by JULIET WATERS

It’s inevitable that anyone who starts reading a novel about quantum theory will discover some fascinating article on the subject the next day, and soon after that hear about a new movie based on quantum theory (starring Marlee Matlin), which will soon all make sense the following day when you learn about the theory’s influence on several California new age gurus. The sudden ubiquity of quantum theory will not, however, guarantee that you will come any closer to understanding it.

No matter how many explanations of quantum theory are out there, if you’re like me, they seem to collapse the minute you really try to understand what the hell they’re saying. That’s a little joke. If you don’t get it (the joke, or the theory) the best explanation I can offer is the standard one: an electron, for example, is both a particle and a wave and only appears as one or the other at the moment it comes into human consciousness. So what we like to call “seeing reality,” physicists prefer to call “collapsing the wave function.” Enter writers, gurus and other imaginative people who enjoy deducing from this that human consciousness not only perceives reality, but can actually shape it. For most people this trend manifests itself in too many viewings of Star Wars. People willing to grapple with more complexity might want to take a shot at Andrew Crumey’s novel Mobius Dick.

This surprising page-turner doesn’t quite feel like science fiction, though—it’s more like fiction science. Crumey seems more bent on using fiction as a way of illustrating quantum theory than using quantum theory as the basis of a speculative world. With a PhD in theoretical physics, and as literary editor of Scotland on Sunday, he’s well equipped to try this. I can’t say if his science is good. I suspect it is from the clear-eyed Scottish attitude of his curmudgeonly hero, John Ringer, who scoffs at the misuses of quantum theory in everything from literary criticism to cell phones.

Crumey’s fiction, however, is fantastic, in every sense of the word. It would be wrong to reveal too much of the plot of this playfully crafted brain teaser; that’d be kind of like giving the answers before handing out the puzzle. Hopefully it’s enough to say that Mobius Dick opens with a text message on Ringer’s cell phone: “Call me. H.” He suspects/hopes it may be from an ex-lover he’s never forgotten. They met in university when he was a young physicist and she was a young literature scholar, and it seems he’s been debating the relationship between science and literature in his heart ever since. Sharp readers will pick up the play on the opening sentence of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (“Call me Ishmael”), and speculate that this does not bode well for his quest for Helen, or anything else for that matter.

Led by the promise of this message, Ringer is drawn into a mystery that turns in and on itself like a mobius strip (that twisted ribbon figure eight thing loved so much by high school math teachers). Along the way readers are drawn into alternative narratives about Erwin Schrödinger, known as quantum theory’s founding father, and Robert Schumann, noteworthy for his beautiful music, his descent into madness and his great love for his wife, Clara. Can love save the world? Is it just an endless cycle of longing and obsession? Or could it be, like the mighty electron, both at the same time? True to the innuendo of its title, Mobius Dick even manages from time to time to make theoretical science funny and sexy.

Don’t expect lanky, hot scientists debating the potential problems of particle acceleration like they debate the origin of pubic hairs on CSI. Mobius Dick may be a bit much for anyone who doesn’t have a reasonably good liberal arts education. But whether or not one ends up with a better understanding of quantum theory, it’s worth the trip.

Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey. Picador, p.b, 356 pp, $17.99