Review: S by Doug Dorst

Doug Dorst. S. [Creator J.J. Abrams]. London: Canongate Books, 2013. Joseph Darlington Twenty-first century literature has seen a notable resurgence of works willing to utilise the kinds of experimental forms championed by B.S. Johnson. The latest example, Doug Dorst’s S, is an adventure novel with a postmodern twist. On removing the book from its cover we find a different title and author, “Ship of Theseus by V.M. Straka”, which, as we flick through, we find to be covered with handwritten notes and filled with all sorts of letters, postcards, photos and other various ephemera slotted between the pages. In this sense, S isn’t a mystery novel as much as physical rendering of mystery itself. V.M. Straka is revealed as an academically respected modernist author whose biography is unknown and much debated. The novel we are ostensibly reading, “Ship of Theseus”, is a “translation” including esoteric footnotes which, as our two student annotators discover, conceal a series of codes and cryptic references to the authors’ true identity and history. These annotations are both notes between these characters and analysis of the text, allowing us to follow the development of their research and – with the clever use of different coloured pens representing different times at which they wrote in the book – engage in some metafictional speculation on the nature of fictional engagement and biography. The writing purporting to be V.M. Straka’s is a stylish and haunting example of magic realism while the annotations provide a more accessible, colloquial contrast. The extent to which the novel’s “creator” J.J. Abrams directly influences the work itself poses a metafictional conundrum in and of itself and one likely to frustrate those readers wedded to the idea of the writer as the sole creator of the text. As with Abram’s filmic works, Dorst’s S effortlessly balances depth and popular appeal to impressive effect. On occasions the annotations’ critical exposition does end up sucking all the literary ambiguity from the text, but these aesthetic concerns should be balanced by the potential this book offers to attract uninitiated readers into the occasionally intimidating world of nontraditional literature. For B.S. Johnson enthusiasts this work should be of keen interest; if not for its own merits, then at least as a significant milestone in the mainstream’s acceptance of experimental forms.