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In Conversation with Tom McCarthy Part One
by Dan
Author Q & A + Fiction / October 08, 2007
After humble beginnings at French art-house publisher Metronome Press, Tom McCarthy's debut novel REMAINDER hit the mainstream when it was republished Alma Books last year. Rapidly attaining the status of modern classic, it garnered remarkable, at times breathless, reviews from The Toronto Star, The Winnipeg Free Press, The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail and The New York Times.
Something of a departure from the clinical detachment of REMAINDER, Tom's new novel MEN IN SPACE, which arrives in stores this month, is a looser and, in some ways, more humane novel. Already critically acclaimed, it has confirmed Tom's position as "one of the brightest new prospects in British fiction" (The Independent).
Tom and I caught up over email during the summer and discussed his new book, the success of REMAINDER, his influences and the cultural significance of My Bloody Valentine.
Taking my lead from Mark Thwaite at Ready Steady Book, the conversation will be posted in five parts through the course of the week.
WARNING: The conversation contains adult themes and discusses modern literature!
Part One
Dan Wagstaff: Could you tell me about your new novel MEN IN SPACE?
Tom McCarthy: The publisher's blurb sums it up pretty well: "Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of Communism, Men in Space follows a cast of dissolute Bohemians, political refugees, a football referee, a disorientated police agent and a stranded astronaut as they chase a stolen icon painting from Sofia to Prague and onwards. The icon's melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters' ellipses and near misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space: physical, political, emotional and metaphysical. What emerges is a vision of humanity adrift in history, and a world in a state of disintegration." I couldn't put it any better myself.
DW: Where did the title come from?
TM: When the Soviet Union disintegrated, there was this Soviet cosmonaut up on a two-month mission, and none of the independent states wanted to take responsibility for bringing him back down. The Russians said it was the Ukranians' problem, the Ukranians the Azerbaijanis', and so on. So this poor guy had to stay up there indefinitely, stranded. He could look down on the landmass he'd left, but it wasn't the same country anymore. He's only a leitmotif in my book, something going on in the background while the other stories take place - but all of the characters are like him in some way or another: alienated, stranded, watching a fragmenting world through a screen. The saint in the stolen icon painting is also floating in the sky in a Plexiglass-like halo while the landscape below him is dismantled: another man in space. In a way, he's the main character, even though, again, he isn't a character properly speaking; but he embodies all the other characters' quandaries. There are women in the novel as well as men by the way, but 'People in Space' would have been a rubbish title.
DW: The novel is set in Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution. Was the book based on your personal experiences?
TM: Yes. I lived in Prague from '91 to '93. It was an amazing time. A writer, Vaclav Havel, had come to power and put all his friends in parliament. You'd go to some gig and the drummer with five earrings and a spliff in his mouth was the minister for culture or whatever. I fell in with all these artists who were surfing on the wave of post-revolutionary euphoria - before the whole thing wiped out. The city was also a hub for young international Bohemians, because it was extraordinarily cheap and had a certain mystique about it, a real buzz. All these excited articles in American magazines were billing it as 'The Paris of the Nineties', which brought thousands upon thousands of sub-sub-Hemingways bearing down on the place...
DW: The subsequent break-up of Czechoslovakia is a key backdrop to the novel too. What is it that interests you thematically about this?
TM: It's the fragmentation: things falling apart, the old order collapsing. It's always a dynamic situation, whatever period of history it happens in. There's a sense of enormous opportunity, and also of enormous disappointment when this opportunity isn't seized. Heinrich B�ll finds a similar situation in post-war, post-partition Germany in And Never Said a Word: the chance to create a new, autonomous order that will uplift a generation flickering into view like something delicate and miraculous - and then being snuffed out, with enormous human consequences.
DW: The events in the book are seen through the eyes of various different people living in Prague, and yet MEN IN SPACE is more intimate than the first-person narrative of REMAINDER. Why do think this is?
TM: It's a much more human book, most definitely. Not more humanistic, but more human. As a critic from the London Review of Books pointed out, the characters in Remainder become less and less human as the novel progresses, tend more and more towards the status of automata, until they're just tokens to be shuffled around by the psychotic narrator, figments of his warped subjectivity. In Men in Space each character has his or her own subjectivity - but those subjectivities don't connect properly. So ultimately it's not more intimate: just more intimately disconnected.
Part Two, tomorrow...
Photo credit: Alisa Conan
