S + Ship Of Theseus

 







Margin
For Error

S
by Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams
Canongate Books
ISBN: 9780857864772
incorporating
Ship Of Theseus by V. M. Straka
(Winged Shoe Press, New York, 1949)

S, by Doug Dorst and director J. J Abrams, is a curious and extremely interesting proposition of a book. You will only find the title of the book on the handsome slipcover... a big, black S spot varnished onto a black cover and a small seal of paper on which is printed other details such as the identity of the two authors. And then, as soon as you break this seal to pull the tome within from the slipcase, you are embarking on an adventure which, well it may not lead you to an easy resolution but it will certainly hold your interest throughout. The actual book you will find inside is not called S at all. It is Ship Of Theseus, the final work of a reclusive mystery man of an author called V. M. Straka. An author who very few people ever met or knew and who died falling, with torn pages from a manuscript in his pocket. As did, we are told, many people in real life who were possibly part of a faction of revolutionaries involved in bombings on behalf of a group called the S. Or possibly they were not but this is pertinent because it is one of the mysteries to be solved, not on the printed word on the page of Ship Of Theseus, but by the two people, Eric and Jen, who leave the book for each other in a safe place and explore the mysteries of the tome, with good purpose, to the point where their lives are in danger... and whose story you will read from the many notes in different coloured inks which they leave in the big, scholar’s margins of the book.

And, you really do have to be careful how you open this one... and how you read it. Because the book itself is a deliberately distressed tome (distressed right back to 1949) and the two readers whose adventure you are sharing, don’t just leave various notes in all the margins as you watch them try to come closer to the hidden codes which Straka... and the woman who he loves but has never met, who is writing the English translation and leaving her own footnotes... as they unearth and hide in public the various injustices and crimes which the S were, possibly, fighting against. Not just notes, you see but loads of paraphernalia such as postcards, letters to each other or from various people locked into the Straka mystery, photographs, a code wheel (if you are cleverer than I as to where various clues about hidden codes in the book are hidden and what they say)... and even a wonderfully reproduced napkin on just the right kind of paper, where a map has been drawn by Eric to show Jen the secret ways in the tunnels under the University campus which houses the library where they leave this book for each other... to kickstart their own romance which does, it has to be said, have some parallels between Straka and his translator.

The story in Ship Of Theseus itself is really quite an abstract tale of a man called S, who doesn’t know who he is and spends many years in distorted time on the titular ship where he writes, stitches his own lips together with thread (as most of the crew do) and goes ashore in various towns to commits acts of assassination and terrorism... all the while trying to find out why he has been chosen for this life which he doesn’t understand and to find the woman who he thinks he loves... which is a metaphor again for the fictional Straka and his translator.

Of the handwritten (but obviously printed, quite convincingly on the yellowing paper of this dusty tome) notes from Jen and Eric... well, after a while you will realise that they are reading and re-reading to get more clues and ideas as to where they are going, in an effort to beat Eric’s ex-tutor in getting out a book unveiling the actual identity of V. M. Straka before Eric does the same. And each time they make another pass, the inks change colour so they can see the new notes to each other in the relevant places. Which is nice because you end up getting three parts of their story developing at the same time as you read the notes highlighting or starting from certain passages in the book from different points in their growing romantic relationship. It’s kinda cool.

And it has some really nice touches as you read through... not just the obvious Ship Of Theseus thought experiment which is actually highlighted as a metaphor in the book by the constant rebuilding of the ship over years. Such as a moment, which truly terrifies both readers, is when it turns out the little handwritten ‘S’ symbols, aping the ones that have started appearing... along with arson attacks... around campus and near Jen’s home, have not been drawn in the book by either one of them. And, of course, because the characters as represented by their notes to each other are scared by this, you as a reader become concerned too. It’s a lovely idea for a book but, all I will say is don’t read it when you are likely to doze off. I did this once and one of the many artefacts dropped out from the pages. Luckily it was one I’d already read but even then, it took me ten minutes or more to figure out which page it was supposed to be slotted into and only then because that specific artefact was referenced in Jen and Eric’s notes to each other (not all of them are).

My one real problem with the book is the ending. I liked the actual Ship Of Theseus tale well enough. It’s very much in the style of a piece of classical contemporary literature of the year in which the real writers purport it was written and it does have a definitive ending of sorts. My real problem was the conclusion of Jen and Eric’s tale. While that also has an ending, it doesn’t spell anything out for the reader and the central mysteries which spurred the collaboration of these two ‘reader characters’ are never really answered. Perhaps if I’d been clever enough to actually figure out the codes... left in the footnotes by the translator sometimes as small dots by some letters (it will take you a while to get your eye in on these) or the occasional raised letter... I may have been able to figure it out. I’m guessing not, actually but, you know... maybe.

Even though the ending of S was less a revelatory moment and more a celebration of two people finding love between the lines of an ‘old’ piece of literature... I have to say I really enjoyed the journey* and, as much of a cliché as it is to say it, the journey was much more the point of the thing, I feel, than the actual destination of either of the parallel stories depicted in the book. So, in spite of the end game of the book, I thoroughly enjoyed the telling of the tale and I would thoroughly recommend this one to my more literary friends who are maybe looking for something a little different to read, regardless of whether it has a more concrete resolution or not (and maybe some will see one where I did not... I may just have been losing IQ points by the end of my journey through the double narrative). So yeah, great looking book and a satisfying journey from start to finish. Liked this one a lot.

*and now I know what words like leptorrhine (The Shadow should know that one), fricative and panjandrum mean... although goodness knows if I will ever use any of them in a sentence ever. Or maybe, yeah, maybe I just did.