Zadie Smith has hailed Tom McCarthy as British fiction’s great hope, but his new novel is anything but an easy read

Brit novelist Tom McCarthy pictured at at the LRB bookshop (Nick Cunard)

The essentials
Title C
Author Tom McCarthy
Publisher Cape
Length 320 pages
Price £15.29

Tom McCarthy is determined to bring the spirit of the 20th-century avant-garde to the staid world of English fiction. He is best known for Remainder, a sort of anti-novel about a man who receives a large sum in compensation for an undisclosed injury, and spends it re-enacting episodes that may not ever have taken place. It became an unlikely hit; it was described by Zadie Smith as “one of the great English novels of the past 10 years” and praised for “offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward” — by rejecting the rickety conventions of the traditional realistic novel, with its rounded characters, generic plots and earnest themes.

McCarthy is founder and general secretary of the International Necronautical Society, a “semi-fictitious avant-garde network”, which issues larky modernist-style manifestos expatiating on such matters as the “cultural parameters of death”. He has also written a work of non-fiction, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, which uses the ideas of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and other highfalutin post-structuralists to interpret the adventures of the plucky boy reporter. His latest novel, no doubt eagerly awaited in Necronautical circles, tells the strange story of Serge Carrefax, radio enthusiast, first world war airman, drug addict and mild sexual deviant.

Serge is the scion of a French émigré family grown rich by producing silk in the English countryside. Born to a deaf mother and a father who is a pioneer of the wireless, he grows up with his sister Sophie, a precocious biologist, on an estate devoted to scientific endeavour and the education of the deaf. But Sophie’s untimely death causes him to develop a psychosomatic stomach disorder, necessitating a trip to a parodic German spa town, where he is administered many an enema and develops a sexual fixation with a crook-backed masseuse. On the outbreak of war, he joins the School of Military Aeronautics and is soon flying terrifying sorties above the trenches of the western front, calling down artillery strikes on the Germans. Except that Serge isn’t scared: he is a man without normal emotions, and in fact the cocktail of kinetic excitement and freely available drugs suits him very nicely.

Back on civvy street, he tries to study architecture but finds London’s bohemian scene, replete with heroin parties and lesbian showgirls, more to his taste. After a car crash, he is packed off to revolutionary Egypt on a vaguely Kafkaesque mission related to the Empire Wireless Chain, a radio system designed to pump the embryonic BBC round the world. He sustains a nasty insect bite during a sex scene in a pharaonic burial chamber, and the book ends with a series of feverish hallucinations.

But all this, perhaps, makes C sound misleadingly incident-packed and entertaining. The novel is an uncompromising assault on what McCarthy calls the “certainties of middlebrow aesthetics”. The aircraft section seems to be inspired by Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, which declares that “war is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalisation of the human body”. Serge likes the thought that his plane could burn up: “The idea that he could melt and fuse with the machine parts pleases him.” C celebrates a “new age of metal and explosive, geometry and connectedness”, and it does this largely, page after page, by losing itself in period technological detail. 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. “The detector’s brass with an adjusting knob of ebonite,” reads one typical sentence, “the condenser’s Murdock; the crystal, Chilean gelina quartz, a Mighty Atom mail-ordered from Gamage of Holborn.”

The convention with works like this is to remark that it is daring and interesting and the novelist is one to watch, even though the novel may not be perfect. Sadly, I cannot even half-heartedly recommend a book that on occasions left me close to tears of boredom. So: if you’re sick of the bourgeois conventions of the novel, and are searching for a dose of what McCarthy’s Necronauts call “the brute materiality of the external world”, look no further. If not, you should probably give C a wide berth.

Man Booker Dozen announced
27 July 2010

The judges for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction today, Tuesday 27 July, announce the longlist for the prize, the leading literary award in the English speaking world.

A total of 138 books, 14 of which were called in by the judges, were considered for the ‘Man Booker Dozen’ longlist of 13 books.

The longlist includes:

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan - Picador)

Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin - Fig Tree)

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Books)

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy The Long Song (Headline Publishing Group - Headline Review)

Tom McCarthy C (Random House - Jonathan Cape)

David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Zacob de Zoet (Hodder & Stoughton - Sceptre)

Lisa Moore February (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin - Hamish Hamilton)

Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic - Tuskar Rock)

Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky
(Random House - Jonathan Cape)

The chair of judges, Andrew Motion, comments:

“Here are thirteen exceptional novels - books we have chosen for their intrinsic quality, without reference to the past work of their authors. Wide-ranging in their geography and their concern, they tell powerful stories which make the familiar strange and cover an enormous range of history and feeling. We feel confident that they will provoke and entertain.”

Peter Carey is one of only two authors to have won the prize twice, in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang. In 1985 his book Illywhacker was shortlisted for the prize and Theft: A Love Story was longlisted in 2006.

