RSSThomas Wharton, “The Art of Forgery, The Forgery of Art,” The Globe and Mail (Canada), Saturday 17 November 2007
On Jan. 1, 1993, the political entity known as Czechoslovakia peacefully came apart, though there was a very loud street party in Prague that New Year’s Eve. This historical moment, the culmination of the Velvet Revolution that bloodlessly ended Communist rule three years earlier (in Slovakia they called it the Gentle Revolution), forms the backdrop of Tom McCarthy’s second novel, Men in Space (after 2006’s Remainder), which centres on the theft and copying of a religious painting.
Exiled Bulgarian gangsters in Prague want a copy of the valuable medieval icon in order to distract the authorities while the real painting is smuggled out of the country, to the United States. This plot gives the novel a veneer of intrigue, and there are a couple of mysterious deaths along the way, but this is not a thriller in any conventional sense. There’s a mystery here, but one quickly starts to suspect that it’s an Austerian mystery, headed not toward a tidy solution but the posing of a larger enigma. The result is less a thriller than a brilliant if sometimes programmatic deconstruction of one.
For a mid-sized novel, the cast is large, sometimes confusingly so. There’s Anton Markov, a reluctantly conscripted gangster who commissions the forgery of the stolen icon; Ivan Manásek, a dissolute Prague artist who does the forging; Nick Boardaman, the English art student/model who rooms with Ivan; and among many others who might be mentioned, Joost van Straten, a Dutch art dealer who’s in Prague to scout new artists for an exhibition.
Then there’s the anonymous police wire-tapper assigned to surveillance duty in the case of the stolen icon. The increasingly disoriented reports he files as political change renders his activities obsolete become a kind of anguished chorus to the main action. Things fall apart: Central puts you on hold.
And literally hovering over everyone is the figure of an orbiting cosmonaut, who “went up a Soviet … and while he was up there the Soviet Union disintegrated,” leaving him stranded while the politicians argue over whose responsibility it is to bring him down. A Latvian sent up from Ukraine in a Russian rocket, the cosmonaut no longer has a country to return to. Now he is only a man in space.
For the most part, these characters remain isolated observers briefly tangled in a web of espionage and crime, though most of them fail to realize it. They party and do drugs and engage in casual sex. People meet, interact briefly and part as they move in their various trajectories, passive, hapless and more or less desireless.
At times, this reads like Pynchon Lite, though in the novel’s most arresting passages, McCarthy comes into his own, bringing his main characters to exhilarating moments of wider vision and possible, if elusive, transcendence.
Yet, in a way it misses the mark to talk about characters as the plot’s prime movers. More noteworthy in McCarthy’s writing is what one could call the mind of the novel itself, working by a sort of associative logic to link scenes and actors together.
One scene ends with one gangster complaining to another that they have been “turned right over” by a double-cross, and the next scene opens with the line, “In Kampa Park a statue has fallen from its plinth and broken.”
Events, objects, even people replicate one another in a self-referential echo chamber that renders each thing the double or copy of something else, until one realizes that the “originals” cannot be found. Story and form imitate each other: This tale of art theft and forgery becomes an agitated network of substitutions and absences.
The stolen icon, fittingly enough, serves as icon of this ever-deferred grasping after meaning. Its subject is unusual, as iconography goes, and several characters attempt and fail to read the story its arcane imagery seems to be trying to tell. To the paranoid police wire-tapper, the icon is an encrypted allegory of “the transmission and reception of signals.”
McCarthy’s 2007 collection of essays, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, helps illuminate his preoccupations in Men in Space. In his hyper-clever dissection of Hergé’s Tintin books, McCarthy interrogates their incessant fixation on garbled and coded messages, simulacra, secrets hiding in plain sight.
Tintin also reveals that Men in Space is a rewriting (okay, let’s call it a copy) of Balzac’s 1830 novella Sarrasine and Hergé’s The Broken Ear, both texts about the copying and forging of artworks. For McCarthy, the Tintin books are about “inauthenticity and various doomed attempts to overcome it.”
The same could be said of Men in Space.
Thomas Wharton is the author of the novels Icefields and Salamander, and the short fiction collection The Logogryph.