Review: Mothlight by Adam Scovell

At the heart of Adam Scovell’s Mothlight (2019) lies a mystery. Why did Phyllis Ewans hate Billie, her sister, so very much? To the extent that when the elderly Billie scalds herself with a hot drink, Phyllis ignores the fact until Thomas’s grandmother discovers the situation and has Billie admitted to hospital. Thomas’s grandmother is already caring for Billie, despite Phyllis sharing a house with Billie, and at this point Phyllis effectively turns over all responsibility for her care to Thomas’s grandparents. When Billie dies, it is they who arrange her funeral and deal with the legalities. Meanwhile, Phyllis has gone about her business as usual, even as far as going on holiday, apparently determined to forget as soon as possible that her sister ever existed. That  any photographs of Billie still exist is because Thomas’s grandmother, realising what Phyllis Ewans would do, rescued them, to ensure she was not forgotten.

As mysteries go, the solution will prove in some ways to be comparatively banal, although underlying it is a matter of profound importance to Phyllis , and to another person. Yet Thomas, the narrator of the story, will apparently be unable to comprehend the nature of the mystery or its solution, refusing to see what is apparently staring him in the face. Perhaps it is simply because he is so completely out of kilter with the world around him, though why that might be is unclear. We could maybe start with his having been “a shy and inward-looking boy” (11), at least according to his grandmother. Why he spent so much time with his grandparents is not explained, but there is already a sense of something lurking unacknowledged in his early childhood.

His parents seem to be entirely absent, and his grandparents have taken on some sort of parental role. They are also the facilitators of his first meetings with the Ewans sisters even as they later forbid him to keep in touch with Phyllis Ewans. Their own connection with the Ewans sisters seems to be purely business—Thomas’s grandfather runs a grocery business and they are customers, albeit customers who rarely pay their bills. With hindsight we may wonder why it was that Thomas’s grandparents tolerated this running debt, but it is not a question that Thomas ever asks himself.

As he grows older, Thomas will describe himself thus:

I became a lonely teenager, interested only in things that could excuse such loneliness. These were namely an insistence on long walks in Wales at the weekend and an increasing interest in moths.

Scovell, Mothlight, 28

Whether the loneliness begat the walking and the pursuit of moths, or whether the walking and the pursuit of moths begat the loneliness is unclear, not least because Thomas himself seems uncertain, but as the novel unfolds it becomes more and more difficult to imagine that Thomas ever had an existence that was separate from either Billie or Phyllis Ewans so closely is his life entwined with theirs. Indeed it is almost as though they somehow brought him into existence. When, after Phyllis’s death he painstakingly begins his examination of her possessions, one has the sense that Thomas is as much hunting for himself as for the explanation of Phyllis’s animus towards Billie, and the deeper secret that Phyllis herself hides. And it’s difficult not to conclude that, for all he has been obsessed for years with Miss Ewans, he has come to stand in relationship to Phyllis much as she once stood in relation to Billie, and that she is as much a necessary part of his life as she is an annoyance.

By his own admission, Thomas begins to haunt Phyllis’s life, infected as he is by “the parasite of her interests” (37), and yet he seeks to suggest too that his early interest is superficial, something he has picked up “in the way that many do when young and impressionable, and so I took to the most obvious ways to express this interest by fumbling around in an amateurish manner, and with little success ” (39). But the opening words of the novel undermine all of this:

To my knowledge, Phyllis Ewans had only two great preoccupations in her long life: walking and moths. An interest in these same two subjects also grew within me after a number of years of knowing her; such was the power of her influence.

Scovell, Mothlight, 10

So which is it to be? Has Phyllis exercised a magnetic influence over Thomas since almost the moment they first met (although, by his own admission, Phyllis first takes an interest in him because Billie has already taken an interest in him), or has Thomas, for whatever perverse reason, modelled himself on Phyllis Ewans, and taken on her interests and, perhaps also, her life? There is undeniably something strange about the interest that both women take in him, and indeed about their relationship with one another. Billie is described as being “much older than her sister” (11) and Thomas will later say “they were only sisters in name, and I still harbour daydreams surrounding the likelihood of their differing parentage” (11). One begins to wonder if in fact Billie is Phyllis’s mother rather than her sister. And, eventually, one can’t help wondering if Thomas has come to imagine he is Phyllis’s son.

Meanwhile, Thomas’s narrative proceeds in fits and starts, as though he cannot even find the right place to begin the story. He constantly backtracks in his attempt to tell the story, pulled between the past, present and future, apparently unable to locate himself in his own narrative. Or perhaps, more accurately and more appropriately, he is circling the story, like a moth drawn to a flame, only to find himself caught in a death spiral, unable to resist his attraction to the light but unable to explain it either. At one point, just after Billie’s funeral, Thomas talks of “following blindly towards the light if only to uncover the reason for [Phyllis’s] character. This was the curiosity she had imbued in me with parasitic precision” (28). Which is to imply yet again that Phyllis Ewans herself is responsible for causing Thomas to stalk her as obsessively as he does—and let us not mince words; he stalks her—when it is his own fascination that drives him, a fascination that his grandparents do their best to counter: “I was not allowed to write or converse with her due to the great divide between her and my family”, this presumably referring to the quarrel when Phyllis left Thomas’s grandparents to take care of everything after Billie’s hospitalisation. But then, by Thomas’s own admission, he “could not have done so at any rate as there was no forwarding address for her new London home” (41).

All this in itself might be enough for a short novel: how Thomas accidentally rediscovers Phyllis Ewans in London, when he starts work in a university entomology department and hears her name mentioned. How they begin to meet regularly and talk, how Thomas begins to sense a deeper mystery, and how he insinuates himself into her life, becoming her de facto carer. Whether she actually requires this is not entirely clear, but as Thomas puts it: “She needed to be healthy for as long as conceivably possible in order to pass on her secrets to me” (68).

What does Phyllis Ewans get from this arrangement, apart from a devoted slave? According to Thomas, it’s stories. “This was an explicit requirement, as Miss Ewans seemed to draw energy from them, almost as nourishment” (68), and Thomas devotes much of his time to telling her stories of his experiences when out moth-hunting, or retelling them, altering them, embellishing them.

