RSSJosé Teodoro, “Stars, Art and Politics Mix in Men in Space,” The Edmonton Journal, Sunday 17 February 2008
Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space unfolds as 1992 gives way to 1993, Czechoslovakia divides itself into two separate nations, and a lonesome cosmonaut hovers up between the stars while earthbound bureaucrats argue over who should accept responsibility for his return. Moving along this azimuth of transition are several characters who converge in Prague. Many are young, bohemian, searching for direction, their youth itself a state of tumultuous transition. All are connected by a single endeavour: the forging of an icon painting, stolen by exiled Bulgarians and bound for the United States.
What drives Men in Space is a single grand theme: every scene is imbued with some imaginative variation on our compulsion to replicate, and the strange results replication yields. This theme was also central to McCarthy’s comical, ultimately disturbing and altogether dazzling debut novel Remainder, in which the recently brain-injured protagonist becomes increasingly obsessed with stage managing reenactments of whatever seemingly banal events he can recall from his pre-accident life, events that hold within them some obscure hint of significance that only becomes more tauntingly elusive once the moments are reenacted.
McCarthy’s followup should not be mistaken for a replica of its predecessor. Rather, it’s an impressive expansion of the novelist’s considerable, unconventional powers. Here, McCarthy’s narrative voice diversifies with his cross-section of narrators, while his very loose storyline is grounded in recent history. The book’s enigmatic appeal here is drawn from a number of interesting sources: the surprisingly warmly depicted relationships; a kinship with the dialectical concerns of modern art that comes across in numerous strikingly linked images, such as those of the novel’s two deaths, one a fall from a skylight, the other a fall through ice; the author’s winning ear for linguistic folly amongst the international cast; and an unusual knack for associational riffing that just makes the novel’s underlying ideas richer, more inviting, as it goes along. Men in Space defies concise summary, and, as you can probably tell, it makes for a heady read, definitely short of plot and long on digression, but also fun, full of intrigue, humour, casual sex, social critique. It even slips in a stirring interrogation scene near the climax.
As McCarthy weaves from narrator to narrator, some of the strongest moments emerge from the reports composed by a police spy, someone forced by his position to be always outside of the proceedings and compelled to interpret what’s going on for his superiors, for himself — for us readers, too. He writes about the process of “mutated repetition” that inevitably intrudes upon the art forger’s work, as well as his own work of listening and copying the conversations of strangers. And I think if there’s any one motif that will resonate most with readers of Men in Space it’s this cycle of questioning our ability to replicate or recreate what’s already passed. McCarthy proposes that we’re seemingly condemned to always be looking back, and doing so, we’re forced to always be catching up with life, as it hurtles forward into vertiginous space.
José Teodoro is a former Edmonton playwright now living in Toronto