problem is, “A to Z Theory” is not done well. If you imagine a meta-fictional mash-up of Numbers, Doctor Who, and Sherlock Holmes… you’ll probably have imagined a more interesting and fulfilling story.
“A to Z Theory” concerns a group of twenty-six mathematicians who all conceive of, and publish, the same theory simultaneously. For a brief moment, mathematicians around the world are in the public eye while controversy rages about this theory and the implications of the unique circumstances of its publication.
And then, a massive metaphysical event takes place. Yes, exactly like that. Either the theory heralded or caused a rupture in reality by which fictional characters climb in to reality and Sherlock Holmes fans and science fiction fans enter into debate with the mathematicians about whether or not Professor Moriarty is behind it all (just what “it all” is remains a mystery, since we never learn what this theory was).
Among the numerous problems plaguing this story I found the wandering narrative position particularly distracting, as well as the lack of payoff at the end. The prose is clumsy but shows flashes of humour and descriptive verve. “A to Z Theory” was published in translation, and I have to assume it reads better in its original Japanese. It’s possible that the untranslated story contained prose so dazzling (and possibly a different narrative structure) the content – less mind-blowing than mind-numbing – might not have underwhelmed me.
In a lyrical passage towards the end an unnamed narrator imagines all the possible universes as pages in a book, dropped in a library and hastily and incorrectly reassembled by a librarian. This Borgesian core image, lovely and inspiring, is lost as a brief speculation tying together the mathematical theory and the meta-fictional mash-up. It’s like a brilliant idea cut and pasted into the shell of a story rather than grown into its own narrative.