And it is at this point that the novel takes a strange turn. Or, rather, that something that has been happening already becomes more explicit. Thomas calls them “visions”; the first occurs at the graveside when Billie’s coffin is lowered into the grave. Thomas describes himself as being somehow attacked by “a skein of moths”(27), an image drawn from a photograph of Billie with, behind her, an ornament of some sort that looks precisely like “hordes of moths” (27). The fluttering of paper wings will dog Thomas as his mental health appears to deteriorate, but that is not all.

Another time, walking alone in Snowdonia, long before meeting Phyllis Ewans again, Thomas experiences a vision of a lake, and from a jetty a woman staring at him. “I had become aware of my own detachment from reality. I could feel the spray of water from the breeze and sometimes felt a hand holding mine” (42). Later, he finds a photograph taken by Phyllis Ewans, documenting precisely the scene he had encountered in a Welsh forest, and asks himself, “whose hand had held mine” (43). By his own admission these teenage experiences have an “accumulative, traumatic effect on my own psyche” (43). And later, as an adult, the hand returns. In one particularly disturbing scene, as Thomas tells Phyllis about a visit to a nature reserve, one they had both visited, though not at the same time.

I felt a hand grasp my own. It was, I just knew, the same hand that had held mine in the forest in North Wales: a woman’s hand, slender and friendly. […] More unnerving than the feeling of the hand in mine was the uncanny change it seemed to make to my own. I looked down to my side in my memory of walking around the serve and found my hand to be slender and feminine with longer, ill-kept fingernails.

Scovell, Mothlight, 70-71

These occurrences increase after Phyllis Ewans’ death, particularly when Thomas is sorting her photographs, many of which appear, uncannily, to document places that he has also visited, although more than once Phyllis Ewans has denied having ever visited them. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Thomas chooses to interpret these synchronicities as Phyllis Ewans attempting to send him messages, and maybe he is correct insofar as Phyllis has chosen to retain these photographs for a reason, though not to communicate with him from beyond the grave.

All first-person narrators are unreliable to some extent, but Thomas regularly undermines his own recollections by repeating them with variations, particularly when it comes to his own creation story, rather in the same way as he has repeated stories to Phyllis. Yet, while his interpretation of the strange encounters might be suspect, there is a sincerity in the way he describes the encounters themselves that suggests that some of them at least are genuine, for values of genuine that presuppose a belief in the supernatural. It’s not entirely clear what Thomas believes but it is clear that he continues to find the experiences deeply unsettling. His mental breakdown after the death of Phyllis Ewans only makes matters worse while at the same time driving him to finally solve the central mystery of her life, following a breadcrumb trail of hidden photographs, entries in an address book, and a name: Elsa.

Indeed, the answer has, to some extent, been within Thomas’s grasp all along had he not been too naive to fully understand the meaning of that ghostly hand in his, and the associated “feeling of nervousness about this, [that] no one could be allowed to see us holding hands, whosoever she was […]. It was not simply down to the fact that our affection was a secret […] but that it was considered highly improper as well” (71). It comes as no surprise, in the end, to learn why it was that Phyllis returned so often to North Wales, or to find that Billie had discovered her secret and had acted upon that knowledge to the detriment of those involved.

For all that he claims at the end that he has always known, but can only accept if “the confirmation was spoken out loud” (150), one wonders what it is, at this stage, that Thomas does know. Or, perhaps, more accurately, what he is willing to accept. He seems convinced that Heather, Elsa’s daughter, can tell him for sure, but this is the one thing that she will not do, although she knows the story well enough, and has already confirmed Billie’s betrayal. This suggests that she suspects that Thomas wants her to tell him something else. Heather’s refusal to meet Thomas’s unspoken demand, in the very last sentence of the novel, is remarkably powerful; a moment of clarity after all of Thomas’s own evasions, underlying the fact of his having intruded into a story that is in fact not his to fully know.

And perhaps Thomas has also had the answer to the “hauntings”, if such they are, all along. As a teenager he realised that place is often emphasised in the visions, and later recalls Phyllis Ewans talking of “place being essentially the ghost of all our lives” (44).

I imagined her amused look, peering over my shoulder when the synchronous moments occurred, and found much likeness between her past and my past, albeit my past already had hers intertwined within it. Such dizzying thoughts would plague my mind as if we were, in fact, the same person: a reflection of simulacra displaced by some impossible mistake. All of this could simply have been down to our shared geographies and our shared passion for moths, but it went deeper than that.

Scovell, Mothlight, 44

All this would be enough in itself to make Mothlight a diverting read, if maybe a little mannered in its telling, as if Scovell is trying just slightly too hard for effect. Unsurprisingly, the inside of Thomas’s head is a rather exhausting, self-pitying and self-justifying place to be for long periods of time, not to mention having to spend much of the novel watching him fail to grasp what is so obvious to anyone reading it.

But this is not where the novel ends, and perhaps is not even where the novel begins. For this is a novel with photographs. In the acknowledgements at the end of this book, Adam Scovell tells us that Mothlight is constructed around a series of photos, which, apparently, he inherited from his grandmother and the “real ‘Phyllis’”, although the circumstances remain vague. It is therefore some kind of “found” piece, insofar as the photographs act as prompts of some sort and the novel is constructed around them. If we take the acknowledgements at face value, the co-opting of the photos into a story is assumed to have been permitted (and for all we know the story being told is indeed the story they told, or some version of it), but there is something disconcerting about the thought that these photographs could have as easily come from somewhere else, and that perhaps, one day the subjects of the photographs, or their descendants, might accidentally find themselves, pressed between pages, in a piece of fiction that is really nothing to do with them.

This is perhaps the risk a creator of “found” pieces runs, and maybe it adds a frisson to the act of creation, but something always feels vaguely wrong to me in these cases. As readers we become reluctant voyeurs, colluding in someone else’s act of appropriation. One might argue that this in fact sets the tone for the entire novel because it is in part a massive act of appropriation but equally, it can feel a little as though the author is producing this extra evidence as “proof” when it is nothing of the sort. Which is not to say that novels with photographs are inherently bad, but in this instance their inclusion feels jejune rather than illuminating. Although there is no denying that the first photograph of “Phyllis Ewans”, in which the female figure lurks in the background, hidden behind an English bulldog that sits front and centre, is remarkably striking. It is surely just a trick of the light that the sun glinting on her large round glasses make it look as though she has the eyes of an insect.

