RSSBen Jeffery, “C is For Carrefax (and Continental Theory),” Times Literary Supplement 18 August 2010
Does Tom McCarthy’s new novel C deserve to have been long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize?
Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder (2005), wore its conceit heavily. An anonymous man receives £8.5 million as compensation for an accident he cannot remember. Brain damage has destroyed his spontaneity, forcing him to completely relearn bodily control. “Eventually I not only learnt to execute most actions but also came up to speed”, he tells us. “But I still had to think about each movement I made, had to understand it. No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour.” The man spends his fortune assembling an army of actors and consultants, whose job is to re-stage, in continual loops, episodes that enter his mind like visions; creating precise reconstructions of specific moments (a slow afternoon in a block of flats; a visit to a garage; a bank heist) through which the narrator wanders compulsively, over and over again.
Personal background is more or less absent, as is feeling, except for the addictive high the protagonist experiences whenever re-enactments go especially well. Initially marketed in galleries and museum shops, Remainder proved an unlikely success, drawing widespread attention to McCarthy and his International Necronautical Society (INS), the “semi-fictitious avant-garde network” of which he is the General Secretary.
Operating as an ironic tribute to the avant-garde relics of the twentieth century, the INS distributes mock-solemn manifestoes (“that there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death’s beauty – that is, beauty”) and demonstrates its orientation towards a body of Continental theory that is still largely absent from English fiction, with references to the works of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, among many others. Remainder was clearly proud of its intellectual underpinnings, and McCarthy’s second novel, Men in Space (2007), displayed a similar desire to short-circuit convention, telling (bits of) the tale of a group of bohemians and criminals living in Prague at the formation of the Czech Republic. The two novels complement each other. Where Remainder winds narrative into an unnaturally tight circle, Men in Space pulls it apart, introducing the literary equivalent of static interference into its story of artistic forgeries and malfunctioning communication grids. Both stories are unsatisfying for the same sort of reason: despite the occasionally grisly subject matter, this is a rather bloodless sort of experimentalism; interesting rather than powerful. But McCarthy’s determination to use less common creative tools is laudable, and his project at least has a sense of style. If the first novel possesses the bolder premiss, the second exhibits more skill for characterization, and it is not fanciful to imagine the third, C, might manage to synthesize the two.
In fact, C models itself as much on McCarthy’s other book, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006), a poststructuralist reading of Hergé. Many of the features McCarthy identifies in Tintin’s adventures reappear in C: the strangely opaque leading man; a scene in which a supernatural event is exposed as a mechanical fraud; journeys into burial crypts and dummy tombs; and, especially, a fixation with radio signals. “Written in the century when communication technology erupted and transformed the world forever, the Tintin books come back repeatedly to moments of transmission”, wrote McCarthy. “Forget journalism: what Tintin actually does is send and receive radio messages . . . . Some of Hergé’s most striking images are not of characters or actions but of radio masts, wires casting signals and antennae picking them up.” Roland Barthes’s description (quoted by McCarthy) of literature as a “stereographic space” containing a “dissolve of voice” is particularly apt, given C’s obsession with disembodied noise. It also suits what is, thus far, the overarching theme of McCarthy’s fiction: a kind of materialist eschatology; the effort to put the solidity and finality of space into words. One of the more memorable exchanges in the new novel takes place between two pilots examining the traces left by one of their comrades after he has fallen out of his plane. Where he landed, the acid from his body has stopped the grass growing. “All his memories and everything he ever thought about or did, reduced to battery chemicals”, remarks one of the men. “Why not?” replies the other. “It’s what we are.”
Among other things, “C” stands for Serge Carrefax, the story’s hero. He is an Englishman with a French mother, but we are never told precisely what he looks like, or how to pronounce his name (“where his father gives it an electrical ‘Surge’ rounded by an abrupt J, [his mother’s] version takes the form of a light and lofty ‘Sairge’ that trails off in a whispered shh”). His life begins in 1898, underneath the first wireless transmissions, symbolically fastened to the spread of electric technology. The story is organized in four sections, recounting Carrefax’s childhood and adolescence; his time as a spotter in the Royal Air Force during the First World War; the decadent life he leads in London afterwards; and a visit to Egypt working for the Ministry of Communications. Early on, during a boyhood painting lesson, we are given the hint that Serge is not inclined to psychological analysis: “he just can’t do perspective . . . his perceptual apparatus refuses point blank to be twisted into the requisite configuration. He sees things flat”. “Flat” is the right word. The most compelling relationship in C is that between the young Serge and his sister Sophie. Their squabbling and games — including a proto-version of Monopoly given to them by their Marxist tutor (“’I hope this game adequately impresses upon you the iniquities of capital.’ It doesn’t: they both love it”) — seem to promise a less frosty novel, but Sophie’s death at seventeen closes Serge off, and from then on we catch only glimmers of empathy from him.
Technology fills the space left by introspection. Carrefax’s relatively mute inner voice has the advantage of leaving him free to focus on phenomenology. The plot is more or less perfunctory — his story is really a portal on to the transformation in the world’s texture in the first twenty years of the last century, where static fills the air “like the sound of thought itself, its hum and rush”. Throughout his work, McCarthy has fashioned his characters as semi-aware components in larger, impersonal systems. The predominant stylistic tic in C is Serge letting his imagination run outwards towards those patterns, envisioning them in rhythmic detail, before trailing off with an ellipsis: “In the click and swivel of machinery being slotted together, moved around and re-aligned, its clockwork choreography, he re-lived, in miniature, the mechanical command of landscape and its boundaries that flight affords him, the mastery of hedgerows, fields and lanes, their shapes and volumes . . .”; and: “onwards, to the dung-filled, sloping field beyond the water, the telegraph line on the hill. He pictures the cars beyond that, then the boats, the towers, the stations, the archipelagos . . .”. Many of the places Serge finds himself in have a familiar, period-drama quality, but this is often counteracted by an oddly placed descriptive stress, which diverts the reader’s attention. Jazz musicians “look like machine parts . . . extensions of their instruments, the stoppers, valves and tubes”; the sun over an airfield “seems to sicken” as summer draws on. 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. Carrefax acquires a morphine habit during the war, which is an excuse for some vivid, slow-motion imagery, both in the air (“tracers rise towards him languidly, like bubbles in a glass”) and on the ground, at a London party:
“all the dancers are moving . . . slowly, their frenetic twists and shudders broken down to gestures that ooze into one another at a pace so languorous it’s almost static. Skirts draw together and apart like clouds merging and separating over the course of a whole afternoon; eye-contact between partners takes as long to establish as trunk-call connections, and is taken leave of lingeringly, sadly; wisps of smoke turn solid as they extend from cigarettes to coil like lace around limbs and clothing.”
McCarthy is less successful when he inserts routine Kafka-isms — a POW Escape Committee so secret that nobody knows in which direction to tunnel; spies spying on each other, and so on — in order to fill out scenes. Whether or not telling a juicy story is part of his artistic priorities, on the evidence of his work so far he has no great talent for plotting. All three of his novels have tended to lose stick in places, but without the clear binding concept that Remainder enjoyed the drift becomes more obvious. In particular, the final section of C lacks colour compared to the first three, and it keels into a climactic pathos the character of Serge Carrefax hasn’t earned, giving it a lumpy finish. While there is much to pique the curiosity in McCarthy’s new novel, it remains a disappointingly miscellaneous whole, not quite in balance, or completely outwitting cliché.
Tom McCarthy
C
320pp. Cape. £16.99.
978 0 224 09020 9