C
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The acclaimed author of Remainder, which Zadie Smith hailed as “one of the great English novels of the past ten years,”gives us his most spectacularly inventive novel yet. Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world.After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he’s recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain. All of which eventually carries Serge to a fitful—and perhaps fateful—climax at the bottom of an Egyptian tomb . . . Only a writer like Tom McCarthy could pull off a story with this effortless historical breadth, psychological insight, and postmodern originality.The Barnes & Noble ReviewPerhaps I shouldn't complain about artifice undermining realism at the end. I know (from McCarthy's book on Tintin) that he believes "realism" in fiction means copying documents, such as biographies or other novels, that report the real. But McCarthy's impressive achievement in most of C is balancing the conventional discourse of social and psychological fiction with what Serge calls "streaming information," those irregular metaphoric bursts which may be signal, may be noise, may be encrypted message. Although I've tried in my description to preserve McCarthy's balance of traditional story and occasionally dense style, ultimately it's his inventive streaming -- of technologies, literary texts, codes, and cultural theories, of clicking "c's" and hissing "s's" -- that distinguish the novel and will bring readers back again and again to C, which happens to be the periodic chart's symbol for carbon, the "'basic element of life.'"