I think, though, that these photographs are not so much about co-opting unsuspecting people into the story as they are about signalling a connection with another text, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, a novel that is intensely present throughout this text, but perhaps never more so than when Sebald mentions Thomas Browne’s Musæum Clausum, and his inclusion of the bamboo walking canes in which two Persian friars smuggled silkworm eggs out of China, a section illustrated with a black and white photograph of a plate from a book of moths. By contrast, the only visual representation of a moth to be found in Mothlight is in Vince Haig’s beautiful collage cover design, where the moth’s wings are a patchwork assemblage of the photographs which lurk at the heart of this novel.

Sebald’s approach to writing Rings of Saturn is pretty much self-evident (and I do urge you to read his narrative; there was nothing else quite like it at the time, and since then, while many have attempted to emulate him, they have done so without really coming as close as they like to imagine). The text’s framework is a record of a walk he makes along the coast of East Anglia, in part as a celebration of recovering from illness, described at the beginning of the narrative. Each chapter spirals out from Sebald’s direct experience to a consideration of previous inhabitants of East Anglia (most notably Thomas Browne, writer of the incomparable “Urne Burial”, itself a meditation on the history of the area, and of past burial practices) and beyond, intertwined with the history of Sebald’s own family in Germany. Although it is at heart a narrative in search of a rootedness, it is noticeably a very outward-looking book, even if the narrative returns to home at the end of each chapter, “home” being wherever Sebald happens to find himself at that point but also a process of finding or relocating “home”. Importantly, it is also illustrated with a mixture of Sebald’s own photographs of his journey and appropriate material from photographic archives. Scovell’s approach is, we might say, Sebaldian, but it is also antithetically Sebaldian. While Sebald looks outward, recording his discoveries, Scovell’s narrator turns ever inward, somehow finding less and less to record.

Sebald’s photographs can be seen in terms of a very mundane act, documenting an account of a journey—sophisticated holiday snaps, but holiday snaps nonetheless; their interest lies as much as anything in the fact of Sebald having taken or curated them—but can the same be said of the photos taken or collected by Phyllis Ewans? What is it that Phyllis is actually documenting? We can choose to read them as documenting an innocent series of journeys through North Wales, or, covertly, documenting a love affair, if one knows how to read the signs, which Thomas clearly does not. But, talking about a particular series of photos Phyllis Ewans takes of Billie’s bedroom after Billie’s death, as if to underline her sister’s absence, Thomas notes that ‘Phyllis Ewans forced the ghost into the space, capturing it within an image of itself to control the existence of its memory” (31), and seems almost to be proposing that Phyllis uses the photograph to capture her subjects and memories, almost in the same way as she captures and mounts a moth.

There are many other influences in play, many of them folk horror-related, as one might expect of the person who devised the Folk Horror Chain. I was reminded of M.R. James’s neurasthenic academics, hastily scribbling down their accounts of dealings with the supernatural while awaiting the next act in their personal drama of revelatory horror drama: at the beginning of the novel Thomas alludes to being “plagued by my illness”. Phyllis Ewans’ alleged preoccupation with walking makes me think of Nan Shepherd, writer of The Living Mountain, and patron saint of so many modern walker-writers (though I am not aware she had any particular interest in moths). The novel’s dedication “For Nan” thus takes on a certain ambiguity—is he honouring his grandmother or someone else?

And there is more than a whiff of Great Expectations about this novel, the film as much as the book. Thomas’s initial meeting with Billie and Phyllis, a small boy’s encounter with two strange women, is memorably recounted.

Much of the furnishing was incredibly old and a thin mist of dust and debris was always visible. I’d never seen dust such as this before and quietly enjoyed disturbing it with my hand to create shapes and tiny whorls in the air. The walls were covered with mounted moths and, with hindsight, I imagine this dust to be an atmosphere of scales comprised of [sic] insect wings.

Scovell, Mothlight, 10

Billie certainly has a flavour of Miss Havisham about her, with Phyllis taking on the role of Estella. Billie ‘still had the air of a great and fashionable lady, brought over from her youth which was one filled with expensive fur coats, pearls, jewels and silken stockings’ (11), and everyone is surprised at her great interest in Thomas. The narrator describes how ‘Billie reached for a small purse tucked under numerous layers of clothing and blankets. Her spindly fingers, no doubt thought of as delicate and desirable some forty years previous, wrapped themselves around a rolled-up note. […] This bought my attention for some time on that visit, during which I all but ignored Phyllis Ewans’ (12). One cannot help but wonder whether Phyllis wasn’t also enacting a long and complex revenge for being overlooked, not least in the way she deliberately shows him a mounting of a poplar hawk moth, almost forcing it upon his attention.

As my grandfather went to leave, Phyllis Ewans decided to show me a specimen she had hanging in the furthest part of the hallway. Seeing an opportunity to discuss her favourite subject, she took the mounted insect off the wall and began to tell of its history with great gusto and character […] The moth had stood out from the others due to its great size and its solitary mounting. […] It seemed to my young eyes even then to possess some secretive important, some unique position ahead of all the other moths.

Scovell, Mothlight, 13

Clearly, for the adult narrator, this is an important moment in retrospect, but at the time? Later he will claim that Billie attempted to disrupt ‘my own burgeoning interest in walking and moths’ by showing him photographs, and perhaps with good reason if she associates moths with sexual transgression, but we are left with a powerful sense of two women bickering over the young Thomas’s future, and in effect crushing it before it has even begun, even as the mounting of the poplar hawk moth is later smashed: we are told this from the outset then spend much of the novel waiting for it to happen.

Then I began to wonder about the novel’s title, which I incidentally like very much. Was “mothlight ” Scovell’s own coinage, I wondered, or was it another of those words that Robert Macfarlane is seeking to reintroduce to our daily vocabulary? When I searched online, I found something unexpected. “Mothlight” is not original to Scovell but is in fact the title of a very short collage film made in 1963 by Stan Brakhage.

Unusually, Brakhage’s film was created without the aid of a camera; it involved pressing found objects between strips of splicing tape and then running them through a projector. Brakhage was inspired by seeing moths drawn to a candle flame. He identified powerfully with “these crazy moths […] flying into the candlelight, and burning themselves to death” and wanted to incorporate them into his artistic practice. He struggled to film live moths and eventually turned to dead ones instead:

Over the lightbulbs there’s all these dead moth wings, and I … hate that. Such a sadness; there must surely be something to do with that. I tenderly picked them out and start pasting them onto a strip of film, to try to … give them life again, to animate them again, to try to put them into some sort of life through the motion picture machine.