Three authors have been shortlisted before: David Mitchell (twice shortlisted in 2001 for number9dream and in 2004 for Cloud Atlas), Damon Galgut (in 2003 for The Good Doctor) and Rose Tremain (shortlisted in 1989 for Restoration). She was also a judge for the Booker Prize in 1988 and 2000.

Howard Jacobson has been longlisted twice for his book Kalooki Nights in 2006 and for Who’s Sorry Now? in 2002.

The 2010 shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 7 September at a press conference at Man Group’s London headquarters. The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010 will be revealed on Tuesday 12 October at a dinner at London’s Guildhall and will be broadcast on the BBC Ten O’Clock News.

The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction will receive £50,000 and can look forward to greatly increased sales and worldwide recognition. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, will receive £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their shortlisted book.

Chaired by Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, the 2010 judges are Rosie Blau, Literary Editor of the Financial Times; Deborah Bull, formerly a dancer, now Creative Director of the Royal Opera House as well as a writer and broadcaster; Tom Sutcliffe, journalist, broadcaster and author and Frances Wilson, biographer and critic.

C Tom McCarthy Knopf, $26.95 (312p) ISBN 978-0-307-59333-7

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 enigmatic title signifies (for starters) Serge Carrefax, who grows up in early 1900s England on the grounds of the Versoie House, where his inventor-father Simeon runs a school for the deaf, using his pupils to test the copper-wire telegraphs and radio gizmos that are his obsession. There, Serge and his ill-fated sister, Sophie, enact strange experiments in chemistry and star in a school pageant depicting Ceres’s journey to the underworld. More C-words follow, as an older, haunted Serge travels to a Bavarian sanitarium in search of the healing chemical cysteine and, following his enrollment in the 104th Airborne Squadron, enjoys flying reconnaissance while high on cocaine. The young century unfurls, bringing with it spiritualists, Egyptian espionage, and a fateful tryst in an ancient tomb, where Serge will at last discover the delicate wavelengths that connect him to the historical signals for which he is an ideal receiver. Each chapter of McCarthy’s tour de force is a cryptic, ornate puzzle box, rich with correspondences and emphatically detailed digressions. Ambitious readers will be eager to revisit this endlessly interpretive world, while more casual readers will marvel at the high-flying picaresque perched at the crossroads of science and the stuff dreams are made of. (Sept.)

7-10 PM: International Necronautical Society INS Commission on Crypts: Architecture, Neurosis and Death

An evening of discussions and interrogations organised by the International Necronautical Society. The INS is a semi-fictitious organisation founded by author and artist Tom McCarthy, closely modelled on the European avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. McCarthy will be joined by award-winning novelist Chloe Aridjis and scholar Richard Martin as they interrogate acclaimed writer and psychoanalyst Darian Leader and leading architect Patrick Lynch. The proceedings will be monitored by INS Chief of Propaganda Anthony Auerbach and INS Environmental Engineer Laura Hopkins.

C, Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Cape 2010

Cold caplets covered Carrefax’s contraption crouched cannily… It is tempting to start in this way a review of C — the book eagerly anticipated by Tom McCarthy’s admirers for the last couple of years, which at one point was rumoured to contain only words beginning with the eponymous letter. Reader, it does not. Despite the proliferation of c-words, they are interspersed with others. The result is a heady — or, more aptly, captivating — concoction that constantly keeps you switched on. Far from being reduced to a word game, the text is spanned with verbal landmarks which make for a mock exercise in uniconsonantism the author clearly enjoys.

The protagonist, Serge Carrefax, is an odd figure, almost a robot half-turned man. More often than not, this basic plot — a machine acquiring human traits, sometimes a heart and even an immortal soul — ends in a tragedy, the machine enfeebled by this unexpected human condition collapsing under its weight. With Serge it is different — he is too human to survive, although not human enough to be an Everyman (this role remains firmly reserved for the protagonist of McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder). Serge is born at the turn of the 20th century into a somewhat extraordinary family, under somewhat extraordinary circumstances; while his deaf mother is giving birth, his father — who can hear but rarely listens to anything apart from his own ideas — is obsessed with his wireless radio experiments. The background of this nativity scene — “copper buzzing in the garden” — determines to a large extent Serge’s whole life. He becomes a radio ham, but, unlike his father, sees himself as a medium rather than a transformer. Serge’s abilities could make him a perfect receiver of signals that abound in the space around and beyond him were he not blocked in so many ways; a doctor at a spa resort diagnoses his illness as “Jam, block, stuck. Instead of transformation, only repetition”. This line is one of the many reminders pointing to the main message all McCarthy’s books contain: that nowadays the only subject worth addressing in literature is art, in its various guises, and that every situation in life can be deciphered through it — through constant repetition (reenactment for those more used to the writer’s terminology). Remainder and Men in Space, the first two fiction books by McCarthy, joined by this more mature work (with a number of equally rich plot lines — a modern European novel at its strongest), together form a triptych that might be interpreted, literally, as a 21st century icon — of sorts.

