Surplus Matter

I hold out little hope for Spielberg’s film. I suspect it will be sanitised and anodyne, devoid of the complexities that make Tintin so compelling. Hergé complained in his last years that his creation was killing him. The final sequence in the incomplete Tintin and Alph-Art shows, in what I’ve always seen as a cryptic cry of desperation on its author’s part, the hero being led off to have plaster poured on him and thus be turned into an artwork called “Reporter” — condemned, that is, to die inside his own simulacrum. This is dark stuff, Dorian Gray territory. If I had my way, the film would be directed by David Lynch.

Tom McCarthy on the political trajectory of the Tintin cartoons and Spielberg’s forthcoming movie.

This is textbook post-traumatic territory, and textbook literary alienation. The necessity — and impossibility — of watching yourself from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead — and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well.

Tom McCarthy reviews Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts in the London Review of Books.

If this was a Wednesday Top Ten I’d probably choose ten different books entirely, and another ten on Thursday.

Tom McCarthy’s Top Ten novels in The Book Depository.

He places his copies next to the original, one on each side. They’re both perfect. When they’re waxed all three should look exactly the same. He’ll phone Anton, then sleep, then varnish the paintings and collect his money. The phone’s been unplugged from its socket and placed in the room’s corner, by the plant. Did he do that? He should move over and phone Anton. But he doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to take his eyes off the three images – four if you count the mirror in which he’s framed, standing, wrapped in a sheet stained the same crimson as the saint’s robe, with his grooved, waxed hair, his gaping mouth.

Read the exclusive extract from Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space published by 3:AM Magazine

Tom lists his favourites at Pulp.net

Every Friday, Dusted Magazine publishes a series of music-related lists compiled by our favorite artists. This week: Tom McCarthy and Papercuts.

“We had decided that I should arrive by sea. Amsterdam has always been a port, so entering it this way had a certain logic, given my brief. It was anything but practical, though.”

Short fiction by Tom McCarthy.

“He leans against a lamppost. Beneath the silk top hat his face is angular; a goatee drops from the chin and then curls upwards, tapering to a fine point at the end. Cabs are standing in a row along the facing curb, cabmen reading papers, horses snorting. Behind them at the entrance to a park old men are talking on a bench. Around the corner comes a group of schoolgirls carrying croquet hoops and mallets. The girls wear sky-blue sailor shirts: the Legion of Honour uniform. Their voices drop to whispers as they pass him.”

Nine sketches by Tom McCarthy

“Some months ago, it was suggested by the Corporation of London that the best way of dealing with the pigeons fouling the high-rise on the twelfth floor of which the International Necronautical Society has its HQ was to drape netting over the whole building, cap-a-pied. Having spent a year researching the history of cartography with a view to mapping death - researching this history in all its details, from the variations between Mercator, Petersen and Polar Gnomonic map projections to the question of graticule to instances of blank and one-to-one scale maps (Lewis Carrol’s oeuvre is awash with these) - INS staff were intrigued by the prospect of having a grid square superimposed over their splendid view of the world’s greatest city. They were, however, even more appalled by the thought of working in what would effectively become a cage, and lobbied the Corporation to opt for an alternative method of pigeon control.”

by Tom McCarthy
At the Still Point… orig pub in Contemporary Magazine, London, 2004
In When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s magnificent 1996 documentary about the great Ali-Foreman boxing match of 1974, the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, Mohammed Ali at one point tackles the question of the speed at which he operates. ‘They have cameras,’ he tells […]