[YouTube]

Watching “Mothlight” online is an odd experience – an intense storm of detritus appears on the screen, some of it identifiable as insect body parts, the rest of it unrecognisable. There seems to be some debate about how it would have originally been experienced, but there is an idea that the whirr and clatter of the projector would evoke the idea of wings beating, while the light from the projector would illuminate the dust motes floating in the air, as Scovell describes them above. It is difficult to know how to respond to these images of carnage; the natural impulse is to construct a narrative around them but the story, such as it is, lies in the film’s provenance rather than the film itself. The insect parts are momentarily animated but they die all over again once the film is run.

Which might be another way to read Mothlight; not as a text constructed around a series of found “prompts” or clues but more as a series of artefacts pressed between the pages of another book, tumbling out into the reader’s vision, to be made into a story according to how they fall. Which is a pretty conceit, reinforced to a degree by the recurring image of fluttering wings, as though supernaturally emphasising that this text is not what you think it is. But no, that feels a little too clever.

By this point the novel as artefact is becoming as much a treasure hunt as it is a novel. On the one hand, I’m up for a treasure hunt, yet on the other it quickly becomes annoying. Is this what I’m supposed to be doing? Or is the fact that I have to go away and do the research a mark against me, in that I don’t already know? But still I continue, uncomfortably aware that as a reader I am now, like Thomas, painstakingly, if reluctantly in my case, rummaging through the material made available.

The epigraph quotes words spoken by Jacques Derrida in Ken McMullen’s 1983 film, Ghost Dance. The film itself claims to explore the beliefs and myths surrounding the existence of ghosts and the nature of cinema, which might in turn prompt us to consider Mothlight as an act of cinema on the page. I am, I admit, suspicious of this as an idea. I don’t think the two are entirely analogous, and inserting pictures into a novel really isn’t going to change that. Having said that, Ghost Dance is a mesmerising film, making me think of nothing so much as Chris Marker’s La Jetée, another “found” story. Derrida appears near the beginning of the film, as himself, theorising to one of the characters in a very entertaining cameo. He’s obviously enjoying himself, and in turn we enjoy his pleasure at being in the film. But it is what he has to say about ghosts that should be the focus of our attention. “To be haunted by a ghost is to remember something you’ve never lived through. For memory is the past that has never taken the form of the present.” And this seems to me to be at the heart of Thomas’s experience. He might be reliving Phyllis’s memories through his handling of her photographs, or maybe he is trying to relive something that never happened at all.

It was a section of narration later in the film that really caught my attention. An unseen man says: “The more things break up, the more myths flourish, attempting to make historical sense out of historical chaos”, and this seems to me to be very much how we are initially invited to read Mothlight. Yet, one of the characters poses a question that undermines this: “Do you think these myths are an attempt to avoid something?”

The question remains, hanging, as the novel ends. As does another question:  does this novel need to parade its props and influences when the story itself is sufficient?

Reading C by Tom McCarthy #10 – Appendix

One last post about C, the novel that seems to keep on giving by resisting any coherent interpretation. However, this post is a round-up of odds and ends that occurred to me while I was working on it.

First, a few bits by and about McCarthy himself, including an interview in the Guardian (24/07/10), which reminds me that there is so much I’m just not getting about this novel, and a recorded interview (also downloadable). Also, a piece by McCarthy himself … here

Then, as I was reading, I kept being reminded of other books that seemed to have some kind of connection with it, so here, in no particular order, are a few that resonated with me.

Alain-Fournier – Le Grand Meaulnes (variously known in English as The Lost Domain, The Lost Estate, The Wanderer). This is one of my favourite novels so I recommend it anyway, but I find certain resonances between Versoie and the lost domain that Meaulnes discovers and then spends years trying to relocate. On the other hand, Meaulnes is everything that Serge is not.

More on Alain-Fournier here and here (with photographs of some of the settings.

Kitty Hauser – Bloody Old Britain, about the archaeologist, O.S.G. Crawford, who first recognised the potential of aerial photography in archaeology. Crawford flew as an observer in World War One, and spent much of his working life with the Ordnance Survey (you can see why I was thinking of Serge, can’t you?). He was an strange and complex man, out of step with the world in which he found himself, fascinated by oddities; a man who became seized with the idea of recording aspects of life he felt were under threat. He has a huge, pretty much uncatalogued archive of photographs of things like doorways and architectural bits and pieces, kept in one of the Oxford museums. Review of book here.

A couple of years ago, I read Erik Larsen’s Thunderstruck, about Marconi and Crippen, two men with no connection whatsoever, other than that Crippen’s arrest for murder was facilitated by telegraph. In many ways, this really was a book of two halves. Both were interesting, but they didn’t belong together. However, I mention it here because of another character who featured, the scientist, Oliver Lodge, who also worked on early telegraphy. I was immediately reminded of him when I began reading C because of the way in which Lodge was so easily distractible from what he was doing, a little like Simeon – Larsen describes it as a ‘lofty dilettantism’ –and as a result missed the opportunity to trump Marconi.

He was also, in common with a number of other significant scientists (including William Crookes, whose Crookes tubes are mentioned towards the end of C), fascinated by spiritualism and the idea of being able to communicate with the dead, more so after his son, Raymond, was killed in the First World War. Lodge took part in experiments to contact his son and indeed wrote a book about them and his belief that he had indeed heard his dead son speak to him.

Christopher Frayling’s The Face of Tutankhamun also sprang to mind immediately. It’s the book of an outstanding series he made for the BBC about the (re)discovery of Egypt through its history and archaeology and the influences of those discoveries, particularly the tomb of Tutankhamun, on English and American culture. Apparently, the series is available on DVD in the US but not in the UK, which is not very helpful of them. Perish the thought I might actually want to, you know, watch it again.

Reading C by Tom McCarthy #9

Comments on Chapter 1 are here, Chapter 2 here, and Chapter 3 here, Chapters 4 and 5 here, Chapter 6 here and Part 2 here, and Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.

Part 5 – Conclusion

Yesterday, I wondered if C might be a stele for Serge Carrefax, his life, the characters in it, the scribe in his own life. This morning, it occurred to me that C might be in fact be a scarab of some sort: “So the scarab withholds the vital information even as it records it? Even as it prints? (290)” says Serge at one point, and if that is not true of his life, of this novel, then I’m not sure what is.

