FictionThe story of how Tom McCarthy's Remainder made it into the mainstream has captured as much attention as the plot contained within.
Turned down by British publishers, 750 copies were printed by small Parisian house Metronome. Word of mouth, web critics and eagle-eyed bloggers talked it up as something special. There followed some newspaper reviews that declared it to be, among other things, verging on a modern classic.
In the meantime, new independent British publisher Alma bought the book, while Vintage captured it for the US market. Without the reader opening a page, this book already tells a tale of how oddball fiction and potential classics slip through the fingers of publishers far more interested in mass market pap and established names.
But what about the fiction? In Remainder, an unnamed man suffers an accident. Something falls from the sky. He cannot say what that was, largely because the £8.5 million settlement stipulates this. Waking from a coma and spending months piecing together his own movements, painstakingly, one nervous command after another, he becomes obsessed with re-enacting particular episodes of his life. It is a way of redefining authenticity in a world in which he has emerged very rich and very bored.
He begins by buying two apartment blocks and recreating an occasion of his life that he cannot quite pinpoint, but during which he lived in a flat, below which a woman cooked liver, a faltering pianist provided the soundtrack, and cats strolled the roofs.
He hires builders, set designers, cat handlers and actors, and repeats the scene over and over, at times of his choosing. He has scale models built. Sometimes he asks the actors to repeat a precise detail. Sometimes he is content to simply lie in his flat knowing that it is all unfolding, over and over again, outside his door.
He extends the obsession to re-enacting an encounter in a garage, then to a murder scene he stumbles upon, and finally to an invented bank robbery. Scenes are set on a constant loop, trivial details enlarged, time slowed down. His control gives him a sliver of omniscience in his own universe. And yet, throughout, there are suggestions that the protagonist's obsessive quest for authenticity may itself be taking place in some half-lit set in his mind. Characters appear and disappear. The ecstasy he finds in particular details kicks him into trance-like states as he becomes ever more obsessed with his own participation in these episodes. Surrealism intrudes, so that the reader is never quite sure if these looped scenes are about to unravel.
McCarthy writes in a flat prose, and while it suits a character that veers between emotional disengagement and compulsive curiosity, when the reader is faced repeatedly with the same scenes that style wears a little on one's patience. Meanwhile, early characters simply dissipate, while others are sent in to occasionally tease the reader.
Nevertheless, it is mostly enthralling, dotted with dark humour and undoubted originality, even if it contains echoes of many other writers, notably the touches of Philip K Dick in its fractured reality. And it really sticks around in the mind, nagging at one afterwards, and the most complimentary thing that can be said about this novel of repeating scenes is that it really does deserve to be read a second time.
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist
Remainder By Tom McCarthy Alma Books, 289pp. £10.99
