This review of Tom McCarthy’s new novel C appears in the latest issue of the Literary Review. (See also Stuart Evers’s interview with McCarthy in the current edition of the New Statesman.)
Interviewed in 2007 shortly before the publication of his second novel, Men In Space, Tom McCarthy declared that he was not ‘really interested in the kind of realism which is all about the feelings and emotions of a person. My characters or personages are negotiating and being shunted around a set of grids that are bigger than them and their feelings.’
In Men in Space, the grid around which McCarthy moves his ‘personages’ (a more appropriate term, surely, than ‘characters’, given his professed lack of interest in interiority) is historical: the novel, with its cast of artists and students, secret policemen and minor Bulgarian crooks trafficking in fake Byzantine icons, is set in Prague, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His first work of fiction, Remainder, had a much narrower focus, but a similarly implacable logic. After emerging from the coma that followed a sketchily described accident involving ‘something falling from the sky’, the (unnamed) narrator proceeds maniacally to re-create unconnected fragments of his past, engaging a firm of ‘re-enactors’ to help him.
McCarthy’s latest novel, C, is as obsessively and elaborately patterned as Remainder was, though what the author calls its ‘repetitions’ are executed on a much broader canvas. Indeed, C has the appearance (though only the appearance) of a Bildungsroman. Arranged in four parts of roughly equal length, it begins with the birth, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the protagonist Serge Carrefax, his head enveloped in a silky amniotic caul, and moves from his childhood in an English country house, via a Mitteleuropean sanatorium (where he is treated for ‘chronic intestinal problems’ caused by ‘morbid matter’) and the Western Front, to the druggy bohemia of early 1920s London and finally to post-independence Egypt.
The section set in London after the end of the Great War, when Serge enrols at the Architectural Association (he is an indifferent student, incapable of executing his sketches in anything other than plan view), contains some of the most straightforwardly descriptive prose in C. It’s all chorus girls and cocaine, and much of it wouldn’t be out of place in an altogether more familiar kind of historical novel – the kind of novel, in fact, that McCarthy isn’t remotely interested in writing (though this portion of the book shows that he’s perfectly capable of doing so). For, as Zadie Smith has argued in a much-discussed essay on Remainder, McCarthy’s fictional practice amounts to a ‘strong refusal’ of what she calls ‘lyrical realism’ – the sort of decorous, well-wrought narrative enlivened by strenuous noticing or description that tends to win literary prizes these days.
One of the things Smith detected in Remainder was the way it frequently ironised its refusal of the principles of conventional storytelling, joking at its own expense. The same is true of C. It’s hard, for example, not to read a passage in the First World War section of the novel as a sly commentary on its own procedures. By this time, Serge is flying missions over the Western Front as an ‘observer’, taking photographs of artillery emplacements behind the German lines. After one sortie, he is asked by the recording officer for his ‘flight narrative’. His reply is perfunctory in the extreme: ‘We went up; we saw stuff; it was good.’
‘Observing’, then, has become incidental for Serge (as it is, indeed, for McCarthy). The flights above the trenches in an RE8 bi-plane are occasions for a kind of technological epiphany in which Serge indulges obsessions that he has nurtured since childhood. (Early in the novel, his father Simeon, an inventor and pioneer of radio and telegraphy, delivers an impassioned sermon on the ‘love of technology’ that binds him and his children.) Flying as part of a formation, each plane ‘marking out its assigned grid square’, Serge ‘feels an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things’.
This passage is both characteristic and uncharacteristic: characteristic in its preoccupation with grids, signals and codes; but uncharacteristic in its suggestion of a sort of mechanised or technological transcendence. McCarthy has said that his novels are in fact about ‘failed transcendence’, about the ways in which the ‘world disappoints us by making promises which it doesn’t then fulfill’. In Remainder, the motif of that failed transcendence is surplus matter that eludes the attempts of the re-enactors to control it; in Men in Space, it is a facsimile of a painting of a medieval saint, where instead of God being depicted in a circle around the saint’s head, the head is enclosed in an ellipse or cosmic void. Here, the recurrent motif is radio static – the novel hums with electrical interference and the white noise of botched or blocked signals.
Near the end of the book, Serge falls ill on a trip down the Nile. He has the impression of ‘being held in a machine, but … one whose operator has abandoned it … leaving its motions to repeat without a reason for doing so anymore’. He could almost be describing the experience of reading the novel in which he appears.