And so I reach the end of my rather rambling journey through Tom McCarthy’s C, and it is time to try to pull together a few thoughts about it. As you may have noticed by now, it is a novel that resists an easy commentary. It is overflowing with words and ideas profligate with both, and it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to trace a straightforward path through it. Rather like the paths at Versoie, which twist and turn and fold in on themselves like a maze, the novel folds around itself, with images resurfacing time and again, the loops and repetitions that Serge so often notes.

Or maybe not a maze so much as a crossroads. The crossroads at the heart of my home city of Oxford, in England, is Carfax, which is a corruption of the French “carrefour”, or crossroads. I immediately thought of that when I first saw Serge’s name, and I wonder, given his family history, and given the novel is in four parts, or four turnings, whether this might be a useful way of thinking about what is going on. Serge takes four different journeys during the novel, through childhood, through treatment, through the First World War and through post-war Egypt, and each time he returns to a point where his life is or seems about to be remade. Even in the last section, the mystical marriage-cum-coronation is a remaking, though perhaps now in a different world, as if Serge has finally found a place where he belongs, in the radio waves themselves, a two-dimensional place (though a mischievous part of me wonders too if McCarthy isn’t drawing some sort of analogy between godhead and AIs; the movement towards computer imagery almost suggests that). Alternatively, one might think of the ka figures in the tomb, portraying its occupant at different points in his life, allowing his spirit to move from one to another.

If this is so, it perhaps addresses what might be perceived as a certain narrative … not aimlessness, precisely, though if ever there was a character without a direction, it is Serge, who seems not to have a clue what to do with himself in life … but, well, like Serge, the novel doesn’t really seem to have an ending. Though that, I suspect, is part of the point.

The profligacy of the book’s ideas seems to mirror the potential of the early twentieth century in terms of technological developments, the many strands of research, the possibilities but this is set against the increasing dehumanisation of the people. One is struck time and again how the people in the novel seem to be akin to automata, or to be human machines, repeating the same actions over and over – the women in the rearing sheds and weaving shops, the children learning to articulate sound, the learning by rote of the pageant speeches, even Sophie’s obsessive attention to code-breaking, to dissection. During the war Serge is bound by the lines on the map but simultaneously breaks free of them, but once the war is over, it’s back to learning by rote, surrounded by people who are caught in a daily routine of work and performance. The location may change but on one level is Alexandria any different to London when nothing seems to get done. The archaeological excavations are literally contained, in the box-like tombs, and their contents become yet more lists. The only escape open to Serge by this time is death or a crossing to another world for he is endlessly trapped by his own world, constantly returning to the beginning, to restart it.

I suppose what I love most about this novel is its layers of possibility. I’ve dug around in them for the last few weeks, but I know that I’ve by no means exhausted their potential, like the layers of tombs that will never be excavated. This is frustrating and exhilarating at the same time. I’m haunted by a sense of what I may have missed (lots) as much as I delight in the connections I’ve discovered so far. There are moments when I wonder if McCarthy hasn’t pushed it a little too far, whether the piling up of image and repetition isn’t just a little too knowing, but given McCarthy’s track record I assume this is an entirely conscious choice and it’s no less intriguing for that.

So, a novel that is ingenious and exciting and mysterious by turns. I have by no means made up my mind about it but I can’t deny that the power of the writing blows me away.

Reading C by Tom McCarthy #8

Pylon at Luxor (Notre Dame Architecture Library)

 

Comments on Chapter 1 are here, Chapter 2 here, and Chapter 3 here, Chapters 4 and 5 here, Chapter 6 here and Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.

Part 4 – Call

There is a moment in part 3 of C when Serge, newly inducted into London’s drug culture and its arcane system of signs and passwords (including C for cocaine, of course), “starts seeing all of London’s surfaces and happenings as potentially encrypted: street signage, chalk-marks scrawled on walls, phrases on newspaper vendors’ stalls and sandwich boards, snatches of conversation heard in passing, the arrangements of flowers on window-sills or clothes on washing lines. (211)” Codes were Sophie’s thing, something that linked her to Widsun, but the marks on walls, the secret signs, made me think also of hieroglyphs, and that leads me, conveniently, to the final section of C, Call. (depending on how you pronounce ‘caul’, the title of the first section, you may notice a similarity in the names; I feel sure this is intentional).

Widsun, as we will recall, is now working in Communications, in North Africa, and has offered Serge a post in Egypt. (The irony of dealing with this section, set in post-war Egypt, at this particular moment, as the Egyptian government disintegrates in slow motion is not lost on me.) As ever, the reader is dropped right into the action, as Serge follows his new mentor, Petrou, around Alexandria. They are surrounded by destruction but, as Petrou explains, it’s not all as recent as it looks. As they gaze at a pile of “giant slabs toppled over one another”, Serge learns that some damage comes from recent riots but “these were probably torn down from some other edifice when the Persians sacked the place in the seventh century; and from another one before that too, when Octavian routed Antony. That’s the thing about Alexandria: these periods just kind of merge together … (242)”

In fact, much of this final section of the novel seems to be about things merging, or more often collapsing into one another, layer upon layer. All of Serge’s preoccupations from earlier parts of the novel will resurface here, in profligate detail, so much so that it’s difficult to keep a grip on the story one is so busy noting resonances from earlier. It is as though this is the place where all the traces of those earlier inerasable broadcasts Simeon was concerned about have become caught in the eddies of time and space.

Serge’s actual task, to write reports about the development of the Empire Wireless Chain, seems to be of little interest to anyone. It’s not clear who the report is even for, nor what kind of ‘appendix’ it is that Widsun requires from him. Serge was never a writer – during the war he was negligent about filing post-flight reports – and things have not changed. When told he is supposed to be providing a wider perspective, he notes once again that this was never his thing, but his concern is brushed aside. In truth, it doesn’t seem as if anyone knows what they’re doing. This is post-war Egypt, teetering on the brink of independence, and the various powers are jockeying for position. There is a sense of ineffectuality about everything, not least the fact that Britain, which had led the world in developing radio and telegraphy communication, has now fallen far behind, other countries having done deals with the much reviled Marconi. It is as though Simeon has become Britain, not that Simeon himself plays any further part in the story. On a more individual level, Serge is surrounded by people who are failing to communicate what it is that they want.

