Book Review: C

Published on Wednesday 25 August 2010 15:51

C Tom McCarthy Jonathan Cape, £16.99

TO SAY that there were high hopes for Tom McCarthy's C is an understatement. McCarthy's debut, Remainder, was rightly described by Zadie Smith as "one of the great English novels of the past ten years". It very elegantly embodied the most daring ideas riffled from contemporary French philosophy in stark prose which reflected its protagonist's awful, bemused clarity.

The good news is that C is a very good book indeed. The caveat is that McCarthy will probably do better.

The title, so seemingly simple, is a constellation of meanings. It's the chemical symbol for carbon, the lifeless building block of life, and the physical constant of the speed of light. It's one half of "cc", reiterating McCarthy's interest in repetition and reproduction, and one half of the measurement of an engine's power. It's the simplest musical key, without flats or sharps. It's the place that you go from A to B via. All these meanings shimmer across the novel, a bold and ambitious book which at its heart is a postmodern examination of how modernism came to be.

The novel's hub is Serge Carrefax, a young man born into the 20th century. His upbringing is baroque: his father teaches the deaf, his deaf mother runs a silk factory. Both are concerned with lines: lines of poetry which the schoolchildren must enunciate, lines of fibre teased out from silkworm cocoons. Serge becomes an enthusiast for radio, and his world seems drenched in secret messages, hidden meanings. After a family trauma, he is sent to a sanatorium; enlists in the air force as an observer; becomes a cocaine addict and a debunker of spiritualists in inter-war London; and finally assists in the assembly of a network of radio transmitters in Egypt - the forerunner for the BBC.

Images of webs and machines proliferate across his story; in Egypt he helps excavate a site associated with Thoth, "the god of secret writing", whose name is misheard as Tod, German for death. In the crypt, newspapers and papyri are jumbled together, everything is plundered except disease, and the novel winks again at the great line of TS Eliot's where he summarised the whole aesthetic project of Modernism: "these fragments I have shored against my ruin".

McCarthy has adopted a heightened form of prose from Remainder. The vocabulary is more abstruse without losing its precision; the syntax is more fractured and unspooling. He mixes the poetic and the demotic, the archaic and slang. There is a clear debt to the kind of historical writing Thomas Pynchon pioneered in both Mason & Dixon and Against The Day. On my first reading of the novel, I was slightly concerned that there is a lack of momentum in Serge's story, although it could be argued that a form of listlessness and lack of direction is his defining, blank quality. He does not seem to will his future.

In retrospect, I think McCarthy is going further. He suggests that the entire period, and Serge as its un-surging symbol, is like an electrical circuit being put together, but without the means to activate it. Modernism, he seems to argue, built the machine but it was the postmodernists who flicked the switch to "on".

McCarthy is one of the most intelligent and talented novelists of our generation. Future scholars will argue over whether C is the end of his apprenticeship or the beginning of his mature period.

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on August 29, 2010