Code World
By Jennifer Egan

New York Times - Published: September12, 2010

C

By Tom McCarthy
Alfred A. Knopf. US$25.95
(Jonathan Cape in UK)


There are many stories Tom McCarthy chooses not to tell in “C,” his tour de force new novel encompassing the short life of one Serge Carrefax, born at the turn of the 20th century on a rural English estate.
Serge’s father, a manic tinkerer with early wireless technology, runs a school for the deaf but seems oblivious to his own deaf wife, Serge’s mother, who’s so blinkered on opium (supplied by a mute gardener who grows the poppies himself) that she nearly lets Serge drown in a creek at age 2. Serge’s beloved older sister, Sophie, becomes sexually involved with a friend of their father’s and winds up committing suicide at 17 — possibly after having an abortion. Serge’s relationship to Sophie is preternaturally close, with incestuous overtones, and her death severs his only real human connection. But these dramas are merely suggested, their shadowy outlines ignored, sublimated or flat-out denied by those involved; Sophie’s self-poisoning is deemed an accident.

Photograph of Tom McCarthy, right,by Erinn Hartman

McCarthy, author of the ingenious 2006 novel “Remainder,” withstands the temptations of emotional plotting and holds out instead for something bigger, deeper, more universal and elemental. “C” is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning: our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result.
Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in “Remainder”; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream. We follow Serge to a spa in or near Germany (where he goes to recover from bowel problems after Sophie’s death) to the killing fields of France (where he drops bombs on the Germans during World War I) to the interwar underbelly of London (where he nurtures a heroin habit among a demimonde of performers and spiritualists) to post-independence Egypt, highly suggestive of present-day Iraq, where he works in “communications,” ostensibly helping to erect a wireless radio system but also possibly doubling as a spy.
What drives Serge isn’t love or friendship or even survival (born with a caul, like David Copperfield, he is sustained by a run of exceptional luck). He seeks the message behind all messages: an original, primordial, unifying signal. The fact that McCarthy manages to satisfy this tall order — while also justifying his odd title in so many different ways that I was reminded of ­Hercule Poirot’s line from “Murder on the Orient Express”: “There are too many clues in this room” — is a testament to his literary resourcefulness and verbal pyrotechnics.
Throughout, “C” evokes the communications frenzy of a century ago, as well as our own.

The full review of this Man Booker shortlisted title at NYT.

And from The Guardian:
Tom McCarthy reads from his novel C, which has been shortlisted for the Booker prize, and talks to Sarah Crown



And a review in The Telegraph.