Black Static

Ultrameta is the title of a novel by Scottish writer Douglas Thompson. It was published by Eibonvale Press in August 2009, a trade paperback edition of 336 pages, with an introduction by Allen Ashley and an afterword by Joy Hendry. Those are the facts, or some of them.

The plot of the novel eludes easy summation, but the spine of the story within this book comes courtesy of Alexander Stark, an academic who disappears for ten years, and during this period his wife receives letters giving accounts of other lives, lives that range far and wide in both time and space. A fastidious critic might object that what we are being given here is not so much a novel as a collection of interlinked short stories with a rather tenuous and haphazard framing device, and present as evidence in support of this position the fact that several of the 'incidents' that make up the book were published separately and Ultrameta itself was in contention for the prestigious Edge Hill Short Story Prize, but such considerations are outside the scope of this review. Intercut with the 'incidents' are scenes in which other characters are shoved centre stage to throw light on the main narrative and, primarily, the matter of Stark's disappearance (a police officer, a journalist), intruding a metafictional element, and readers are given other supporting material to help bolster the necessary suspension of disbelief, such as documents, transcripts etc.

One theory put forward to 'explain' the book is that the 'incidents' are past (and future) events and that Stark is being continually reincarnated into these other life streams, his consciousness flitting in and out of existence and reporting back on a multiplicity of lives, with the subtext that 'we are legion' and it is only convention that keeps us trapped in the one moment/life. Insofar as it is valid, this interpretation seems to reference both Vonnegut's Trafalmadorians, for whom all time - past, present and future - exists simultaneously and who can choose in which moment their consciousness takes root, and Luke Rhinehart's theories of dice living as a way to explore the individual's potential through accessing the 'multi-man'.

The devil, of course, is in the details, and Ultrameta is a book of nothing but details, its message filtered through the medium in which it is presented.

We are told that Ultrameta is 'the city of the soul', and the suggestion is that reality itself is, in some way, Stark's personal 'palace of memory', but what does the term actually mean? Ultra, from the Latin ulter meaning 'distant', is most commonly used as a prefix to denote an extreme position (e.g. ultraconservative), but can also denote 'going beyond' a specific limit or range (e.g. ultramicroscopic). Meta, from the Greek meta meaning 'after', 'beyond', 'with', 'adjacent', 'self', in common usage is a prefix that indicates a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter (in parenthesis, the word 'metaphysics' was first used as the name for a text by Aristotle addressing ontological concerns, which was found after his Physics). And so, reducing things to their basics, we may say with some conviction that 'ultrameta' means to be concerned with extreme concepts, or possibly to be extremely concerned with concepts, but of course this is a reduction to absurdity, and at such times a healthy application of Occam's Razor is advocated, the tool most appropriate to cut through this Gordian knot.

On referring to wikipedia, our online 'palace of memory', we find that the first entry thrown up for the word 'ultra' has it as the British designation during WW2 for 'signals intelligence obtained by "breaking" high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications'. On this basis it seems safe to conclude that Ultrameta the book is written in code and to cast round for some Rosetta Stone with which to unlock its mysteries.

And in looking for this key the novel's structure is central, with the idea of the circle, of wheels within wheels a recurring motif.

The book's Contents are presented in the form of a series of concentric circles, with chapter headings etc written so that they border the line of diameter, page numbers on one side of the divide and titles on the other. To look at the design, one half black and the other white, brings to mind the circles of Hell, or a sonar screen.

The chapters are numbered 1a through 12a, and then we have chapter 13, which is titled 'Ultrameta' and after which the following chapters count down from 12b through to 1b.

Each chapter opens with a circle design containing the chapter title and a drawing that hints at something of its nature, while words of text are inscribed round the circumference of the circle, white print on a black background.

In the ascending chapters the words of text in the circumference are also part of the opening line of the narrative that follows. For example, chapter 1a has the phrase 'Ours is a country difficult to escape from...' and then begins 'Ours is a country difficult to escape from. Today we drove west from the city, looking for the ocean.'

With '13: Ultrameta' things become slightly more complicated. The words in the circle are indeed the first words of the ensuing narrative - 'When I walk out into this city...' - but they are also the opening words of the final paragraph of chapter 12b. In the context of 12b though they appear to be part of a manuscript the characters are reading, with the inference to be made that this manuscript is in fact '13: Ultrameta' (echoes of Delany's Dhalgren and Danielewski's House of Leaves abound throughout this work).

Things grow yet more confusing with the descending chapters.

