Mr Mee

Mr Mee (Picador, 2000; Dedalus Books, 2014) is a novel by Andrew Crumey, his third set wholly or partly in the eighteenth century (following Pfitz and D'Alembert's Principle). It has three alternating story-lines: one featuring a pair of 18th-century French copyists, and two with modern protagonists - elderly Scottish book collector Mr Mee and university lecturer Dr Petrie. The lecturer's strand is serious in tone. Dissatisfied with his marriage and suffering ill health, he muses on French literature and becomes infatuated with a student. The other two strands are comic. The copyists become guardians of an esoteric encyclopaedia, and Mr Mee wishes to find it. He turns to the World Wide Web (still fairly new at the time of the novel) and discovers pornography and drugs, with farcical consequences.

The copyists, Ferrand and Minard, are based on two men mentioned briefly in Rousseau's Confessions. Their fictional versions – described by one critic as "something of an eighteenth-century Abbott and Costello" – resemble the title characters in Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet. The lecturer Dr Petrie thinks Ferrand and Minard never existed, comparing Rousseau's Confessions to Proust's In Search of Lost Time - something that appears to be a memoir but is really a novel.

The copyists' encyclopaedia is the work of Jean-Bernard Rosier, a character from D'Alembert's Principle. The name recurs in subsequent Crumey novels: The Rosier Corporation in Mobius Dick, the Rosier Foundation in The Great Chain of Unbeing.

The first chapter of the novel includes a version of the Monty Hall problem, presented as a letter from Rosier to D'Alembert about a hostage whose life depends upon choosing which cup a ring is hidden under. Chapter 8 has a version of the unexpected hanging paradox and also alludes to the uncertainty principle and measurement problem.

The name Mr Mee may be a pun on "me", reflecting the novel's concern with truth and authorship in first-person writers such as Rousseau and Proust. It might also hint at encyclopaedist Arthur Mee, or the novel's year of publication, MM in Roman numerals. The title was changed by some foreign publishers: the Italian translation was titled Il professore, Rousseau e l'arte dell'adulterio; the German edition was Rousseau und die geilen Pelztierchen.