The media’s coverage of Tom McCarthy’s new novel has been remarkable. Our esteemed cultural gatekeepers have, by and large, followed the guidance given them by the publisher and described C as a “modernist” or “experimental” or “difficult” novel. McCarthy himself is slightly more circumspect, telling The Observer that “I’m not trying to be modernist, but to navigate the wreckage of that project”. His jacket blurb, though, explicitly describes his work as being in the tradition of Beckett.
What he has actually written is a fairly conventional British historical novel, with the the customary bloat and boast of copious research, but lacking the formal invention and play that one would expect in anything described as modernist.
This dichotomy is tremendously interesting to me, and I want to spend a little bit of time thinking about why McCarthy has allowed his publishers to create this association.
When I think of modernist novelists, I think first of all of formal innovation of the type that readers of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil will be familiar with. And certainly one thinks later of Beckett in this same mould.
Just taking the writers I listed above, we find innovations like interior monologue, intertextuality, novelistic essay, digression and shifting narrator without having to think about for very long at all. The nearest McCarthy gets to a formal innovation is the interpolation of the odd letter and the pervasive use of the present tense.
We’re fond of labelling things, of course, because it gives us a sense that we know what we’re dealing with. Aha, we say, a modernist novel. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. But we’re also tremendously fond of applying labels as a mark of aspiration, sometimes not in a wholly dishonest way, in order to bask in the satisfying bloom of a connection with the work of those we admire. And of course critics love to assign labels, both pejorative and otherwise, because it prevents them from having to do the hard work of actual analysis. You’ll note that I did that very thing when I described C as a “very conventional British historical novel” a little earlier. I hope to give weight to my choice of labels in a little while.
What sort of author would allow their publisher to claim an artistic kinship with Beckett? The sort who had no say in the matter, perhaps? The sort who was happy enough to receive a highly flattering comparison but too timid to ask that it be suppressed in the interests of modesty? Or perhaps the sort whose estimation of their work far exceeded its actual quality. Or, finally, the sort who is actually producing work worthy of comparison to such a great forebear.
It’s impossible to be certain which one of these categories McCarthy fits in. Well, except the last; he definitely doesn’t fit there. A more modest, hell a more honest, author would have asked his publisher to tone it down a considerable amount.
Alright, so much for it being modernist. Is it good?
I say yes. It’s better than almost any Booker longlisted novel I’ve read in the last few years, with only J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime being significantly better. (It’s instructive to note the formal innovation that really is present in Summertime, incidentally.)
The basic theme is communication and what happens when it breaks down. Our hero is Serge Carrefax, whose mother is deaf and who was taught to speak by his father, an inventor who is particularly fascinated with radio. Serge develops a similar fascination.
In a crucial episode he witnesses his sister, Sophie, having sex, although he seems unaware of what is actually happening, despite the fact that, as we shall see, it leaves an indelible mark on his sexuality. There’s a very subtle suggestion that it was his father who was her sexual partner. It’s possible that I’ve imagined this entirely, largely prompted by the sudden appearance of the word “incest” in the last few pages of the novel. Whoever her partner was, she soon loses her grip on reality – this is another major theme – and takes cyanide. Perhaps importantly, Serge twice gives false accounts of her death, although in both cases there is a poetic truth to his explanation.
She was pregnant at the time of her suicide, and her foetus appears to have passed to Serge in the form of chronic constipation, for which he seeks treatment in a Czech spa town. Here McCarthy establishes a pattern that will be followed in each subsequent section of the book: Serge arrives, meets and screws a girl, builds towards some kind of crisis, is hit by the crisis, he moves on.
Every time he screws a girl, he does it from behind. This is the position that he observed his sister having sex in. I suppose that this is meant to remind us how important an event in Serge’s life this was but I think, for reasons I’ll come to, that this doesn’t really work. It also suggests that Serge is unwilling to open himself to a richer form of communication in his love making, which would be made possible with eye contact.
