Tom McCarthy: C
The perennial relationship between desire, technology and language
MBP: Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. Where were you when you heard the news?
TC: At home.
MBP: C is set at the turn of the 20th century. Was there a particular reason why this period interested you?
TC: It's the period when radio emerged. But I don't see 'C' as a historical novel at all. It's about a perennial relationship between desire, technology and language.
MBP: The main character, Serge Carrefax, has a father obsessed with the radio. Were many men of this generation obsessed by the radio?
TC: Very much so. Caliban in 'The Tempest' describes voices and music swirling about his ears on Prospero's enchanted island. Well, with radio, this situation becomes a reality, and thousands of wire-and-crystal-fiddling Calibans are enchanted.
MBP: The First World War is a well documented period but as a writer did you want to bring forward a new perspective?
TC: Yes. My perspective is completely anti-humanist. It's Homeric - but in a modern sense, like what you find in Marinetti or Ernst Junger. War is about geometry, an experience of space, and of communication, and a being-towards-death.
MBP: In 1999, you founded an art organisation called the International Necronautical Society. Can you explain how this project fits in with C?
TC: The INS is a kind of semi-fictional reprise of early twentieth century avant-gardes: committees, manifestos, expulsions and denunciations etc. It was while doing an INS project at the ICA, involving radio transmissions, that I had the idea for C.
MBP: Your influences are visual artists rather than contemporary British novelists. Does it help you as a writer not to read contemporary fiction?
TC: I read lots of contemporary fiction. I published a long essay on Jean-Philippe Toussaint in the London Review of Books a few months ago; I've recently done a public dialogue with Jonathan Lethem on his work; I'm a big fan of Shelley Jackson, Ben Marcus, Jesse Ball, Stewart Home. What I don't read is contemporary middlebrow English fiction - which is, after all, a small patch in a very large ocean. A placid patch: I prefer the bits with clashing rocks, whirlpools and sirens.
