C by Tom McCarthy

It may be ‘Joycean’ in its ambition; but will C wow the Booker judges?

Londoner Tom McCarthy’s new novel, C, has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and it is already attracting acute critical attention. Writing in The Telegraph, Tim Robey described it as “a novel about the airwaves – about signals and significance, human voices and human lives leaving their mark in the early days of wireless telegraphy”. The main character, Serge Carrefax, is “born at the turn of the 20th century to a deaf mother and a father obsessed with the possibilities of radio,” Robey explained. Serge “finds himself at the vanguard of the new technological dawn, serving in the First World War as a radio operator on airborne recon missions, before coming back down to earth with a bump. With this naif as its oblivious, emotionally shell-shocked hero, the novel is a kind of futurist Bildungsroman – it speeds ahead into the new century, but also surveys from its cockpit the lingering vapour trails of planes shot down and lives curtailed before their time.”

Reviewing the novel in The Guardian, Christopher Tayler found “something you don’t see every day: a novel steeped in both high modernism and continental philosophy that’s being rolled out as a publishing event in the UK and US.” Tayler is not wrong about the expectation surrounding the novel’s publication. Ladbrokes has put McCarthy at 5/1 to win the Booker, according to The Bookseller.

Peering more closely at the book, Tayler found in C “a 1960s-style anti-novel that’s fundamentally hostile to the notion of character and dramatises, or encodes, a set of ideas concerning subjectivity.” But although Tayler found the “near-Joycean scale and density . . . truly impressive” – not to mentioned McCarthy’s ”ability to fold it into a cleanly constructed narrative” – the reviewer felt that the “mind-blowingness as a reading experience depends on the reader’s appetite for certain types of analysis. Armed with various concepts from Heidegger, Freud or Paul Virilio, say, it would be possible to unpick its implications more or less indefinitely, but there’s a dispiriting feeling that the book has been reverse-engineered with an eye to achieving just that.”

In a New Statesman interview with Stuart Evers, McCarthy denied that C is a “historical novel”. “Maybe you get some of that as a side effect,” he remarked, “but I’m more interested in something that’s at the same time very contemporary and very ancient, which is the relationship between language and technology and the human subject.”

McCarthy has been doing the interview rounds of late – another example of the hope invested by the media in his new novel. And in a heart-to-heart with Gregory Cowles of The New York Times, he spoke of his recent residency at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, and the effect that this might have on his future writing. “One critic described ‘Remainder’ as a French novel written in English; well, by that token, ‘C’ is my German novel,” said McCarthy. “What the next one will be is anyone’s guess. Swedish, maybe…”

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