The entire book is quite frequently very funny, especially in its wordplay on misheard words – another instance of the communication theme – and a couple of wonderful set pieces, and the tone is consistently beautifully ironic. The comic highlight is Serge’s disruption of a seance with a piece of radio equipment which enables him to tell the audience that the medium is a fraud by communicating it through her tipping table. It’s a superb piece of comic writing which is also germane to the theme: the seance is fake communication, and Serge’s disruption of it is truthful communication.
The description of Serge’s sister having sex is also tremendously funny, as we gradually piece together what is happening based on McCarthy’s use of free indirect style to show it to us through Serge’s young eyes. Much as I enjoyed that, though, I wondered how much the comic nature of the description detracted from the obviously vital importance of the act to Sophie and to Serge.
From the spa town – in which he witnesses an argument between nationals of the countries soon to be setting their differences from the discomfort of trenches – he heads to the Air Force. Here his responsibility is to communicate – the theme, again – with his artillery to instruct them where to shell. The authenticity theme is here again, in the form of a carefully staged simulacrum of a German gun emplacement. Later, he goes to the rear and finds a group of technicians experimenting with various means of detecting the Germans’ positions with sound waves. Communication again.
In this section, the text is littered with encoded messages that he sends to base, and we are forced to recognise the research that a contemporary realistic novelist is expected to have done. I’m not sure why making things up should be something a novelist would try to disclaim; perhaps it’s a comfort blanket they huddle in to protect themselves from the claim that their plot isn’t credible. I suppose if you set out to be a realist then you might as well do it properly, but there’s a logical extreme to this which ends in a place that can’t be good for the novel. Unfortunately, the obviously researched pieces of the novel are easily the worst passages.
It is while with the Air Force that Serge becomes addicted to drugs. As a result of these drugs – another aspect of the authenticity theme – he fails to react appropriately when his plane comes under attack, can’t communicate with his pilot, causing them to crash, killing the pilot. He’s captured and imprisoned. This is the easily the weakest section of the novel, concluding with a rather clichéed section in which he faces a firing squad which is called off at the very last minute thanks to the armistice. There’s also the rather troubling fact that he shows absolutely no remorse for the pilot’s death.
From the war, Serge heads back to London where his drug-taking starts to assume an even more dominant part in this life. By now there’s a Gumpish feel to the way that Serge is present at important events, in this case the drug-enhanced roaring ’20s. From there, he heads to Egypt to work on the British Empire’s communications networks. This occurs in 1922, a key year in modernism as several reviewers have reminded us, although any connection with the publication of Ulysses or The Waste Land is undetectable to me.
Again, this section deals with authenticity, this time through the ancient Egyptians’ practice of creating a fake burial chamber in order to fool looters into thinking they had found the real thing. Perhaps understandably, McCarthy is unable to resist the temptation to mention that avatar of communication, the Rosetta Stone. By this stage, the communication theme is well and truly banged in.
While having sex with a woman he has just met – from behind of course – Serge is stung by something (a scorpion?) which eventually induces delirium, and with it the authenticity theme is back. It’s during this delirium that the incest suggestion flashes by. It’s easy to see how incest could be considered fake, or at least illegitimate, communication. But I might equally be doing a little bit too much decoding here.
C – which one rather lumpish bit of dialogue suggests stands for carbon, the basic building block of all life – is a very well written and enjoyable novel. But it is not in any sense experimental or modernist. Perhaps it’s just people trying to sell books, and nothing sells books like a bit of a literary todo – Gabriel Josipovici has recently published a stinging critique of the big beasts of British letters called Whatever Happened to Modernism? and it fits nicely in with that kerfuffle.
The problem with that approach is that it causes one to lose respect for the author, whose hubris is frankly pretty repugnant, and it overshadows one’s experience of the book, because there’s a frustration at its conventionality which wouldn’t otherwise be there absent these claims to difficulty and formal innovation. If you want a modernist-inflected novel written by a British author, may I recommend Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant The Unconsoled, perhaps the best British novel of the last 20 years. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an amusing, well written, conventional literary historical novel, C is an excellent choice.
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