Shadowed in his early years by his older, brighter, brasher sister Sophie, Serge looks like a typical little brother at first — incestuously inclined, sulky and awkward. His reaction to her death is the indication of qualities that will make him stand out of the crowd throughout the book. He feels no grief, no sadness at Sophie’s funeral — he is only embarrassed by his hard-on, nothing more. As anyone who is familiar with McCarthy’s oeuvre knows, this is not the first time the author and his characters are inspired by death. Indeed, in his capacity as the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society, McCarthy has always maintained that death is a form of art per se and, at the same time, a creative driving force no artist can dismiss.

You don’t have to be a practising shrink to add two and two together and figure out that Serge’s “blockage”, his inability to pass things through himself, is rooted in the loss he never mourned — and therefore is destined to mourn all his life. However, things are never that simple in McCarthy’s world; there are pages in the book where the death of Serge’s sister strikes you as a purely artificial device the author uses to distract the reader’s attention, to refocus — or rechannel — it. The accidental nature of this frequency switching trick is as dubitable as that of the girl’s death.

Another occasion when Serge shows he is not made of ordinary human material is his own close brush with death. After serving as a pilot’s observer during the First World War and spending a long time in prison camps, he faces an execution squad as if it was a deliverance: “As he waits for the sergeant to give the command to shoot, Serge feels ecstatic”. The last moment announcement that it’s all over, far from bringing relief, ruins the beauty of the moment. “For the first time in the whole course of the war, he feels scared”.

Going back to things starting with c, they delineate Serge’s story in a manner concise, concentrated, and convincing. To mention just a few, there are: carbon, copy, crypt, code, cocaine, cyst, most of them playing a sinister role in the book, connected to one another in a way that holds the plot together, seemingly effortlessly. Is carnage wrought on Sophie by her secret lover to blame for a glass of cyanide in her stiff hand? Could it be the cheeky catatomb (the resting place of a family pet) that leads Serge eventually to the catacombs of ancient Egypt? Are cycteine (the chemical supposed to cure spa patients) and cysthair (the perilous result of Serge’s carelessness when exploring Egyptian heritage) both links of the same chain? As for copy, this concept, known to the reader of Remainder as reenactment, is equally important in C.

Among features McCarthy’s fans will recognise in this book to their joy is the cinematic quality of his writing. As in his earlier books, every now and again the author notices something so striking in its beauty or violence or both that he cannot help himself — he freezes his camera on it, giving us a long, Tarkovsky-style scene shot from an angle no one has thought of before. In Remainder we stood transfixed, side by side with the protagonist, watching a shot man’s blood trickle into a puddle of water. In C a victim of shooting is lying in the street, his blood mixing with milk, projecting an even stronger image on the reader’s retina. Serge’s delirious dreams are of a similar nature; in one of them, “the whole scene’s flat, like film”.

McCarthy’s prose is full of interconnections between visual and textual effects. The word play that is a vital part of the book is not the cloying, aggressive type. Instead of being kept on your toes, you are invited to play this guessing game at leisure, often as a comic relief, something to lift you out of the darkness you are surrounded by most of the time. When told that his newborn son has a caul, Serge’s father mishears it as cold and has to be informed that a caul is “a kind of web” that brings good luck. There are several references in C to a web of signals enveloping the world, but to say that they are designed to symbolise the forerunner of the Internet would, of course, be oversimplifying things. The most curious of these allusions is brought about by another idea of Carrefax Sr. who assumes — admittedly, neglecting the basic laws of physics — that no signal emitted in the ionosphere is ever lost, “they all bounce back eventually, or loop round”, and hence can be detected years later. One might, for instance, be able to “pick up the Battle of Hastings, or observe the distress of the assassinated Caesar, or the anguish of Saint Anthony during his great temptation”.

The theory may, indeed, sound curious to the reader; in fact, curiosity is yet another c-word that seems to carry in itself the key to some of the book’s codes. Serge is immersed in his wireless world, but Carrefax Cathode, another of his father’s projects, awakes no further enthusiasm in him — “whatever vibrant immediacy this might possess, all Serge can see is death” — as he toys with the question, “Can death be patented?” His curiosity towards women is restricted to one side of things — or, rather, of women in question; Serge never makes a beast with two backs with any of his lovers, always entering them from behind. It is Serge’s obsessive interest in certain things that makes him a true artist (but definitely not a scientist) — the interest whose focus remains unclear, drowned in the white noise. The climax of this state of incoherency comes when Serge is waiting for a word from his dead sister’s mouth that will bring with it completeness and closure. What he hears is “a burst of static — a static that contains all messages ever sent”.

