PopCo [Paperback]

For the first 300 pages or so, this had become my favourite book. Reviews tend to involve a lot of hyperbole, but when I say this was temporarily my favourite book, that's the simple truth.

Let me start from the beginning. While it's wholly irrelevant, aesthetically the book is gorgeous. The page edges are dyed a rich, dark, royal blue and cracking it open feels almost decadent; certainly luxurious. The first few pages are a little disconcerting, inasmuch as, small font, narrow margins, no dialogue... it's a wall of text, and it makes it appear inaccessible. But as soon as you start reading, you've got through that and you're happily sitting on Alice Butler's shoulder while she tells her story.

The first half of Popco is like being in a room with rich, dark green or blue walls; dark painted floorboards; fabrics everwhere, lots of lovely strange trinkets on shelves and tacked to walls; old postcards and photos; jewellery hung from beaded lamps and the fugue of slightly stale, sweet dope in the air... too many things to look at and explore and your senses go into overdrive. Thomas draws you into that room *completely* and you find yourself chewing the inside of your cheek from the shock of reading something so full of texture and imagination.

We follow Alice Butler - toy designer and code-cracker - to Dartmoor; then we follow the story to Bletchley Park, then all the way back to British pirates in the 18th century; forward to chocobos in Final Fantasy VII and virtual worlds; back to the 1980s and a small house full of pure mathematics and the The Voynich Manuscript, then forward again to the present day to an evil toy company conglomerate... back and forth we swing through time and Thomas never misses a beat.

It is a fiercely, frighteningly clever book. She goes into great detail regarding paradoxes, incomprehensible maths, probabilities, codes and how to break them. It's actually rather astonishing. The entirety of chapter 9, for example, is spent discussing codes, specifically the Vigenére code, and how to use it and on page 87 is an actual Vigenére Square. She pours detail and flavour into absolutely everything she writes about and it's incredible... until three quarters of the way through the book, at which point it becomes unbearable, and crosses over into preaching.

Veganism and homeopathy are the lifestyles she's pushing, and she pushes them *hard*. At first, it's alright - it's just one of many, many topics she covers. But then she keeps on, and on, and on. More pages about homeopathy (which, incidentally, is bunkum) and more preaching about the evils of eating meat, and dairy products.

I don't think I've ever been quite so frustrated with a book, as every drop of magic she'd infused the book with went away with the pontificating. It took about 40 pages of it for my adoration to turn into something far more disappointed and cynical and the last 80 pages or so became a chore to read. Given the majesty of the first 3/4, it's incomprehensible that it became so dreadful.

And yet, the bits that were wonderful were so glorious, the book as a whole still gets a high 4 stars. The words on those first few hundred pages are so beautiful I want to eat them. That's not something you come across very often and it should be cherished. But I desperately wish she'd kept the over-evangelism to herself. Large parts of the tail-end of the book are used to skewer marketing - and it's justified. But when she's simultaneously marketing her own lifestyle choices and borderline haranguing people into complying, it's also hypocritical. And it's a shame.

The code-breaking information was fascinating and the beginning of the book gripped me almost instantly. Scarlett Thomas writes in a way that I feel she is expressing things I've thought about, but never contemplated writing.

Ultimately though I found long stretches of the book where I felt I was being condescended to and preached at: Despite having been a strict vegetarian (on-off vegan) and immersed in that kind of literature for two decades I felt the pieces about the negative impacts of factory farming and the milk industry were too heavy handed and almost propaganda-like. There are some similar stretches about beauty, identity and fashion which were also patronising.

Unlike some of the other reviewers who were wowed by the ending, I left the book wondering if I had missed a chapter. To me, the ending felt rushed and a little forced (Thomas even seems to hint at this with her protagonist writing a book which she is unsure how to finish), almost like stories I used to write at school for English homework, thinking "I'm bored of this now, how can I get to my planned end piece?"

Despite my comments above (and below) I do recommend this read, although I preferred "The end of Mr Y". I might be a little more wary of her other books, I'm not fond of being preached to and I think thomas needs to be careful of preaching to the converted.

--Please don't read this part of the review if you haven't read the book in its entirety--
Whilst reading this book, I couldn't help harbouring a sense of doom wondering what sinister reason there could be that the NoCo members were coincidentally the same people that PopCo chooses as its elite marketing crack team. Thinking that 'they are the smartest' wasn't a reasonable explanation I was convinced the board had laid a trap or that there was something deeper going on. It x just the way the story went and I felt that it was maybe a tad implausible, which was a shame because the rest of the novel was much more credible.

I bought this after reading "The End of Mr Y", by the same author, and am really surprised that this has had the better reviews. The book is fairly smart and the writing is good, but the whole thing leaves you wanting something... more. Toward the end of the book I felt like nothing major had really happened, which was especially disappointing as "The End of Mr Y" gets right into the story from the off. The code-breaking tips and puzzles are ok, though fairly rudementary/common knowledge, but also they aren't really involved in the story, just side-bits of information. Regardless, Scarlett Thomas is a great writer that keeps you interested. If you do like this one and haven't read "The End of Mr Y" then go and buy it now!