Remainder

Given the hoo-ha surrounding Tom McCarthy narrowly missing out on the Man Booker Prize this year, it is safe to say that his literary celebrity is now confirmed. I haven’t read C but I have read Remainder, a book considered by many to be better. Declaimed as “One of the great English novels of the past ten years” by Zadie Smith in a 2008 New York Review of Books essay, it is an interesting, idiosyncratic read. As for greatness: time will be the judge.

It tells the story of an unnamed man who is the unfortunate victim of an unknown accident, about which all he knows is that it was: “something falling from the sky.” Hospitalized and in a coma for a number of months, the protagonist (or “enactor” as Smith labels him) is forced to relearn how to use his body and to recover the function of his right-hand side. This process causes him to feel inauthentic: as if his actions were somehow second-hand or acted. In exchange for his silence, the victim is paid eight-and-a-half million pounds by an unnamed, Kafkaesque organization. Unsure of how to spend the money and dizzied by déjà-vu, the man remembers vague scenes from his life, which he decides to have meticulously reconstructed and acted out by an army of people he employs with his new-found riches. Only inside these sets can he feel real: a sensation which physically manifests as tingling in his right side. As time passes, his re-enactment fetish becomes an obsession, and the events he chooses to re-enact more and more perilous, unhinged.

Praised for its “imaginative brilliance” by The Telegraph, the book owes an obvious debt to Samuel Beckett in its laconic, anti-lyric style and its plot reminded me of 2008 film Synecdoche, New York and the J.G. Ballard’s classic, Crash. McCarthy himself has mentioned Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pécuchet, in which two Quixotic figures re-enact gestures from book illustrations in vain bids for imagined authenticity” – so the “imaginative brilliance” isn’t quite as absolute as suspected. It is a really great idea, though, and one that raises interesting questions that are at once philosophical and about the novel itself. Failed transcendence is a favourite theme of the author.

One thing that I will say is that the repetitive style – where whole phrases or details are repeated many times – is trying after a hundred-or-so pages. One yearns for more detail, more information and the meticulous descriptions of texture and the enactments kills some of the momentum built up in the book’s first part. This is partly a legacy of the Francophile McCarthy’s love of Robbe-Grillet and the avant-garde and partly an accurate reflection of the trauma-trashed brain of the protagonist: a necessary evil. Style is not really the point, anyway.

McCarthy has said his job as an avant-garde writer is to “navigate the wreckage of [the modernist] project”, and for that, in today’s anodyne literary environment, he must be applauded. The book is brilliantly controlled and bursting with ideas and questions quite different to those found in much middlebrow (or even highbrow) fiction today. Just don’t believe he is as original as some people say – or some of the hyperbole spoken about this book; provocateurs get extreme reactions. Have a read and make your own mind up.