Although you can guess what happens at the end some time before you get there, the last pages are no less thrilling for that. This is the space you need to contemplate, to muse over what comes after curiosity. You are provoked to do that by many things in C, including its very literariness (the sign of the author’s maturity rather than showing-off on his part), which manifests itself in many ways, particularly in the book’s apparent untranslatability. Finnegans Wake springs to mind whenever you come across a passage translators are going to find especially hard. Joyce’s title is evoked at the closing paragraph, when we are left in the wake of a ship, “two white lines running backwards into darkness”. Cocaine captured crooked convolutions, creases, crazy chambers…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Aslanyan is a translator and journalist living in London. She regularly contributes to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and writes for the TLS and a number of online publications. Anna’s translations into Russian include works of fiction by Tom McCarthy, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Mavis Gallant and Zadie Smith.

[Futureworld: a still from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive]

There’s a scene in Don Quixote where the deluded would-be knight is listening to fulling mills. This is not the famous windmill scene: in that one, the machines are clearly visible; this one, by contrast, takes place in pitch-black night. Quixote, struck by the mills’ rhythmic metallic clankings, persuades himself that they are the half-articulated groans and snarls of monsters. He’s wrong, of course: they’re mills. But then again, perhaps, in the way madmen sometimes are, he’s right. Just maybe, in the looping chains of broken syllables, the clashing metre of compounded phonemes, he’s picking up a message, a weak signal slowly forming in time’s static: an announcement, for those astute enough to hear, of a monstrous age of mechanised industry lurking in the night of the future.

For centuries, literature has been haunted by technology. When Blake shudders in fearful awe before the tiger, don’t be fooled into thinking that he’s contemplating nature. What the animal, a product of “hammer”, “chain”, “furnace” and “anvil”, really represents is the industrial revolution. Blake, like Quixote, grappled with dark satanic mills. His contemporary Mary Shelley also created monsters from machines: her Frankenstein, our culture’s most enduring parable of technology gone haywire, was written largely in response to the replacement of human textile workers with automated looms, and the subsequent torching of cotton mills by Luddite armies of the newly unemployed. Mills again: perhaps it’s no coincidence that they crop up so often. Arising at the intersection where the elements (wind, water) are harnessed by man’s toolbox and plugged straight into his grid, they present themselves to the literary mind as symbols of technology in its most concentrated form: its birth, its architecture, its entire logic. Let’s call it a technologics.

Melville wrote a whole story about a mill: “The Tartarus of Maids”. Its narrator, a seed-trader in need of a good envelope-supplier, visits a paper mill and gazes in “strange dread” at the wheels and cylinders of the “inflexible iron animal”, shocked by “the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it . . . the autocratic cunning of the machine”. In the marriage of humanity and industrial apparatuses, it’s clear who wears the trousers:

Machinery — that vaunted slave of humanity — here stood menially served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan. The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels.

It’s clear, too, that Melville isn’t simply pondering the rise of machine culture in society at large. Etching his way on his horse, Black, across the snow-white valley where the mill lies, and wondering at the range of lawyers’ briefs, doctors’ prescriptions, pastors’ sermons and so on that will be scrawled in ink on the reams of blank paper he’s watching cascade off the rollers, the narrator is a carrier of a more self-reflective anxiety, one that concerns itself with the very act of writing. If man’s autocracy, his genius, his powers of generation, have all passed to the machine, and if the pulpy, material base for the refined and abstract thoughts and emotions that we read in books has been revealed to us, then how can we understand poetry or prose as the sublime self-expression of autonomous and elevated individuals? Melville’s answer is as implicit as his question: we can’t, not any more.

If this technologics is already stirring in Cervantes, swelling in Blake and Shelley and coming to a head in Melville, then the moment that it fully breaks and floods the whole aesthetic landscape can be dated to the very day. On 20 February 1909, Filippo Tommaso MBlakearinetti published on the front page of Le Figaro his incendiary “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”. Wrapped in an account of a car crash that Marinetti in fact experienced (and which he celebrates here, in proto-Ballardian manner, as an episode of almost transcendent metallic beauty), the manifesto announces the new, superior aesthetic of the machine. “A racing car,” reads the manifesto’s fourth paragraph, “whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath — a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot – is more beautiful than The Victory of Samothrace.” While the diagnostic move — acknowledging the machine’s ascendency in art as well as industry — may be the same as Melville’s, the attitude could not be more different: where Melville’s narrator shivers with revulsion from beginning to end of “The Tartarus of Maids”, Marinetti vibrates in his manifesto with a fiery enthusiasm that approaches ecstasy. “We will sing,” reads paragraph 11, “of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.”

