RSSShards of Information Add Up to a Brilliant Novel
by Doug Edmond
Remainder is a unique and brilliant novel. It is the story of a young “everyday” Englishman traumatized by an accident that eliminates his memory but leaves him £8.5 million richer. All that he knows is that something fell out of the sky and hit him. And someone is willing to pay a large sum of money for his silence. Our unnamed sympathetic hero begins by describing his struggle to come to terms with his near-fatal accident and his loss of memory.
Following months of being in a coma and even more months relearning how to move his body to complete simple tasks, it becomes apparent that he lost something even more important — his sense of authenticity.
As he wonders what he should do with his newfound wealth, he aimlessly tries to get on with his life until he is overwhelmed with déjà vu observing a crack on the wall in a bathroom at a party.
He obsessively copies the crack onto a piece of paper, much to the frustration of those waiting to use the bathroom. In attempting to recreate the crack at home, he realizes that, for a brief moment, he felt connected to reality.
The experience leads to a memory of a building he decides he must recreate in all its details, including what may be real or imaged occupants. He hires a logistics expert, purchases two apartments, moves out all the current tenants and proceeds to recreate an exact copy of his memory of the building.
This memory also includes the re-enactment of an insignificant event that he believes occurred in the building. To do so, he hires of a very large staff of re-enactors who re-enact the simple event over and over again at his request. The re-enactment successfully creates another brief yet significant connection to reality for the narrator.
This leads to more detailed re-enactments and re-enactments of re-enactments. Our protagonist obsessively seeks out instances in which he feels fluid and natural merging with reality. In time his thirst for more authentic events spirals violently out of control.
McCarthy describes in a unique way the age-old dilemma of authenticity in everyday life. He immerses the reader in the setting of the re-enactments, providing precise details of all the objects and actions of the participants.
You can smell the frying liver wafting into the protagonist’s apartment from the kitchen of an elderly re-enactor.
Remainder is McCarthy’s first novel. His other book is a non-fiction work entitled Tintin and the Secret of Literature.
McCarthy was born in 1969 and lives in London. Until now he was mostly known for the reports, manifestos and media interventions he has made as General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictional avant-garde network.
Remainder was initially rejected by the large publishing houses in the U.K. in 2002. The novel’s current success is the result of a small Paris-based publisher, Metronome Press, being willing to take the risk and to readers getting the word out to other readers.
The Canadian distribution rights were obtained by Raincoast Books based the success of the initial printing.
This is a refreshing and enjoyable read by a writer with ideas and talent. You may find yourself wanting to re-read certain sections seeking to understand the underlying meaning of the author’s contention that, like a
trauma victim, we cling to small fragments of information regarding our state of being in the world.