Surplus Matter

The near-Joycean scale and density of all this is truly impressive, as is McCarthy’s ability to fold it into a cleanly constructed narrative, which has its boring stretches but also moments of humour and weird beauty. Yet its mind-blowingness as a reading experience depends on the reader’s appetite for certain types of analysis. Armed with various concepts from Heidegger, Freud or Paul Virilio, say, it would be possible to unpick its implications more or less indefinitely, but there’s a dispiriting feeling that the book has been reverse-engineered with an eye to achieving just that. On the other hand, Sophie’s death, which is partly an allegory for lost philosophical certainties, can also be read as taking on an emotional weight that goes against the grain of the novel’s ostensible scorn for squishy psychologising. “Will he turn out,” McCarthy asked recently of the French writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint, “to have been deconstructing literary sentimentalism or sentimentalising literary deconstruction?” It’s a sign of his writerly horse sense that this skilfully realised, ambitious, over-literary book finds the time to leave a similar question hanging.

Christopher Tayler reviews C in the Guardian.

I’ve been reading Ada – I think it’s his masterpiece, the best book by a long, long way. Strangely, a lot of Nabokovians don’t like it… Anyway, it’s all about encryption of some kind or another. Telephony is key – even though it is the one thing completely banned in the book. Again, this is by the same token as sex has been banned in Remainder. That book was all about sex, of course, so having it there in any explicit form would have diluted the message.

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Anna Aslanyan in 3:AM Magazine.

The book fairly thrums with insects, incest, geometry, spiritualism, maps, coordinates, the invention and evolution of radio, aeroplanes, codes, weapons, and object-detection systems. If Kafka, according to Zizek, eroticized bureaucracy, McCarthy “eroticizes technology” he sexes “things” up.

Steve Finbow reviews C for Bookmunch.

Don Quixote and Finnegans Wake are both surveys, in the archaeological sense, of previous literature, and they both, by paying such attention to the past, manage to do something radically new. Also, they both enact a kind of system-failure: literature doesn’t work, and that, ultra-paradoxically, is the condition of its possibility. Every ten minutes, it seems, some schmuck or other announces the death of the novel — and of course, they’re right: the novel has been living out its own death from before its birth.

Tom McCarthy interviewed by Steve Finbow in Bookmunch.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Remainder established McCarthy as a contemporary champion of the experimental novel and heir to the postmodern stylists of the late 20th century, but it’s difficult to come up with a suitable thematic or stylistic precursor to his unclassifiably brilliant latest.

The influential American Publishers Weekly gives C a rave review.