His technologics thus declared, Marinetti gathered around him an array of painters, poets and dramaturges, producing manifesto after manifesto as his movement gained momentum. Choreographers, he announces in “The Manifesto of Futurist Dance”, shouldn’t confine themselves to celebrating the muscular possibilities of the poor human body, but should imitate instead the sublime movements of pistons and levers as they emulate “the multiplied body of the motor”. Orators, he decides in “Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation”, should dehumanise themselves in similar fashion: the futurist declaimer must “metallise, liquefy, vegetalise, petrify and electrify his voice” and “gesticulate geometrically, thereby giving his arms the sharp rigidity of semaphore signals and lighthouse rays, to indicate the direction of forces, or of pistons and wheels”. Painting, he declares in his “Manifesto of Aeropainting”, is best done from an aeroplane: that way, the constraints of perspective are overcome, sky and landscape superimposed and jolted into motion, their elastic crescendos and diminuendos engendering new progressions of forms and colours. Half-way through that particular manifesto, he more or less leaves off considering what painting from a plane might look like, realising that the very fact of being in a plane itself constitutes a radical, dynamic form of art, an “aerosculpture” formed through a “harmonious and signifying composition of coloured smokes offered to the brushes of dawn and dusk, and long vibrant beams of electric light”.

Painting — or writing. Again, as with the trajectory of Melville’s Black across the white page of the snow, what Marinetti is really interested in here is the process of mark-making, of inscribing a blank sheet of sky. Despite issuing directives to followers in all mediums, the founder and manifestor of futurism remained a writer — and it’s perhaps on this subject that his exhortations are most interesting. Explaining his conception of “words in freedom”, he invokes the “lyric initiative” of electricity:

Nothing is more beautiful than a great humming central electric station that holds the hydraulic pressure of a mountain chain and the electric power of a vast horizon, synthesised in marble distribution panels bristling with dials, keyboards and shining communicators. These panels are our only models for the writing of poetry.

Here we could be back on the hillside with Quixote, listening to his monsters — for what is a power station if not a 20th-century mill, whose clanks have modulated into a continuous and seductive hum? Here, as in Cervantes, we have the literary sensibility and the machine thrown up against each other – only here in Marinetti, the machine has emerged from the darkness to scintillate in all its fine-tuned, networked, nuanced potentiality. It, and not the human who observes it, most embodies the possibility of literature. It is, in all senses of the word, a generator.

For me, the most interesting aspect of Marinetti’s writing is not so much the range of poems, paintings and performances it produced in his immediate cohorts, but rather the way it names a tendency that shaped the work of writers who would never have considered themselves “futurists”. Take Kafka: in his novels and short stories he reveals himself to be obsessed with what, by now, we should see as a three-way stand-off, or ménage à trois, between man, technology and writing. “In the Penal Colony”, an account of a cruel punishment ritual in some (perhaps not so) far-away land, sees a condemned man strapped into a giant mechanical apparatus that, with an incising harrow guided by a scrolling punchcard-script, inscribes the law into his very skin. In the unfinished book America, we get a lavish description of Karl’s writing desk, a large machine as complex as the penal torture apparatus: it has a “regulator” dial that sets its parts in motion, making some panels rise and others sink, reminding Karl of the mechanical Christmas displays he watched as a child. Karl later takes a job in a hotel which functions as a huge information-relay contraption, with boys scurrying from one floor to another carrying messages that have been dictated over phone-lines, written down, crossed-checked with ledgers to and from which other boys constantly dart — in short, a metaphorical cross between a computer and a novel-in-progress. Given the task of manning the lift, Karl realises sadly that he’ll never fully understand its workings: the other lift-boy, despite six months in his post, “had never seen with his own eyes either the dynamo in the cellar or the inner mechanism of the lift, although, as he said himself, it would have delighted him”.

Technology in Kafka is (like writing itself) positively gnostic: always on the verge of revealing some great, universal wonder — yet always withholding this revelation even as it seems to offer it. Look at this stunning passage from The Castle, in which K, confined to his humble inn, presses his ear to a telephone connecting him to a switchboard inside the castle to which he so yearns for ingress:

It was like the hum of countless children’s voices — but yet not a hum, the echo rather of voices singing at an infinite distance — blended by sheer impossibility into one high but resonant sound which vibrated on the ear as if it were trying to penetrate beyond mere hearing.

Here again — humming, zinging, resonating on the edge of song and of intelligibility — is Marinetti’s poetry machine. But this time, Marinetti’s jubilation has given way to a sense of melancholy. K, of course, will never be admitted to the castle; and technology, by turns both beautiful and menacing, becomes above all the very shape and circuitry of what he lacks.

Technology and melancholia: an odd coupling, you might think. Yet it’s one that has deep conceptual roots. For Freud, all technology is a prosthesis: the telephone (originally conceived as a hearing aid) an artificial ear, the camera an artificial eye, and so on. Strapping his prosthetic organs on, as Freud writes in Civilisation and its Discontents, man becomes magnificent, “a kind of god with artificial limbs” — “but” (he continues) “those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times”. To put it another way: each technological appendage, to a large degree, embodies an absence, a loss. As the literary critic Laurence Rickels paraphrases it, laying particular emphasis (as Kafka does) on communication technology: “every point of contact between a body and its media extension marks the site of some secret burial”.

