Surplus Matter

Jacking the Synapses of the Imagination

“For me, this [the BT Tower] is the most sacred building in London,” he says. “If you were an alien terrologist and you came down to study us, you would see St Paul’s and imagine that it might have had some relevance when God existed. But since he doesn’t any more” — this said with a mischievous smile — “and signals do, this is now the hub of London. This is where meaning is projected around the city.”

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Tim Robey in the Daily Telegraph.

Neither Nor

I love the bread and butter of plot. Literature is, after all, an engagement with the real. That doesn’t mean that it’s mimetic, but somehow fiction has to get messy and constitute the real — whether that be an object, a speech pattern, a smell, or whatever. Commentators and critics seem to want fiction either to be blatantly avant-garde and postmodern, or to be realist and 19th century; but really most literature is neither nor.

Stuart Evers interviews Tom McCarthy in the New Statesman.

A Melancholy Technologics

Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.

Tom McCarthy, in the Guardian, on the links between technology and the novel.

The Remix the Novel Has Been Crying Out For

“I see what I’m doing as simply plugging literature into other literature. For me, that’s what literature’s always done. If Shakespeare finds a good speech in an older version of Macbeth or Pliny, he just rips it and mixes it. It’s like DJing.” On the evidence of C, McCarthy is quite possibly the remix the novel has been crying out for. “Here we are, rich inheritors of all this magnificent detritus,” he says. “How do we want to recombine it? I think it’s a good time to be a good writer, actually.”

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Robert Collins in the Sunday Times.

McCarthy’s MacGuffin

Tom McCarthy interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme about Double Take. He describes WMDs as “a good example of a MacGuffin”!

C as Video Art Installation

It is not difficult to imagine C as a video art installation, playing recognizable footage, but at the wrong speed, with the composition somehow askew.

Ben Jeffery reviews C in the Times Literary Supplement.

Tom McCarthy Live!

Details of Tom McCarthy’s two September London gigs at the LRB bookshop (6 September) and the Southbank Centre (27 September), with Lee Rourke and Nicholas Lezard.

No New Direction?

Although McCarthy favours the emphasis on facts and visual description encouraged by Robbe-Grillet and achieves something of Kafka’s chill, C remains disappointingly approachable. It neither confounds nor excites; for better or worse, it is not a new direction. Serge, for all his affectlessness, still “casts his mind back” and even feels “excitement and desire growing in him”. Details carry symbolic freight; the author uses evocative devices such as onomatopoeia (the word “plash” appears three times). Robbe-Grillet said that the anti-bourgeois novel would not be able “to escape altogether” — but you might have expected Tom McCarthy, after all the rhetoric, to escape a little more than this.

Leo Robson reviews C in the New Statesman.

Going On and On

The ultimate aim of the necronaut, the INS manifesto says, is to construct ‘a craft that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist’, with one example of such a craft being ‘the rehabilitation of sacrifice as an accepted social ritual’. From this perspective, it’s not important whether or not McCarthy’s novel is reviewed well or badly, allowed to win the Booker or any other gong. Whatever happens to this novel or to this writer, a chain of events has been set in motion. Nothing and no one is going to stop it going on and on.

Jenny Turner reviews C in the London Review of Books.

Eagerly Awaited in Necronautical Circles

There are passages that are very impressive: particularly some of the descriptions of flight, and one euphoric hymn to the wireless. But, though it is no doubt horribly middlebrow to say so, the deliberately flattened, almost mechanical characters (who, incidentally, speak like present-day art students) and the endless technical prose make for joyless reading.

Theo Tait reviews C in the Sunday Times.