Tom McCarthy - Satin Island

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Self-satisfied tedium

For some time, the Booker Shortlist had a reputation for obscure books which are inaccessible to most people and which a small clique claim to enjoy in order to make themselves look good.  This isn't fair because there have been some superb, readable novels on the Shortlist for years now – but I'm afraid I thought this was an example of just the sort of stuff that puts a lot of readers off the Booker nominees.  I am happy to work hard at understanding difficult but worthwhile novels which say something important, I certainly don't insist on a strong plot or likeable characters or any of that sort of thing, but some sense that I'm doing a little more than wandering around the author's head while he invites us to admire his own brilliance would be welcome.

Satin Island is narrated by a character who introduces himself as U – which rather sets the tone.  "Me? Call me U."  See what he did there?  Echoes Moby Dick, makes it sound like "call me you," gives the narrator a single-letter name like some famous characters in Kafka and other places – which is fine in a way, but the whole book has that same self-satisfied, show-offy tone and it really began to get wearing.

U is a Corporate Anthropologist, working for a rather sinister, nebulous Company (named only as that) who are themselves working on a rather sinister, nebulous Koob-Sassen Project.  This seems to be a global means of influencing everything somehow, but we never get more than a few obscure references…and so on.  Much of the book is U's reflections on what he sees around him from an anthropological point of view while he himself seems very disconnected from any human activity or emotion.  He will speculate for pages about the nature of parachutes, for example, but whenever he visits his partner he simply reports "we had sex" with no engagement at all.  (It's that old existentialist alienation again – oh good!)  There is an awful lot of this stuff.

There is, to be fair, real intellectual content here; McCarthy is extremely well read and knowledgeable about anthropology and a lot of other things – and he's very keen to let us know it.  There's also a lot of stuff that sounds profound but isn't, like, "Parachutes, as a rule, are badly treated by their human masters: granted false release and then immediately yanked back into servitude, into yoked bondage."  That is a lovely sentence, there's a clever interaction of yanked and yoked and so on, but as anything more than a poetic metaphor out of context it doesn't add up to much.  That's how I felt about much of the book.

I eventually got so fed up that I did something I never normally do; I read some other reviews to try to see whether I was missing something here.  I came across this from Duncan White in The Telegraph: "McCarthy positions us, as readers, with his characters: in pursuit of a fugitive epiphany we stage our own intricate re-enactment."  Well, if that sentence makes sense to you, then you may well enjoy reading this while pursuing your fugitive epiphany and staging your own intricate re-enactment. 

My translation of it is: "We have no idea what the point of this is and you have to make it up yourself," and ersonally, I eventually found this book so far up itself that it was gazing out between its own teeth.  It's fine to react against the Creative-Writing-Course-driven mainstream, but you do need to engage the reader on some level. This didn't engage me at all and, fine writing and intelligence notwithstanding, in the end I found Satin Island an infuriating waste of time.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)