For Rickels, the link between technology and mourning isn’t merely Freudian and speculative, but also solidly historically grounded. In his excellent book Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts, he points to the advent in the west of recording devices such as phonographs and gramophones before infant mortality rates had been reduced by mass inoculation, even among the better off. Many middle-class parents, following the fad for recording their children’s voices, found themselves bereaved, and the plate or roll on which little Augustus’s or Matilda’s voice outlived him or her thus became a kind of tomb. “Dead children,” Rickels writes, “inhabit vaults of the technical media which create them.” Bereavement becomes the core of technologics; what communication technology inaugurates is, in effect, a cult of mourning — indeed, Rickels even suggests replacing the word “mourning” with the phrase “the audio and video broadcasts of improper burial”. And the literature that emerges in the age of communications technologies — modernist literature — is this cult’s expression, its record, its holy script.

Researching my own novel C, which takes place during precisely this period of emergence, I found evidence everywhere to support Rickels’s claim. The telephone, it turns out, owes its invention to more than simply hearing-aid experiments. Alexander Bell, who grew up playing with mechanical speech devices (his father ran a school for deaf children), lost a brother in adolescence. As a result of this, he made a pact with his remaining brother: if a second one of them should die, the survivor would try to invent a device capable of receiving transmissions from beyond the grave — if such transmissions turned out to exist. Then the second brother did die; and Alexander, of course, invented the telephone. He probably would have invented it anyway, and in fact remained a sceptic and a rationalist throughout his life — but only because his brothers never called: the desire was there, wired right into the handset, which makes the phone itself a haunted apparatus.

A similar, if more collective, story goes for radio. Little more, in the first decade of the 20th century, than an obscure ship-to-shore relay mechanism eavesdropped on by a handful of teenage “wireless bugs”, the medium burst into the public consciousness with the Titanic disaster. The ship had managed to send out an SOS before it went down, with the result that hundreds of passengers were rescued — indeed, many early newspaper reports emphasised this fact more than the loss of life. The inventor of wireless, Guglielmo Marconi, who was himself in mid-Atlantic passage at the time, was feted on his arrival in New York as a great saviour, while the share-price of his company shot through the roof. Yet as another literary critic, Jeffrey Sconce, points out in his book Haunted Media, as a result of this catastrophe-and-miracle-rolled-into-one, Marconi’s device would henceforth be inextricably linked to “the image of unfortunate souls spread across the icy void of the Atlantic”. When, a few years later, radio found a role in the first world war, the link was reinforced. As Sconce writes: “Orchestrated and reported by wireless, the appalling spectacle of trench warfare implicated the medium in another void of modernity, the barren expanses of what came to be called No Man’s Land. There’s even a novel from the period, by Grace Duffie Boylan, called Thy Son Liveth, in which a fallen radio operator transmits from the ether to (and here the family association rears its head once more) his mother.

Boylan’s book may be fanciful, but the belief that the airwaves crackled with the dead was widespread, even among rationalists. If, as we moderns now knew, our “soul” — what animates us — is a set of electric impulses, does it not make sense that these should pass into the air and be detectable, “receivable” by wireless? Oliver Lodge, distinguished physicist and frequent lecturer at the Royal Institution — no crackpot outfit, but the very seat of British scientific research — thought so. He wrote a whole book about “communications” he’d had, via psychic “operators”, with his own son Raymond, who’d died in the war. Séances grew exponentially in popularity (millions had, after all, lost their own Raymonds) and “upgraded” their vocabulary: where 19th-century mediums had used a rhetoric of “spirits”, new ones talked of “frequencies”, “signals” and “reception”.

C takes place, specifically, between 1898 and 1922. The dates aren’t accidental: they mark the period between Marconi’s early short-distance radio experiments and the founding of that centralised state broadcaster of entertainment, news and propaganda that we still know as the BBC. In 1922, Britain was erecting, in its colonial territory Egypt, the first long-distance pylons of its proposed imperial wireless chain — and as it went about this, it lost Egypt, which gained independence in February of that year. For ancient Egyptians, “pylons” were gateways to the underworld: these modern ones came to symbolise bereavement on a national scale. In November, also in Egypt, Howard Carter disinterred what would become the most famous family crypt of all time. 1922 was also modernism’s annus mirabilis, seeing the publication of The Waste Land, in which voices, dialogues and even weather reports drift in and out of audibility as its author-operator fiddles with his literary dial — and Ulysses, a huge textual switchboard in which the themes of death and media are plugged into each other time and again. As Leopold Bloom drifts from telegraph to post office, past advertising billboards to a newspaper printshop, he attends a funeral and ponders the possibility of placing gramophones in graves so that the dead might be revived in sound:

Put on poor old greatgrandfather. Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain hellohello amawf krpthsth . . .

Bloom himself has lost a son, in childhood. Whether in literature or life, a melancholy technologics runs through the whole period, and these couplings — pylon-tombs, dead voices crackling in the ether or scored into the grooves of records — crop up with a persistence verging on the obsessive.

