RSSRemainder, review, Slates 23 November 2007
Tom McCarthy’s success is an ostensibly British peculiarity in a best-sellers chart populated by conspiracy novels and against all odds tales of domestic abuse. Much like Booker Prize winners Martin Amis, Julian Barnes or Salman Rushdie, McCarthy, a fellow male Oxford alumnus, writes with a set of openly academic ideas in mind. Remainder, his first novel, is concerned with the particulars of artistic genesis and its implications upon notions of identity and history; so far, so analogous.
Except this isn’t the first novel McCarthy has technically ever written. Men In Space, a reworked piece and recently published to a similarly warm reception, was penned, albeit in a revised form, some years prior to Remainder. In fact the majority of the reading public are lucky to be able to obtain a copy of Remainder at all. Save the rave reviews it received on its initial publication on Paris based indie Metronome Press, McCarthy had previously struggled to generate any interest in the novel with any of the major publishing houses. That is of course until the recently formed Alma Books decided to take the title on last year, whereupon the book exploded and McCarthy has been turning down lucrative offers for its rights ever since.
What is more interesting is the fact that Remainder has achieved its high status in the charts without any assistance from cynical marketing campaigns, and without the blessings of either the aforementioned Booker Prize, nor indeed that other highly sought after literary accolade, the Richard & Judy Official Book Club Cover Sticker of Approval. All of which begs the question: Why on earth are we being force fed coffee table adornments when the real stimulants are so close to hand? Regardless, the novel’s value remains unaffected as a unique and challenging work in its own right.
Typically, Remainder’s unconventional character is expressed principally through its form, a narrativeless, first person affair where little happens in standard terms. There are no problems or solutions as such, just ideas to be explored indefinitely. At the beginning of the novel the unnamed narrator is awarded eight and half million pounds in an out of court settlement, after an accident that ‘involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits.’ The details of which remain undisclosed as a condition of his compensatory fee. Following this he attempts to meticulously re-enact past events, starting with rebuilding a block of flats from his memory’s specification, and by hiring a cast of extras to live there and recapitulate certain events (putting out the rubbish, frying liver, fixing a motorbike) as he somewhat dubiously remembers them. ‘Dubiously’, because these re-enactments are based upon a memory, triggered from a sense of dejà vu that he is unable to qualify as one of his own: ‘I searched back into the past, right back to when I’d been a child. No use, I couldn’t place this memory at all.’
Such ideas strike at the very heart of Remainder’s core theme of genesis, both of the artistic, personal and historical kinds. From the outset we are presented with the idea of history and personal identity as being defined through a process of suppression and denial. From this notion stems the narrator’s project itself, which is an attempt to mimic the subjectivity of the world around us, and one that undermines the very notion of the existence of originatory genesis whatsoever. In effect, and in challenge to classical conceptions, each moment becomes a memesis of a memesis; a wry joke that McCarthy exploits to full potential when one of his re-enactments is eventually transformed into a real event.
In terms of style Remainder’s measured and lean prose is a response to McCarthy’s overtly literary peers’ use of obscure language, and partially explains the novel’s success. Nevertheless, the novel is complex and reads like a character from Samuel Beckett’s trilogy narrating a book written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, as McCarthy’s narrator’s obsessive description of his exterior reality takes on a fractured psychology of its own. Moreover, a dark sense of humour permeates throughout this work due to this, but one is never completely certain as to what extent we are meant to sympathise with his isolated and detached worldview.
Accordingly, Remainder, like all good British novels, is being made into a film, currently in production by Film 4. Quite how they plan to shoot the novel and remain true to the concept of the book is beyond me, as so much of it relies on the form of the work as a sort interior monologue that lends structure and reason to the main character’s seemingly illogical behaviour. Whatever the case, Remainder is one of the best novels to come out Britain in the last ten years, if not more so, and is deserving of every credit given to it.
Tom McCarthy is also mentioned in another Slates article entitled “Brit Lit of the Post-Punk Generation” (about the Offbeat Generation).