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In Conversation with Tom McCarthy Part Four
by Dan
Author Q & A + Fiction + Podcasts / October 11, 2007
Today is the fourth installment of my conversation with British novelist Tom McCarthy. When we met in Toronto last year, we talked a lot about music and movies between events, and I was keen to pick up where we left off when we corresponded by email...
(Read the previous installment here)
WARNING!: This conversation contains adult themes and references to avant-garde New York rock bands!
Part Four
DW: The music of The Velvet Underground features in MEN IN SPACE, and I know we share a love of My Bloody Valentine. How does music influence your work?
TM: Funnily enough (and without giving away too much of the book's ending), the last word in Men in Space is 'soon', the title of the final song on My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. It's not an accident. I'm of a generation that grew up on music, and it's shaped our whole sensibility in a really intimate way. Also, formally and thematically the best musicians are way ahead of the game: think of techniques like sampling, or the rapid-fire subcultural allusiveness of, say, Sonic Youth. It's hard to say exactly how music's influenced my work, but it's surely as inextricable from my life and work as for most people of my age.
DW: Who are listening to at the moment?
TM: Just now, Nirvana.
DW: REMAINDER - a book about repetition - was published in 2005, 2006 and again in 2007. Do you ever feel like life is imitating art?
TM: When someone hijacks an aeroplane and flies it in a figure-of-eight until it runs out of fuel, then I'll know that Remainder's found the one Quixotic reader every book potentially has, its Mark Chapman.
DW: After the struggle to get REMAINDER published, how did it feel to see your debut novel on the cover story of the New York Times Book Review?
TM: It felt nice.
DW: When you were visiting Toronto last year for the International Festival of Authors (IFOA) you met with Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali. He's directing the film version of J. G. Ballard's HIGH-RISE, which has similarities with REMAINDER. Don't you live in a 60's high-rise? After reading Ballard, I think I would find using the lift either incredibly stimulating or completely debilitating!
TM: It was great meeting Vincenzo, and I can't wait to see his take on Ballard. I do live in a 60s high-rise. It's fantastic. Bizarrely (since you're talking of movies and directors), the producer who's putting together the film adaptation of Remainder came to visit me here recently - and got stuck in the lift on his way down. He got freed eventually and the project's still on. I should have bargained for a bigger percentage before phoning the fire brigade.
DW: Are you interested in film as medium? The protagonist in REMAINDER actively avoids it, and yet it seems tailor made for you...
TM: Although the hero of Remainder doesn't allow cameras at his re-enactments (effectively turning them into film sets without a film), he's obsessed with DeNiro in Mean Streets, and with heroes in movies generally. Whereas the rest of us are continually comparing ourselves to characters in movies and falling short, he reasons, characters in movies aren't comparing themselves and their actions to anyone or anything: they're 'just being' - and are therefore more authentic. His logic's skewed, but I'd say it's shared by virtually everyone who's ever seen a movie.
DW: What are your favourite movies?
Orphée by Jean Cocteau: best film ever made, all about transmission, death, love, poetry and time. The INS radio project was a direct appropriation of the scenes in that film where the dead poet C�geste sends radio messages on illicit frequencies to Orph�e, who copies and repeats them. I like Tarkovsky's work, and was thinking of it when I wrote Remainder: all the slowness, the absorption in surface and texture. Another film I hadn't seen then but have since and think is brilliant is Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, in which a Peruvian townsfolk continually 'film' movies with wicker cameras and sound-booms after they've seen an American movie crew do it for real, making stylised events repeat ad infinitum. Lynch's latest film Inland Empire is stunning too: completely literary, labyrinthine, regressive. It's the best piece of art in any medium I've come across for years.
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Photo credit: David Boulogne