The pinnacle of literary modernism, its most sophisticated and extreme achievement, is Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake, published 17 years after Ulysses as the world stood on the brink of a new orgy of technology and death. Impossible to summarise in a sentence, the Wake has been variously interpreted as the babble running through a dreamer’s head, a disquisition on the history of the world, ditto that of literature, a prophetic set of runes for our age, and a scatological tract so obscene that it had to be written in code to escape the censorship that had befallen Joyce’s previous novel. But whichever way you read it, two things are certain: first, that (as the word “Wake” would suggest) it’s a Book of the Dead, dotted with tombs and rites of mourning; and second, that the technological media people it at every level — telephones and gramophones, films and television and, above all, radio. We have “loftly marconimasts from Clifden” beaming “open tireless secrets . . . to Nova Scotia’s listing sisterwands”; we have a “contact bridge of . . . sixty radiolumin lines . . . where GPO is zentrum” (the post office was the site of Radio Eireann); we have “that lionroar in the air again, the zoohoohoom of Felin make Call”; we even have disembodied voices shouting to each other to “get off my air!” According to the Joyce scholar and poet Jane Lewty, co-editor of Broadcasting Modernism, “the Wake can best be understood as a long radio-séance, with the hero tuning into voices of the dead via a radio set at his bedside, or, perhaps, inside his head.” Perhaps, she concedes when I push the point with her, the “hero” might even be the radio set itself.

Listening to deathly voices in the dark, from Quixote’s moment on the hillside onwards, technologics has suggested, to those who want to listen to its broadcasts, a new, dynamic way of understanding literature — that is, of understanding what it is to write, who (or what) writes, and how to read it. 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.

Could Tom McCarthy, a 41-year-old Londoner with an experimental streak, be the future of fiction?

Tom McCarthy: ‘I haven’t read most contemporary British writers’ (Nick Cunard)

Less than a century ago, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf took the 19th-century realist novel and forged it into the blinding experimental thunderbolt of high modernism. Ninety years later, with more novels being published than ever, and most of them uniformly aiming for the same realist goal, it’s as if Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Mrs Dalloway had never happened. Where did the zeal for unfettered innovation go? Even in the brilliantly able hands of David Mitchell, Zadie Smith or Ian McEwan, the novel has regressed almost completely to its realist origins. With commercial expectations in publishing more desperate and unforgiving than ever, the room for experimentation has shrunk to virtually nil.

A recent book, Reality Hunger, by the American author David Shields, has generated febrile literary chatter about the novel’s future. Shields argues that the form, tied to phoney invention and creaky artifice, is no longer a viable medium for the tastes of the hyperconnected age, with its urge towards hybridisation and cross-pollination. Nonfiction — memoir, the lyric essay, rap, all freed from fiction’s dusty strictures — is where it’s at.

You can see novelists showing chronic signs of fiction fatigue. The twice Booker-winner and Nobel laureate JM Coetzee has strayed ever deeper into autobiography in his novels, and has rallied to Shields’s cry: “I, too, am sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings.” He was joined by Smith, who recently swore off writing another novel and, “out of exactly the kind of novel-nausea Shields describes”, decided to produce a collection of essays, Changing My Mind. “Novels,” she writes, “are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing — especially if you happen to have written one.”

Novelists, catching the mood of despair, are falling like flies, turning to what now appears as the verdant, promising land of nonfiction. This year alone, Chinua Achebe, Jonathan Safran Foer, Siri Hustvedt and Rupert Thomson have published nonfiction debuts. There are, of course, fiction writers of astounding virtuosity out there, such as Mitchell, McEwan or Hilary Mantel. But these novelists are, it is no disparagement to say, going through the motions. Where’s the novelty, the newness, that the novel promised in Joyce and Woolf’s hands? The contemporary novel’s not dead. It’s sleepwalking.

Then along comes Tom McCarthy. Forty-one, and born in London, McCarthy has stood until recently at the outer edges of the literary world. With his third novel, C, a supercharged, fizzingly written Bildungsroman about a morphine-addicted radio operator in the early decades of the 20th century, he is arguably about to take his place at its centre.

McCarthy’s debut, Remainder, relatively unheard of at the time, was hailed by Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books as the salvation of modern fiction, a work uniquely exhibiting the power “to shake the novel out of its present complacency”.

Yet when McCarthy originally finished the novel in 2001, it was turned down by every publisher he showed it to.

In it, a nameless man living in Brixton wins £8.5m damages for an unspecified accident and spends the lot re-creating an apartment block — complete with actors playing neighbours and passers-by — in which, he believes, he remembers once feeling “authentic”.

With its themes of re-enactment and repetition, Remainder was the 21st-century heir to JG Ballard’s Crash. But publishers were flatly unimpressed. “They went, ‘Well, it’s just not like a proper book,’” McCarthy recalls. “And I said, ‘Haven’t you read Beckett?’” To which their answer was, simply, no.

