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 At this point, consider what McCarthy has done. Working in tight circles, his narrative goes almost nowhere, but purposely so. The level of detail is absolutely maddening, but few characters are brave enough to challenge the emcee of this surreal show for fear of losing their hefty paycheck. The characters do not develop, and there are no subplots other than the narrator’s obsession with coffee chain loyalty cards, which is merely typical. The only focus of the reader’s attention is the narrator’s stasis within madness.
Reviewed by Nora Mahony
Remainder
by Tom McCarthy
Metronome Press
272 pages, English edition, ISBN 2-916262-00-8, € 8,50
By the time that this review is posted, still more readers, and indeed critics, will have devoured this book, though we should take note of the readers’ opinions. For in the case of Remainder by Tom McCarthy, most of those ‘in the know’ have already gotten it wrong. Having tried and failed to rise above the slush piles of the major houses here, London resident McCarthy had to hock it abroad, landing his manuscript on the welcoming desk of the multitasking, multinational Metronome Press in Paris. Only when it was spotted by the eagle eyes of Richmond-based independent Alma Books did it attain the acclaim it so deserves, acclaim that readers have been heaping upon it since its initial publication.
The premise of the book is, it must be said, uninspiring and a hard sell: our unnamed narrator is recovering from a dreadful accident of which he has no memory. We meet him once he has learned to walk again, and learned that he will receive £8.5 million for his troubles from the unnamed responsible party. The opening pages are tough going, as they focus on stasis, his shaken mind and the concept of Settlement (always with a capital ‘s’), monetary and otherwise. One can understand full well why it met with distrust in editorial departments across the city, but they were wrong to distrust a writer so capable or so visionary.
Once the money comes through, the narrator is unsure as to what to do next. A patient if bewildered lawyer recommends another kind soul in the form of an accountant to lay the groundwork for financing the rest of his life. That is the tone of the novel henceforth: the money has brought a beginning, but equally an end. What lies ahead is a remainder, the remainder of the narrator’s shattered life and a gaping void of interest, motivation or a sense of how he relates to anything or anyone around him.
The title is the motivating force behind the entire narrative, though it is easily forgotten as the bizarre story unfolds, or rather, folds incessantly in on itself, enclosing the narrator in an exponentially diminishing world. The devil, as they say, is in the details, and one fragment of a memory begins the chase and seals the narrator’s fate. He senses, for the first time that he has seen something before. It is a crack in a bathroom wall, but as becomes apparent with the other minutiae that thrill and fulfil him, it is completely irrelevant what spurs his memory.
The narrator decides that as he has the means to do so, his only memory it warrants pursuing- not the real thing, the origin of the real memory, but rather, he seeks to recreate what little he remembers. Before the reader has really grasped why this makes an appropriate way forward, the outline of the project begins to form:
I was going to recreate it: build it up again and live inside it. I’d work outwards from the crack I’d just transcribed… but my bathroom wasn’t the right shape… I’d need to buy a new flat… And then the neighbours… the old woman who cooked liver on the floor below, the pianist two floors below her… I’d have to make sure they were there too. The concierge as well, and all the other, more anonymous neighbours: I’d have to buy a whole building, and fill it with people who’d behave just as I told them to.
As with all of McCarthy’s writing, you get taken by the ruse as you ponder the narrator’s sanity 65 pages in, and how this can’t possibly be where the book is heading. We, like the narrator, don’t truly believe until we meet the novel’s greatest character, possibly the most remarkable of recent contemporary fiction: Naz, an easily-pictured sharp Londoner of Indian extraction, impeccable in his appearance and moreso in his ability to solve problems immediately and unquestioningly. His role is undefined and indefinable: a facilitator of sorts, his company’s remit is to sort things out for their clients. Any thing. Any client.
With Naz masterminding the practicalities in that silent, omnicompetent yet servile way you suspect that people are referring to when they speak of ‘good help’, the narrator is free to decree new and ever more specific alterations to perfect his vision. McCarthy weaves an existentialist’s cat’s cradle. Each mundane action is repeated endlessly at the rich narrator’s whim, so that a perfect recreation of the past soon creates new and unforeseen problems: the old woman’s constant frying of produces an unthinkable amount of fat in the ventilation system, and the cats, remembered as mincing across the facing red-tiled roof begin to fall at a rate of four daily, but so they must continue. The single-mindedness of the narrator is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying as he pulls the strings of his on-call team of actors like a merciless puppetmaster.
The search for perfection is a strong and insatiable passion, and the narrator’s appetite for more specific, more choreographed projects for recreation knows no bounds. Combined with limitless funds, the potential for more re-enactments is, seemingly, endless, and the idea of infinity certainly hovers on the horizon later in the story. At this point, consider what McCarthy has done. Working in tight circles, his narrative goes almost nowhere, but purposely so. The level of detail is absolutely maddening, but few characters are brave enough to challenge the emcee of this surreal show for fear of losing their hefty paycheck. The characters do not develop, and there are no subplots other than the narrator’s obsession with coffee chain loyalty cards, which is merely typical. The only focus of the reader’s attention is the narrator’s stasis within madness.
McCarthy’s talent is witnessed by the fact that the reader comes to this conclusion only too late. You will be left, unsurprisingly, feeling that you got caught up in the details and missed out on the broader themes, including the author’s wry criticism of consumerism and wealth and what they mean today. You will want, in short, to reread it again and again. Remainder should have an appeal far beyond the limited label of ‘cult classic’, one it surely already bears. This truly may be the best novel of recent years: universal, translatable and with an unnerving sidelong glance at modern culture, it is the work of a powerful writer who may have only just begun.
About the reviewer: Nora Mahony is a misplaced Dubliner of Washingtonian origin. She is currently working in publishing in London, where she is a member of the Society of Young Publishers. A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin in Italian and French, she is a frequent contributor to the Irish Times and The Times Literary Supplement, and is seeking to expand her reviewing repertoire. Nora has also written copy for a range of art and design books over the past year, something that she is ill qualified to do but enjoyed nonetheless. www.thesyp.org.uk
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