RSSToby Lichtg, “The Angle of Prague,” Times Literary Supplement 12 October 2007
Tom McCarthy’s clever new novel, Men in Space, is set in a fracturing post-Communist Europe, where ex- Soviet states are “veering apart like pool balls separating on the break”.
“Beginnings”, we are told, “of journeys, nations, lives — are always violent.” The men in space of the title could be most of the book’s collection of artists, students, crooks and critics, drifting around the new Europe, but specifically an astronaut, hanging over Earth, stranded in his capsule: “This guy went up as a Soviet, on a routine space mission, and then while he was up there the Soviet Union disintegrated. Now no one wants to bring him down”. The anecdote is told to amuse; but the isolation it evokes looms powerfully over the novel.
The plot revolves around a stolen icon painting, removed from a gallery in Sofia, stopping briefly in Prague to be copied before going to the United States. But the artwork is more than a plot device — it is the intellectual pivot of the novel.
“Icons”, we are told, “are cosmic maps. They conceive space metaphorically, as a series of levels leading into the world of the spirit.” The icon itself raises puzzles: the oddly elliptical halo of its saint is a possible nod to the Keplerian rotation of the planets; the “floating” and “unknown” saint himself; the motionlessness of the boats; the axonometric figures (”there’s no variation in their distance from the viewer”). There is a general sense of disembodiment to it, which seems to chime deeply with all who see it.
The action is mainly set in Prague.
McCarthy’s eye skims across the city, into bars and parties, over tourists “oozing and coagulating . . . like some dense, radioactive mass”, his ear attuned to the dissonance of languages at the New Year’s countdown to 1993 as Czechoslovakia prepares to fissure. The painting crosses the path of Anton, a Bulgarian football referee with a fondness for geometric physics. Anton enjoys discerning patterns. He muses about the components of a match — “the near-identical shirts, repeated runs, sudden departures” — as “one single movement, parts of a modulating system which you had to watch as though from the outside”. He marvels at the “lines and vectors” linking people. Slightly involved with the underworld (a murky “system linked by half-submerged chains”), he recommends an artist, Ivan, to copy the painting.
Ivan lives a bohemian life, sleeping around, forgetting to eat, drinking too much.
There is a long party scene set in his apartment, filled with dope, confusion and limbs tangled under duvets (here, the narrative, a mishmash of internal voices, slides briefly into an aloof, episodic prose reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis).
Sex for Ivan is isolating (sometimes isolated). High on magic mushrooms, he sits opposite his lover, not touching her: “it was precisely his not touching her that was getting her off . . . . It was as though an invisible third person . . . were transferring energy between them”. McCarthy has some fun with disembodiment. Nick, Ivan’s flatmate, has a brief liaison with a macabre medical student, who leads him into a dissecting room and shows him a selection of legs; they make love on the autopsy slab. All this floating and splintering is not as forbiddingly explicit as it sounds; and McCarthy does give us space to tease out the meanings of his metaphysical geometry — the angles of relation between beings and events, the dimensions of reality and verisimilitude.
Sometimes, however, especially before the novel picks up pace, the cleverness gets in the way. This is a work that benefits from a second reading.
Ivan completes his commission, and hands both paintings (the copy and the original) back to Anton. But the police have been bugging the culprits, and arrests are soon made. Though Anton is prepared to strike a deal with them, it turns out that both paintings are fakes (”it’s not a felony to possess a copy”).
As Anton’s dreams crumble, the original painting continues on its disruptive journey. By now, even the law has lost its sense of self. One of the most memorable characters in Men in Space is the officer who listens in on the offenders and whose deadpan account punctuates the narrative (”Subject opined that Czech liquor tastes like toilet water; Associate concurred”). Having boasted about his “place within the overall field of transmission”, he is taken off the now-defunct case, but cannot let it go. He starts to identify with his surveillance equipment, feels himself a part of the transmissions and “interference”, continues to send his dispatches pointlessly into the ether (”I’ve had no contact with the precinct now for weeks”).
The ending is a tribute to Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, as the fevered writer continues to emit while anticipating his own (resisted) end (”Soon I will stop. Soon . . .”). Like Beckett’s “unnameable”, he remains suspended between two worlds, hovering over the abyss. Tom McCarthy has drawn intelligently on his literary antecedent; but Men in Space is an original work in its own right, a confident and intelligent meditation on failed flights of transcendence.