So, like Beckett, the novel instead found a home in Paris, where it was released by the art publisher Metronome Press, which in 2005 printed it in a limited edition and sold it as an art work. “You could buy it at the Tate bookshop or at the ICA,” McCarthy laughs, “but not at Waterstone’s. When Waterstone’s asked for it, the publisher said, ‘F*** off, you can’t have it.’” Having piqued the book world’s curiosity, the novel was finally bought by a small independent publisher in London, Alma Books, and by Random House in America. It became, by a circuitous route, a bestseller.

McCarthy is no conventional novelist. His friends are visual artists. He hasn’t read anything by McEwan or Mitchell. “The truth is,” he says, “I just haven’t read most contemporary British writers.” His influences are almost all non-British: Derrida, Baudrillard, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Heidegger, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman. His living role model is David Lynch: “His film Inland Empire has a much more literary logic than most mainstream fiction. Most contemporary artists are very literate. They’ve all read Beckett and Faulkner, or William Burroughs. A shocking number of writers haven’t.”

Author Zadie Smith has happily endorsed McCarthy’s work (Francesco Guidicini)

Though he’s primarily a novelist — “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. It’s what I grew up on” — it’s instructive that McCarthy is also an artist. In 1999, he founded a “semi-fictitious” art organisation, the International Necronautical Society. (Neatly, if ironically, the organisation is touted on the second page of Shields’s book as a touchstone for the future of art.) And it was from an art project performed by this organisation at the ICA in 2004 that C was born.

“Art at the moment is the kind of place where you can get away with that,” he says. “Publishers obviously want stuff that’s going to sell, but so much literature has become almost like this kind of vanity mirror where liberal culture can see itself reflected back. And I just don’t find that dynamic.”

McCarthy’s new novel is fascinating because, although it brims with literary allusions and symbols, it rockets along, too. Its protagonist, Serge Carrefax, is hurtled through history. He is based partly on Alexander Bell, the inventor of the telephone, and partly on Sergei Pankejeff, one of Freud’s case studies. “I think Freud’s a great novelist more than anything else,” he says, truly showing his modernist colours. “His case histories are like the most brilliant gothic fiction.”

If McCarthy — as Smith has suggested — presents a radically fresh prospect for the future of the novel, it is probably, paradoxically, because he has instinctively ignored contemporary literature almost completely. He would argue, in fact, that it is only by immersing oneself in all that has gone before that any contemporary novelist has even the faintest chance of coming up with something new. “I don’t think most writers, most commercial middlebrow writers, are doing that,” he says. “I think they’ve become too aligned with mainstream media culture and its underlying aesthetic of ‘self-expression’. 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.”

C is published by Jonathan Cape on August 5 at £16.99; Reality Hunger by David Shields is published by Hamish Hamilton at £17.99

[Document begins, includes Notes]

On 14 December 2009, the INS celebrated 10 years since the publication of its Founding Manifesto with a General Meeting in Open Session addressed by INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy.

The address strode quickly to the evening’s agenda, by-passing commentary on the INS’s past (… what would be the good of such a commentary? To count the scratches one has made across a strip of film assumes that one can stand outside the film and hang it up to dry, pegged by quotation marks. An error of scale and a conceptual failing too: the film is everywhere, always, already — and our aim should be to render it all scratches), past speculation on the INS’s future (To think necronautism … is to no longer have any future within which to think it), to enumerate five items as follows:

1. to reinstate Matt Parker to the post of INS Experimental Volunteer. Expelled in the 2003 Purges for the crime of ‘not being dead’, he replied, with impeccable integrity, by contracting cancer. Learning that he wouldn’t be cured, he demanded restitution to his post, then died. The Executive Council has approved this request, cum laude. Every angel is terrifying. Welcome back.

2. to respond to the demand submitted recently by Stewart Home, who professes to have attended every Hearing, Declaration, Publication and misc. held by the INS since its inception, and moves that his dedication to the INS’s cause is such that he was enacting it a good ten years before the founding of the INS. Home’s claim to have invented plagiarism is at once so preposterous and so compelling that the First Committee has been moved to recognise it, and hereby grants him the special privilege of an honorary expulsion.

3. Listen: the world is a sign of restless visibility greater than six miles.

4. Listen: Between cities, countries and continents we are going to crash.

5. Listen: Radio Essen, 102.2, from the Atlantic to the Ostsee. Mich aber umsummet die Bieen. Trumpets, Wupertaal. Reuters, down 48, IBM down .84, AT&T down .67. Its name: Cellscreen. Its tempo: twenty minutes for a 96-speed disc. The bees hum around me, and where the plowman makes his furrows, birds sing against the light.

Notes

1. The necronautical view on the future was elaborated in the INS Declaration on the Future, first read on …
2. A brief summary of past INS activities is available from the INS Department of Propaganda.
3. Official INS propaganda may be freely distributed, distorted, appropriated or adapted as the reader sees fit.

[Document ends]

Narration: Lorna Brown
Notes and Drawings: Elizabeth MacKenzie