With no one really paying attention to him, Serge can once again drift aimlessly, accumulating experiences without doing much with them. He is once again a passive witness rather than an active observer. trying to make sense of what he sees but, without perspective, lacking the means to fully interpret. Alexandria suits Serge because, perhaps like him, it seems “just now […] roused, or half-roused, from its slumber. (245)” Or perhaps it is because here, he seems to find himself as the hub of his own world, even down to the discovery that the tram lines are designated by geometric figures, echoing hiss schoolroom perception of the world. Everything he has ever done, ever thought about, seems to be focused here. As Petrou notes, Alexander himself had a grand concept for the city:

He wanted it to be the great hub of the world, connecting everything to everywhere else. More than that: it would be Greece’s grand self-realisation, its ascent, beyond itself, into a universal condition, Über-Greece: a kind of simulation, better than the real thing ever was. His version would assimilate all other cultures, all their gods and figureheads and what you else, and conjoin these beneath the canopy of a transcendent, modern Hellenism in which reason, science and knowledge would all flourish. Alexander was a co-ordinator too. (246)

In some ways, this echoes, I think, Simeon’s perception of Versoie, as a hub, the point of connection; only the scale differed. History folded around it in the same way as it piles layer upon layer on Alexandria, and yet both failed, with both cut off from the current of the world. Only Serge remains as an imperfect conduit between the two, the communications apparatus that can’t communicate.

But his presence in Egypt opens up possibilities for other discussions, ones that haven’t so far been articulated fully. There is a first hint when Petrou talks about the Ptolemies taking over in Egypt and marrying their sisters. A few pages later, when Petrou describes Alexandria as a “city of sects and syncretism (253)”, Serge adds “And incest”, moments before they see the statue of Sophia. Taken in conjunction with a comment made by Serge’s superior, Macauley, about seeing his father in Serge, only it’s clear he doesn’t mean Simeon but Widsun (267), and one begins to wonder what it is that Serge does know and what it is he is looking for.

Serge is finally given a proper task of sorts, to survey an area to see if it is suitable to erect a second pylon for the Wireless Chain, a final, redundant attempt at stamping British authority on the entire wireless project. This requires Serge to join an archaeological dig at a place called Sedment, which he mishears as Sediment. Mishearing words is a theme of this entire section, as though Serge is beginning to go deaf or is no longer able to comprehend the language when it is spoken. His mishearing, however, often adds a second layer of meaning to the situation, though it also often topples over into frantic hand-waving, as though McCarthy is desperate to squeeze in all the resonances before the novel ends. Or, if we follow Simeon’s theory, the resonances are overwhelming the novel. Latterly, his mishearing become noticeably scatological, as though his bodily inhibitions are also starting to come undone. There is a sense that Serge is disintegrating, in more ways than one.

On the dig, he has become known as Pylon Man, because of his task, to find a suitable site for the new pylon, losing his name as well as his speech. While the pylon reminds us of his interest in radio, in ancient Egyptian architecture, a pylon is a monumental gateway in a temple, suggesting that Serge has somehow been transformed into a gatekeeper (and puts me in mind of the opening sequence of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten: “Open are the double doors of the horizon; unlocked are its bolts.”). The question, then, is what sort of gatekeeper might Serge be.

When Laura, one of the archaeologists, tells Serge about her dissertation it turns out to be about the myth of Osiris:

the god’s dismemberment, his sister Isis’s search for his parts, her conception of Horus from the one part of him she couldn’t find and so was forced to remake herself, and Osiris’s subsequent adoption as the deity of death and resurrection by the people of the Nile, who’d depict him in their art with a large phallus, rising to inseminate each day. (280)

She goes on to note that Osiris would “swallow [the sun] and pass it, bringing about the repetition of creation, the timeless present of eternity. the ancient Egyptian cosmology had no apocalypse, no end: time just went round and round … (281)” Osiris, as the god of death and rebirth is thus alive and dead simultaneously. I’ve already commented on the way that Serge seems to been reborn in Sections 2 and 3, and it would appear this was not a coincidence. More than that, Serge suddenly realises that Isis, gathering up her brother’s body parts, save for his phallus, is in radio terms a coherer, like an old-fashioned radio set that made particles move together, to cohere. Radio, as he puts it, is “a gathering-together too” (284).

The archaeologists’ voyage up the Nile to Luxor has a certain funereal quality about it. It is repetitious in the extreme, and Serge has a sense of himself as being part of a giant mechanism, transported through history. The view is a series of photographic negatives; Laura’s outpouring of information are like ‘a strip of punch-card paper emerging from her mouth – constant and regular, (283)’; forms of communication compete against one another for Serge’s attention and it is noticeable that the predominant form is something that would not have been known to Serge at all, the computer.

As Serge notes, Laura is inventorising the dig, entering each find in a ledger. At one point he finds her transcribing lines of text: “[t]he lines run in strips like flypaper or film, each frame a single picture: bird, scythe, foot, ankh, eye, a pair of hands …(293)” When she tells Serge that they are spells for executing functions, it’s difficult not to see them as a series of instructions to a computer. Later, she will be described as streaming information. Already Serge has seen scarabs bound with copper wire; a curious game he describes as Isis’s cohering set, and which is described as possessing a circuit board. Even the scarabs themselves, reminding us once again of Sophie’s dismemberment of insects, hold secrets, being, according to Laura, of “the deceased’s unreported deeds, clandestine history and guilty conscience”, devices that print and withhold information simultaneously. There is a strong sense that here, in Laura’s workshop, Serge is at a nexus of communication possibilities.

Likewise, Sedment (living up to Serge’s mishearing of it) seems to be the historical rubbish heap of the world. “Shards of broken pottery protrude from these [mounds of debris], alongside scraps of paper that he can’t, in passing, make out as either old papyri or contemporary news-pages, plus short lengths of what look like copper. beetles scurry up and down the surface of these mounds like mountaineers negotiating faces and approaches. (287)” Yet the layers have been so disturbed, it is impossible to create proper archaeological strata, an image that is picked up again later when Serge and Laura descend into the tomb that never seems to end, with room upon room filled with fragments of bone and ceramics, bodies that have collapsed in on themselves and one another. Here they make love; this seems to me to be the one sexual encounter Serge has in which he experiences some genuine passion and emotion and yet the setting is grotesque, a charnel house, an orgy of bones.

