i think one possibility is that Eric went into the ocean and retrieved a photo of the fish, and in doing so retrieved Clio. well, that's one connection anyway!

From somewhere right after Scout shows up and saves Eric from Mr. Nobody, I had this weird feeling she wasn't what she seemed.

Then, when he saw her tattoo, I KNEW that somehow, she WAS Clio Aames. What I don't understand quite is how.

Someone else posted a great theory that I think has something to do with it- Clio was re-conceptualized by Eric- and maybe not this time, but earlier. Remember, Dr. Randle said he had had 11 recurrences of 'dissociative states'. What if he re-conceptualized her sometime prior to this last event, and she's been searching for a way to help and rescue HIM instead?

I just finished the book today, I should add. My head hurts, but in a good way. :wink:

Hi just finished the book - really enjoyed the read. As a Jaws fan from way back I loved the way he basically overlayed the film plot in the last few chapters.

The paper maze, unspace, concepetual fish etc all enteraining stuff.

The end well here is my take:

Clio died in a scuba divng acident - Eric went nuts, blamed himself - lost his mind - Dr Randle's diagnoses is correct. Most of the book is inside Eric's madness - the only execptions are the "lightbulb fragments" which explains why he went nuts.

He commits suicide, but before he died (perhaps as he died) he made peace with his memory (Scout saying "it wasn't your fault ... I don't blame you for it ... It was an accident")

For the romantics - the postcard at the end opens another possibility - that Eric did make it to either a pure conceptual world or alternative universe in which he and the reconstitued Clio/Scout could live in the paradise described in the fragments.

Well, the great things about a book is that you can choose to interprit it anyway you like (more than one way if you want - you paid for it!)

For me, I think Eric took one last holiday to Nexos, used his well practiced trick of sending mail into the future to absolve Dr Randle. He returned home and ended his life - probably by thowing himself into the building site shaft with the pictures.

All up a fun, creative, thoughtful book with a strong undertow of meloncholy that can drag you under - if you are not a strong swimmer.

Oh and also.


At the end of the novel. Eric gains all his memories back because he "Fully Understands". Scout is her own person yet clio, she is a Clio reincarnate although they would be about the same age. At the end Scout and Eric 2 turn into Eric 1 and Clio becuase they chose the alternate world path. The picture brings back all the memnories. I think of scout as god giving Clio a second chance.

I doubt Eric kills himself. What I think happens is that in deiding to stay in the conceptual world, although he couldnt go back anyway, his real world self died.

I loved the book but have been confused about Eric's death. (On the third to last page it says he had been dead for some time.) I have been wondering if he didn't die right before the start of the book (after all he was underground before, maybe in Manchester), and it is a "6th-Sense movie" sort of thing. But if not, when exactly did he die in the book? During the flood, when he threw a laptop into the shark's mouth, or what? If the things that happened in the book didn't happen to a ghost, I wonder what explains them, whether he was in a parrallel universe or something. Or was it his hallucinations? I would appreciate your comments. :D

Hmm... I'm not sure about this one. I've literally just finished this novel after a couple of blissful days of it and I really didn't see why there was a question about the ending at all.

From the way this novel is set up, we automatically must side with Eric Sanderson (mk. 2) because the first Eric doesn't effectively exist in narrative terms. He is just a ghost who pushes the narrator into the direction he eventually takes. So from this perspective, regardless of what is 'real' in worldly terms, Eric Sanderson 2's story is the only one we receive from someone we can trust, therefore it must be true on some level. Even if the whole story is a delusion brought on by the condition, that surely isn't the point. The novel is an internal narrative and Eric's view of things is truer than an objective outsider, like Randle, who merely sees him as a victim of a syndrome.

As for Clio/Scout, although I like the idea posted elsewhere that Clio is actually dying of the cancer mentioned in the novel and that the novel is inside her mind, for me the chronology doesn't gel. She wouldn't have met Eric by then and therefore he would only be a fictional character which would kind of undermine the whole story for me.

When we see the tattoo on Scout's toe, we are obviously being directed toward believing that she is somehow Clio and yet this set up would be far too obvious for this early in the novel and so I'm not convinced this is the total truth. If you look at the difference in behaviour between Clio and Scout, their personalities are incongruous. Eric and Clio's relationship in the Light Bulb fragments is superficial, almost excessively so. They banter and make jokes and although they love each other, this relationship has the shallow harmonics of a real relationship. Comparitively, Scout is deep and in places pretty brooding to the point that she is almost too polished to be as believable as Clio. We are well aware that she is holding information back for most of the novel and I think this makes Eric (and the reader) want to fight all the harder for her. In some ways I think Scout is neither Clio, her own character or convenient 'clone,' but instead a much subtler blend of the three. It is almost as if unspace and the text itself recognises the need in Eric for someone to love and watch out for him and adapts the personality of the one woman he loved accordingly. Consider the action scene when she arrives: isn't it all a bit too conveniently dramatic? Eric is doubting himself and is in trouble when Hall sends in a grenade-toting mystery to save him. I suspect this scene is a bit of filmic license.

