Dr Andrew Crumey

Philosophy, history, science and music are themes that have recurred throughout Andrew Crumey’s fiction. Finding the term “novel of ideas” too stuffy, he prefers “philosophical with a light touch.”

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics inspired the alternative history in Music, in a Foreign Language, which imagined a communist Britain following wartime German occupation. It was seen as postmodernist, though Crumey was also strongly influenced by eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. This became more evident in his next two novels, Pfitz and D’Alembert’s Principle, which used creative dialogue with Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist toexplore the notion of “encylopedism” discussed in Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Mr Mee paid homage to Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet. Rousseau and Proust also came into the mix, in a comic novel that pondered the relationship between memoir and fiction. Mobius Dick featured – among other things – a parallel world where physicist Erwin Schrodinger visited a place resembling Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.

Crumey’s multi-layered approach to narrative structure is influenced by music: polyphony, thematic development, separate movements with varying pace and mood. Influenced by Bakhtin, Crumey investigated the connection between space and time in narrative. Having taken the closed setting of Mann’s sanatorium as a model in Mobius Dick, Crumey drew on the Soviet closed city of Sarov for Sputnik Caledonia, which returned to the idea of a communist Britain.

The alternative history was further teased out in The Secret Knowledge, which included Walter Benjamin as a character, and noted Benjamin’s interest in the pseudo-cosmology of Blanqui. The aesthetic underpinning of Crumey’s eighth book, The Great Chain of Unbeing, was Badiou’s set-theoretic ontology. There is no consistent whole – the “story of everything” is self-contradictory.

Crumey's long-standing interest in music - as narrative topic and structural analogy - is most prominent in Beethoven's Assassins, which features an abandoned opera project, and weaves together themes of freemasonry, mesmerism, psychoanalysis and theosophy.

• Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
• The Great Chain of Unbeing, Crumey, A. 9 Mar 2018
• Human contrast threshold and astronomical visibility, Crumey, A. 11 Aug 2014, In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

• Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
• Visiting an external academic institution: Durham University 2011

• Gennifer Godley Chimaeriform: Navigating Othered Space in the Menippean Novel Start Date: 01/10/2018 End Date: 21/12/2022
• Andrew Hankinson 'How can creative non-fiction use a hybrid form to report effectively and uniquely on attitudes towards immigration and race in North East England’ Start Date: 01/03/2022
• Barry Marshall ‘Present Absences and the Roar of Silence’: Writing about Contemporary UK Working-Class Identity Through the Mnemonic Liminality of Village Spaces Start Date: 10/12/2021
• Guy Mankowski How I Left the National Grid: A Creative Writing PhD on Self-Design and Post-Punk Start Date: 21/02/2012 End Date: 25/06/2015
• Shaun Wilson Malc’s Boy – Exploring Voice and Identity Through Autofiction Start Date: 18/01/2021
• John Schoneboom The Terrorism Novel in a Surrealist Mode Start Date: 04/12/2014 End Date: 07/11/2018

Physics PhD June 30 1986

• Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
• Andrew Crumey's website.