It is here, in the tomb, that Serge is bitten by an unspecified creature, which leads to the fever which in turn produces the hallucination of a mystical marriage, or coronation … it is an extraordinary culmination, a gathering together of images and thoughts from throughout the novel, muddled together in Serge’s fevered mind, shrinking away to nothing. Or, perhaps, Serge himself has become part of the background resonance of the world, to be received later.

I’ll end by going back to a point where Laura shows Serge a stele, a slab on which is painted the life of the person it commemorates.

All these figures; […] interact with one another, and seem to be exchanging words – but in a silent, gestural language only.
“It’s beautiful,” says Serge.
“The colours?”
“No, the flatness.”
“Stelae […] carried pictures of the deceased’s old life to the underworld, and conveyed back up from there ones of the new life he was living – which was, of course, a better, more refined version of the old one.”
“Two-way Crookes tubes, “ Serge murmurs; “death around the world. (294)”

Reading C by Tom McCarthy #7

I continue my reading of Tom McCarthy’s C.

Comments on Chapter 1 are here, Chapter 2 here, and Chapter 3 here, Chapters 4 and 5 here, Chapter 6 here and Part 2 here.

Books read, January 2011

Bookshelves in my study

My daily reading is a bit of a mixed bag, comprising books from my Ph.D work, the rest from my reviewing work, and sometimes even reading for relaxation. However, these monthly reading posts won’t be exhaustive lists of what I read. I don’t mention manuscripts I edit or proofread, for obvious professional reasons. Neither shall I be listing the various academic papers I get through each month (sample title for January: ‘Reading Nanook’s Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)’ – see, you didn’t really want to know, though I recommend the film without reservation). I also read a lot of bits of books, and I won’t mention those either, otherwise it would get silly. In other words, these are books I read all the way through or finish during each month.

So, for January 2011, in order of completion:

#1 Charles Yu – How To Live Safely In A Science-Fictional Universe (2010), reviewed for The Zone, here. If I’d read this sooner, it would have joined Finch as one of my books of 2010. As it stands, it’s definitely one of my books of 2011.

#2 K J Parker – The Folding Knife (2010), also reviewed for The Zone, here. I am open to changing my mind about this one, as I plan to read more Parker.

#3 Alexandra Harris –Romantic Moderns:English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (2010) (Kathryn Hughes’ review in the Guardian, here, also winner of the Guardian First Book Award). Really interesting account of what Hughes perceives as a second, more locally focused, strand of modernism in the UK, focusing on artists like John Piper, writers like Betjemin, Beverley Nichols, et al. I am not entirely persuaded of her argument, but it’s really helpful to position the activities of a group that, for all their fame, always seem a bit shadowy to me.

#4 Carmelo Rafala – The Immersion Book of SF (2010), reviewed for a forthcoming issue of Vector. Majority of the stories either dated or didn’t do anything, or in a couple of instances just plain badly written. There were honourable exceptions: Tanith Lee and Lavie Tidhar, whose stories I enjoyed. Gord Sellars’ story also showed promise. Also, I deeply disapprove of the cover art, showing space woman with floaty post-coital hair, a spacesuit shaped to show she has breasts, because obviously that’s just what NASA would do, and in more shades of pink than I care to think about. I have no idea who this cover is supposed to appeal to but I await Space Barbie with a lack of enthusiasm.

#5 Alaya Dawn Johnson – Racing the Dark

#6 Alaya Dawn Johnson – The Burning City

#7 Holly Black – The White Cat (2010).
The last of my embarrassing backlog of reviews that didn’t get written while I was writing a dissertation instead. Thoughts still percolating but I think I can say I’m lacking feelings of whelm in all three cases, for different reasons. I’ll add links when the reviews appear online.

#8 Taiaiake Alfred – Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto 2nd ed (2009). Read for the day job. Taiaiake Alfred is a Kahnawake Mohawk and writes here about the politics of indigenous self-determination, one of the topics I’m grappling with, from the point of view of someone living north of the 49th Parallel. Very clearly argued, very different from the work of a number of US theorists I’ve been reading, and responsible for the light-bulb moment I’ve been lacking these last few months.

#9 Norman Lewis – The Missionaries (1988). Came across this in a second-hand bookshop late last year. It’s represented as part of a trilogy of loosely autobiographical writings by Lewis, best known as a travel writer. In fact, I think it’s best described as Lewis’s account of a series of encounters with Christian missionaries working ‘with’ the indigenous peoples of South America, to lead them away from the error of their pagan ways. It’s an account of sustained genocide and exploitation, focusing on the questionable activities of a couple of large missionary organisations. It makes for grim reading.

#10 Tom McCarthy – C (2010)
I’ve been blogging about C already on Paper Knife. Suffice to say here that I like it a lot.

#11 Bradford Morrow – The Diviner’s Tale (2011). I’m reviewing this for Interzone. Not quite what I expected. More when I’ve finished the review.

Reading C by Tom McCarthy #6

I continue my reading of Tom McCarthy’s C.

Comments on Chapter 1 are here, Chapter 2 here, and Chapter 3 here, Chapters 4 and 5 here, and Chapter 6 here

Part 2 – Chute (Chapters 7–9)

I took a fairly detailed chapter-by-chapter approach with Part 1 – Caul but will be switching tactics for the rest of the novel, not least because what quickly becomes apparent in Chute is how the same tropes and images are resurfacing. For example, my note on the title of the section is ‘another covering’, and sure enough, late in the section, Serge finds himself and his crashed plane shrouded in the silk of a parachute, echoing the circumstances of his birth, still covered in a caul. And, as he tears away the silk of the parachute, it marks another birth into a new life his second in this section. However, let’s retrace our steps to the beginning of this section of the narrative.