The narrative in 12b opens with the last words of '13: Ultrameta', but the words inscribed round the circumference of the circle are also taken from the end of chapter 13, only from a point slightly further back in the text. This pattern is repeated for 11b and 10b, and superficially it appears that 'circle text' is taken from the ending of the previous chapter, while the 'opening text' comes from some of that intrusive material referenced earlier, sharp splinters of  the 'reality' in which the book is reputedly set injected into the fictional narrative. With 9b though the 'circle text' - '...and you are the hosts.' - appears both at the end of the italicised paragraph prefacing the narrative that follows and at the conclusion proper of 10b. Throughout the remaining descending chapters 'circle text' can always be found at some point towards the rear of the preceding chapter, but on some occasions it can also be located in italicised prefaces at the start of the chapter itself, inviting the conclusion that the interlocking narratives that comprise Ultrameta exist (a) independently (b) as part of a series that is the greater narrative arc and (c) as fictional narratives within the consensus reality of the other chapters (e.g. chapter 12b is both a standalone fiction, part of the series 12b through 1b, and a fictional text referenced within one or more of the other chapters).

At this point it seems advisable to take a closer look at the 'circle text' and readers are referred to Appendix A. Seeing 'circle text' presented like this and in conjunction with chapter numeration (e.g. '1a: Ours is a country difficult to escape from') and the thing that immediately hits you is that this schemata looks like nothing so much as the clues to a cryptic crossword. Obviously some of the numbers have been changed from their original grid pattern and 'b' substituted for 'd' (down), but otherwise the conclusion seems unavoidable - Douglas Thompson has based his great puzzle novel on the crossword from a daily newspaper. There are literary precedents for this (e.g. John Brunner's novel The Squares of the City which was based, plot move and countermove, on a game of chess between Steinitz and Chigorin). Unfortunately we have as yet been unable to track down the issue of The Glasgow Herald in which the crossword originally appeared, and thus secure conclusive proof regarding the nature of the game Thompson is playing with his readers.

Of course we should not allow ourselves to be blinded to other possibilities by the 'cryptic crossword theory' of Ultrameta. Author Douglas Thompson helps maintain a website for the Glasgow Surrealists, and as such will almost certainly at some point have been influenced by the theories of both Oulipo and Dadaism. Indeed now that the idea has raised its head, we cannot look at Appendix A without thinking of Tristan Tzara's instructions on how to write a Dadaist poem - to paraphrase, take an article of the length desired for your poem, cut the article up into separate words/phrases and then rearrange them randomly. Can Douglas Thompson have used similar principles to secure the schemata for his novel? As an experiment we joined up the phrases from the a and b columns in Appendix A and the results can be found in Appendix B. We are particularly proud of the line 'I fall with incredible force accelerating to infinity', which was 'found' by linking 'circle text' from 5a and 2b. Almost as poignant is 'I wake up babbling; almost screaming of the corn and of the dune grasses', gained from a happy collision of 4a and 1b. The possibilities, as with everything else about this book and with life itself, seem endless.

But if the devil is in the details we may also conclude that if God exists then he is to be found in the spaces between, the words that are not spoken.

And looking at Ultrameta's schemata the obvious thing missing is chapter 7. Though it's listed in the Contents, reading through the book the chapter 6a numeration is used twice, and then we go straight to 8a. This alone might be simply a typo, but when we come to the descending chapters 8b is followed by 6b x2, and in the circumstances it is much easier to believe that this is intentional on the part of the author, rather than simply carelessness.

The question immediately prompted by this revelation, is what else is missing from Ultrameta? So far we've discovered absent headers and pagination on pages 291 and 307, suggesting they are part of the 'real' narrative that is cunningly hidden within the text of Ultrameta. Our researches continue and when they are complete we are convinced that this notoriously difficult text will be as transparent as a sheet of glass.

Appendix C

Transcript of a conversation between a doctor and an orderly at a mental health facility

D: The patient was a book reviewer noted for his attempts at method reviewing, where he would endeavour to write his reviews in the manner of the book under consideration

O: What happened to the poor sod to leave him like this?

D: A book called Ultrameta. He gave up all other work in favour of writing review after review, each in a different style and under a different pseudonym, and each referencing all of the others, with the intention that if they were placed together they would make up a coherent narrative.

O: Good lord!

D: So far we've found nine reviews in print and a further seventeen posted online. My personal favourite is the so called 'graphic novel interpretation', in which he accused the author of Ultrameta of ripping off Marvel Comics' Iron Man simply because he had a character called A. Stark, who at one point metamorphoses into AutoMan.

O: I guess he must have really liked the book then.

D: Nobody has ever been really sure, least of all the reviewer himself, and I think that's what finally drove him over the edge.