RSSTheo Tait, “C by Tom McCarthy,” The Sunday Times 25 July 2010
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.