Finally, the issue of Eric's death and whether or not the ending is pure fantasy, depends on your view point. I'm a big fan of subjective post-modern literature, (read Rushdie), so I like to believe that both stories are simultaneously true. Eric's narrative is obviously impossible in a real world and yet we are constantly confronted by the unbelievable in modern medias so it is easy to suspend our disbelief. He has been effectively dead for the whole novel, his personality has been destroyed by his amnesia and so the question of what happens to his body in the real world is unimportant because this Eric never really existed there anyway.

He hasn't escaped to a fantasy land as such, he has just stopped existing outside of his conceptual links to people and the world around them. In effect he has merely moved on to a higher level of fiction within a fictitious world.

Basically what I'm saying is that I don't think it really matters what you believe. Value the ambiguousness of this novel for what it is; something that turns a simple thriller/love story into something much more rare and beautiful. Defining things and pinning them down merely weakens something that is incredibly woven. You shouldn't attempt to rationalise a painting, just appreciate its aesthetic.


Oh yeah and did anyone else dig the shades of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in the descriptions of catching the shark? They wait for days to catch that fish. At least Eric has someone to keep him company even if his trophy ending gets eaten up in the process.

Gratz to Steven Hall on what I expect to be the first of many great novels.

Just finished the book. Here's some observations i made.

Clio has an unspecific cancer - Scout has Mycroft Ward in her brain, it could be possible that Clio had a brain tumour and this is a link between them.

I thought for a while that maybe scout was a figment of erics imagination. This can't be true unless the whole adventure is, as aunt ruth acknowleges her.

Also, in theory Eric has no recollection of Clio, outside of his dreams which he states that he never remembers properly. So even if Scout looked just like Clio, he wouldn't know.

Beyond that I'm stumped as to the connection. Does Scout know what she knows before the final scene in the ocean? (referencing their banter from the lightbuld fragment).

I feel that Clio somehow carried on existing in concept and memory, although physically she didn't exist any more. I suppose there's no reason, if we exist in concept and physical form, why death in one = death in the other. Eric turning away from the photo of his house could be him choosing the conceptual over the physical.

I'd forgotten about Mr Nobody saying that him and eric were the same thing. I suppose if the concept and physical can be separate then maybe Mr nobody is the concept Eric 1, made physical by the tablets.

Also, i get the feeling that losing everything and becoming Eric 2 is an essential part of the plan. Although Eric 1 forgets when his memory starts to fade, i think this was the plan all along. That his complete destruction, then rebuilding, was essential somehow.

I must say, it's been a long time since a book has interested and emotionally involved me this much. Reading the Lightbulb fragment part 3 outside work the other morning i was practically weeping. :(

As I had alluded to in another thread, to me the novel postulates that life is a loose collection of memories, shadows, rough outlines of time, shapes, people, things, noise – inkblots, really – that only gain meaning once we imprint ourselves and interpret those shapes and shadows, that is, once we understand the context and relevance of those memories and the life they collectively represent.

There is a poem by Wallace Stevens that I recently met in another novel that came back to haunt me as I was reading TRST (imprinting?): “The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds/ And of sounds so far forgotten, like her voice,/ That they return unrecognized. The self/ Detects the sound of a voice that doubles its own,/ In the images of desire, the forms that speak,/ The ideas that come to it with a sense of speech.”

The Second Eric inherited as many “transcribed” memories, mostly of Clio, that the First Eric could convey, yet for the most part, they felt alien to him - they literally belonged to someone else. It was only after Second Eric began to undergo the same experiences as the First Eric (e.g. falling in love, descending into unspace) that he began to ‘imprint’ his new self /those new experiences upon those of First Eric, and understand. In the same manner, the glassful of "written" water was just words on paper until Second Eric was able to imprint a relevant memory of water upon it to make it liquid.

(Incidentally, while the gulp of water in part leads Second Eric to restoration, ironically it is also a gulp of [sea] water that became Clio’s tragedy.)

The same holds for the interpretation of the book. There are many great discussions here in unspace sifting through the clues and artifacts and trying to figure out the “true story” of what _really_ happened to Eric Sanderson; ultimately, I believe that the correct interpretation is what one _believes_ to be correct, even if it is imperfect or incomplete in formation.

To a psychologist, the novel resonates as a harrowing account of madness, survivor’s guilt and fugue. To the sociologist, it could be a commentary on how pop culture (commercial movies, novels, pop music etc.) has homogenized and ‘monocultured’ individual experience and identity to the least common denominator. To the academic and intellectual, the novel is an examination of self, memory, and the concepts of words and concepts themselves. To the romantic, it is a tale of enduring love, loss, pain and renewed hope. Etc. Etc.

As in a Rorschach inkblot, the details ultimately are unimportant – one finds meaning and emotional resonance in the blot, and in this novel, despite the loose shapes, fragmented details and ragged edges.

I just listened to some samples of songs by Jose Gonzales, including "Crosses" -- very cool. He reminds me of Damien Rice, whose music I like a lot.

If you haven't read those already, you might also like the "Griffin and Sabine" trilogy as well as its sequel, the "Morning Star" trilogy, both by artist/writer Nick Bantock. Griffin and Sabine has a few elements that echo TRST.

Yes, it makes sense. This is something I had pondered a lot as well. I think that with each recurrence he lost more and more of his memory. So, each time before he still retained some of what was the First Eric Sanderson. It wasn't until the eleventh time that he lost his memory completely, thus creating the Second Eric Sanderson.