Satin Island
Tom McCarthy
[Jonathan Cape]
This reviewer has been a fan of Tom McCarthy’s work since Remainder, a weird and deeply intelligent book about obsession and authenticity. Satin Island is McCarthy’s fourth novel, and in many ways it’s a distillation of the themes of Remainder. That is, it is a strange, stark, spare book about connection and emptiness. U., the narrator, works as a ‘corporate anthropologist’ for an unnamed company, known as The Company, a member of the seemingly arbitrarily-named Koob-Sassen project. U. works in a basement, a kind of node at the centre of chthonic pipes, in a metaphor which is not is much blatant as omnipresent; wherever he goes, U. is in the centre of a vast network of information, noise, and communication. So much, so postmodern. But Satin Island is impressive by virtue of the omnipresence of networks, of multiplicities of information, by how far McCarthy pushes this toward exhaustion. U.’s world is paradoxically blank and over-full. His narration is devoid of embellishment – to the extent that the reader barely has a sense of what anything in his world looks like – and yet it is crammed with data. His node and position appears less and less as anchor, and more of an arbitrary point on a vast, shifting map of discrete data. U. ping-pongs between dead parachutists, BP oil spills, Staten Island, cancer, YouTube buffering in search of a logical conclusion – any logical conclusion.
While U. fumbles exhaustedly for some kind of coherent meaning, McCarthy’s novel becomes almost parodically pareidolic. All possible symbols are systematically stripped of meaning as U. considers and then disregards them; similarly, the novel doesn’t so much end as stop, with U. deciding not to bother going to Satin Island. He is left, instead, in ‘some kind of formal arrangement whose logic escaped [him]’. And so, without beginning, middle, end – and especially lacking centre! – the novel comes to a halt, leaving the reader in a gorgeous daze of symbol and cypher, whose meaning is so clear, and yet tantalisingly opaque.
Words: Aisling O’Gara
