World Books Review: Tom McCarthy’s C

For all of the faults in this novel, which is on the shortlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, one can’t help but keep turning the pages. Tom McCarthy explores a darkness that is unpleasant, tedious, and disturbing, but also timely and fascinating.

C by Tom McCarthy. Alfred A Knopf, 2010, 310 pages, $26.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

Per Martin Amis’ recommendation, I typically read books for review with a pen or pencil in hand. Whenever a sentence strikes me as being particularly interesting, I mark it with a vertical line along the margin. Then, after I’ve finished the book, I transcribe all the relevant lines into a document, for reference during the actual composition of the review. While the number of lines thus transcribed doesn’t necessarily correspond with my opinion of the book, it’s seldom the case that a book without many worthwhile quotations ends up getting a glowing write-up.

The new novel from Tom McCarthy, entitled simply C, has the opposite problem. I have three full, single-spaced pages of quotes, and yet I’ve no idea what to make of the book. Its contents are as enigmatic as its title, and though McCarthy proves himself on every page a writer of profligate talent, the overall effect of the book is hard to name. Just what exactly is McCarthy getting at?

C concerns itself primarily with Serge Carrefax, a child born around the turn of the 20th century who, like Forrest Gump, ends up taking part in many of the era’s most important movements. He’s the son of a scientist deeply involved in pumping technology into society. He retires to an Eastern European spa for some Thomas Mann inspired taking of the waters. He is in the English Air Force during World War I. He wanders about with the demimonde of London, becoming a heroin addict in the process. He travels to Egypt with an archaeological expedition. What an entertaining catalog of adventures! Where’s Tintin when you need him?

The only problem is that Serge is not a character, but a cipher (to make use of McCarthy’s alliterative trope). More than that, he’s a sociopath. At two points in the novel, McCarthy draws attention to Serge’s erection: first, during his sister’s funeral, and second, while engaging in a dogfight during World War I. As a child, upon learning that his sister has become sexually involved with a man more than twice her age, “Serge is overtaken by a sudden sense of vertigo—as though the surface of the path he’s standing on, and of the lawn and flower beds around it, had all turned to glass, affording him a glimpse into a subterranean world of which he’s been completely unaware till now although it has been right beneath his feet: a kind of human wasp-nest world with air-filled corridors and halls and hatching rooms.” Serge is immaculately incapable of dealing with human emotion. Instead, he sees everything through the lens of technology.

If McCarthy has any kind of thesis, it is that even those technologies that purport to bring people together end up having an atomising social effect. Here’s Serge listening in on a homemade radio receiver to a distress call from a sinking ship:

“The Admiralty put a message out instructing amateurs to stop blocking the air. Serge ignored the order, but lost the signal beneath general interference…and heard…among its breaks and flecks, the sound of people treading cold, black water, their hands beating small disturbances into waves that had come to bury them.”

It’s no longer legitimate to speak of “likeable” or “unlikeable” characters, but Serge is a truly harrowing protagonist.

Author Tom McCarthy: He writes better sentences than Thomas Pynchon.

I didn’t read McCarthy’s well-received first novel, Remainder, so I took it upon myself to at least read about it. What I learned, primarily, is that McCarthy is an “avant-garde” writer. Now, excusing the fact that this proverbial “garde” seems never to actually arrive, this does force one to read McCarthy in a new light.

C is meant to mirror Pynchon’s genre-defining V in numerous important respects—the stint in Egypt, the bohemian urbanites, the imposition of war, even the references to radio frequency (Pynchon suggested that the famous Kilroy drawing was actually a schematic for a type of radio filter)—which is all very clever, yet it seems to no greater purpose than to set McCarthy up as Pynchon’s literary inheritor. Far from a gentle referential nod, this is more like headbanging.

Thankfully, McCarthy greatly surpasses Pynchon as a writer of sentences, which more than redeems the occasional dullness. Here are two descriptions of the sun, the first from during Serge’s time in the air force, the second from his Egyptian expedition:

“The sun, rising behind hills, is tearing the mist into gauzy shreds.”

“As afternoons run into evenings, [the sun] becomes so saturated with the toxins all around it that it can no longer hold itself up and, grown heavy and feeble, sinks. Serge watches it die time and time again, watches its derelict disc slip into silvery, metallic marshland, where it drowns and dissolves.”

Serge is allowed such flights of descriptive fancy because of his status as observer, and the novel is the better for them. However, it is no insignificant trade-off.

While C features a strong thematic foundation, as well as dazzling flights of description, it features almost nothing in the way of either characterization or psychological insight. Instead, one is treated to page after page of explanations such as this one:

“The detector’s brass with an adjusting knob of ebonite; the condenser’s Murdock; the crystal, Chilean gelina quartz, a Mighty Atom mail-ordered from Gamage of Holborn. For the telephone, he tried a normal household one but found it wasn’t any use unless he replaced the diaphragms, and moved on to a watch-receiver-pattern headset wound to a resistance of eight and a half thousand ohms.”

Though McCarthy shares Pynchon’s penchant for torturous, deliberate dullness, he is also blessed with Pynchon’s talent for making the incomprehensible wildly entertaining. For all of the faults of C, one can’t help but keep turning the pages. McCarthy is exploring a darkness that is unpleasant, tedious, and disturbing, but also timely and fascinating.

At the spa, before taking part in a war that he will unapologetically enjoy, Serge is forced to wander about carrying a jar of his own feces, for study by the staff doctor. He muses about the impossibility of salvation, of being healed by anything as simple as spring water:

“…all the water that’s gushed through the Mir since its inception would never purify him, wash his dark bile away, because the water’s dark as well. It’s bubbled up from earth so black that no blessing could ever lighten it, been filtered through the charcoaled wrecks of boats and tumour-ridden bones of murdered ancestors, through stool-archives and other sedimented layers of morbid matter.”

It is psychological determinism of the most pernicious sort, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The laws of physics, the language of science, have always better served the cause of pessimists than that of optimists. Which is to say, it isn’t one’s mentality that eventually causes the glass to be seen as half empty. It’s evaporation.

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Tommy Wallach is a writer and musician, and more of his work can be found here.