What happens when JJ Abrams, creator of TV show Lost, writes a book

When you buy a new book, the last thing you expect to see upon opening it are notes scribbled in the margins. That’s the sort of thing second-hand books have — signs that they’ve been read before, that the story in the pages isn’t one that you’ve discovered but one that you’re recovering.

S., written by TV legend JJ Abrams and author Doug Dorst, comes wrapped in plastic and in a hard case. Open to any page, and you’ll find the printed page embroidered with notes and scribbles and doodles and postcards and maps and photos and all sorts of little treasures. Even before you start reading it, S. is an experience. Once you start reading it, the book’s an adventure.

But fair warning: it’s also complicated, confusing, frustrating and the kind of book that drowns you in it.

S. is a fictional artifact, a literary version of ‘found footage’. The book you’re reading is titled S., but the book you’re holding in your hand is titled “Ship of Theseus”, and is a novel written by VM Straka, a mysterious political dissident. No one knows much about him, not even FX Caldeira, who translated Ship of Theseus after the author’s death. Straka’s novel is the main text of S..

Caldeira’s footnotes - questioning Straka, hinting at his personal life and philosophies and occasionally spiralling into incoherence - form the second ’text’ of the book, giving context to Straka’s prose.

The third layer is made up of annotations by a reader. Eric is a brilliant but troubled graduate student who is obsessed with Straka. He begins writing notes on the margins of the book. Soon, Jen, a college student with her own cache of secrets, begins responding to him through marginalia and their conversation forms the fourth layer of text in the book. The notes between Jen and Eric are particularly confusing because they don’t follow an obvious chronology. Pro tip: you’ll have to figure out when the conversation took place by noticing the colour of the ink in which the notes are written.

Besides these texts, the novel is stuffed with ephemera that supplements, complicates and sometimes solves the mystery of Straka and his novel - postcards from Brazil, a coffee shop napkin with a map on it, black and white photos and newspaper clippings.

Ostensibly, the book you’re reading is a library book - Eric supposedly stole it from his high school library - complete with time stamps, worn covers and “BOOK FOR LOAN” stamped on the first page.

Needless to say, S. is a book with immense scope and vision. The Ship of Theseus novel alone is a haunting novel with its amnesiac lead who is kidnapped repeatedly as he struggles to survive a revolution. There are also repeated assassination attempts and a ghost pirate ship, just to make things even more mysterious no doubt.

The real story, though, is in the conversations between Eric and Jen. The two students - both brilliant, both saddled with complicated histories - bring to the book their own points of view, research and curiosity. Soon, the relationship between Eric and Jen begins to blossom, and Eric’s animosity to a Straka scholar in their college soon turns to very real fear as the two students find out more about Straka’s life and deeds.

This book is very much a JJ Abrams production. Abrams was the mind behind Lost, a television show about a group of survivors marooned on an island, and Abrams fans will find many references to the storytelling style of Lost in S.. There’s time travel, lack of continuity, supernatural existentialism galore. There are also little winking references to other ideas that Abrams has played with in his TV career, like questions of ‘circumstantial’ identity (in the TV show Alias).

At the end of the day, despite all the trappings and frills of postcards, clues and pen colours, S. lives up to the promise of magic it offered with its first look. Take a look at the trailer below. That’s just the beginning of the adventure.