As has become customary, McCarthy throws the reader straight into the situation. It takes a moment to establish that war has finally broken out and that Serge has somehow ended up at the School of Military Aeronautics, having presumably conquered his disbelief ‘that all his weight could possibly get airborne’ (103). We see him first as he takes their exams, and it is striking how he solves the maths and mechanical questions through visualising them. For Serge, it is clearly still all about networks, only now it’s not telegraphy or water pipes, so much as a more theoretical, abstract sense of a huge, all-encompassing network, generator of its own inevitable collision. Serge employs the imagery of the railway to portray this:

in a ‘storm of steel rods, axels [sic], crankshafts and combustion chambers, all impacting: pistons plunging through sheet metal, ripping seats from gangways, gangways from their chassis; valves screaming ecstatically and flying loose; pure-molten brake shoes splashing streaks of light; track lifted and contorted beyond recognition, as though space itself were crumpling under the weight and force of the demands being made of it, the sheer insistence of machinery breaking its bonds as it comes into its own … (119)

The network achieves a form of sentience but at the same moment it is constrained by the technology available to it. For the contemporary reader there is inevitably a sense of nostalgia for old technology tied in with this modernistic vision of some kind of machine intelligence. Serge himself has moved a long way from  childhood games with cans and string and adolescent experiments with radio; it is as though, finally, at SOMA, he can use his more intuitive approach to mathematics: ‘I just see space: surfaces and lines … and the odd blind spot’ (121). It is a return, yet again, to the classroom of childhood and the flat world without perspective, but a return that is finally productive for Serge. At the time, he enjoys the ‘clockwork choreography’ of disassembling and reassembling machine guns, which feels like the ‘mechanical command of landscape and its boundaries’ (127) that he feels in the air. He can control the components of the landscape – ‘He liked to move these things around from his nacelle, take them apart and reassemble them like pieces of a jigsaw’ (125) – and in the air he is more than any time previously in his element.

Having finally broken out of his cocoon and found a purpose in life, he takes flight, figuratively and in reality. He is translated from impotent witness to active observer, in effect assuming Sophie’s role, and his perception of the world as flat, like a map, is at last an advantage. The only uncertainty comes perhaps in the fact that his insignia is one wing rather than the two of the pilot. Although he can fly he is most often flown, and though he is doing better than the flightless silk moths that crawled around helplessly, there is still a sense that he is not entirely in control, not least in that he almost invariably travels backwards, looking at where he has come from rather than seeing where he is going.

The superficial details may change but the deeper images remain the same. Serge may be moving outwards and away from Versoie but simultaneously he is forever moving inwards. There are reminders of Versoie in his association with Widsun, who seems to be his self-appointed guardian, a fact which impresses a lot of people. There are other reminders in the way he constantly encounters new technology, new ways of using wire to detect things (Simeon), the silk of parachutes (his mother), men and machinery on the battle field reduced to broken segments of insects as he soars high above them, and the moments of retreat where he burrows underground or retreats to his lodging.

Serge’s flight of freedom is a brief and hectic one, like that of a drone, though he is busy, capable, good at what he does. All too soon he is again reborn, this time into a prisoner-of-war camp, where the indolent rhythms of daily life are all too alluring, and reminiscent of life at the sanatorium. In the same way, Serge doesn’t want it to end. Having escaped and been captured he and a companion face a firing squad, only to find themselves spared and abandoned at the last moment, as war ends. When he calls after the retreating Germans, ‘you can’t do that!’, we sense once again his feeling of being abandoned and also jolted out of a pleasant routine he had come to enjoy and perhaps rely on.  We have been here before, and it begins to see as though we might arrive here again.

What is noticeable too is the final scene in Chapter 9, as the German soldiers prepare to execute Serge, the way in which time seems to stretch out endlessly though only a few minutes must surely have passed. It reminds me strongly of the journey Serge made through the silk factory when he was a boy, when a short journey to find his mother was transformed into something dreamlike, and there is perhaps a certain similarity too with Learmount’s first encounter with Versoie, the estate he couldn’t quite find his way into. This suggests that the contracting and dilating of time is important to Serge’s story (and I can’t resist linking it to the long and short ‘notes’ of Morse code). And yet time seems to be circular too. No matter what Serge does, and if truth be known, he doesn’t do very much, he seems to be trapped in an endless repetition of certain tropes, with the same recurring images, with his time in the air force as a brief, wild interlude, at the midpoint of the novel, when he could be said to have lived fully, exploiting his talents. His second rebirth is a retreat rather than a release, and one begins to suspect that the rest of the novel will bring yet more retreats.

Reading C by Tom McCarthy #5

I continue my reading of Tom McCarthy’s C. Comments on Chapter 1 are here, Chapter 2 here, and Chapter 3 here, Chapters 4 and 5 here.

Chapter 6 brings us to the end of ‘Caul’, the first part of C. Serge, now a teenager, has been packed off for a water cure somewhere in Eastern Europe, to treat what is glossed as ‘stomach complaints’ but might more properly be described as constipation, mental as well as physical. As Serge puts it, ‘it’s like a big ball in my stomach’, ‘[a] big ball of dirt’ (90). This, of course, picks up on that sense, at the end of the previous chapter, of having taken something of Sophie into himself. He designates the condition as ‘it’, and ascribes to it an independent will. Similarly, Serge finds his sight mysteriously veiled by something, like one of his mother’s silks, making his vision ‘gauzed’. Dr Filip, his doctor, is known for attempting to treat mental as well as physical symptoms: as he puts it to Serge, ‘you serve its needs, make them your own. This we must change’ (95).

Given the welter of detail from earlier chapters, and now this, we must inevitably make some sort of link between Serge Carrefax and Sergei Konstantinovich Pankejeff, the ‘Wolf Man’, one of Freud’s most famous patients. There are similarities between them: sexual abuse by a member of the family, the inability to have bowel movements, the death of the older sister by suicide, the sense of a veil between him and the world, not to mention Freud’s belief of the Wolf Man having been disturbed by seeing his parents having sex (which in turn makes me wonder now whether Sophie had in fact been acting as a go-between for Mrs Carrefax and Widsun rather than herself forming a liaison with Widsun; though I prefer the ambiguity of not being quite sure about that one).

The details are not precisely mirrored but the close correlation positions Serge as a person whose alienation has become medicalised in such a way as to place him on the threshold of a new ‘science’, much as he has, throughout his short life, always been on the threshold of new scientific and technological developments, without ever being involved, rather like Simeon, who pops up during this chapter to claim he is on the verge of another breakthrough, and suggesting his son become part of his proposed family firm.

We suspect already that this will, like all of Simeon’s other schemes, come to nothing. Meanwhile, Serge indulges his fascination with networks and connections by observing the pipes and machinery that distribute the spa water, and later looking at the cracks that thread through the different parts of town. His interests are mirrored too in the medical machinery; the segmented bodies of the tables echo Sophie’s fascination with insects. He is adrift, but pleasantly so, lingering at the spa, following his treatment, dallying with the charming Lucia, whose blood is too light whereas his is too dark. Filip accuses him of finding the rhythm of the illness pleasant, arguing that he needs a transformation. He is the silkworm cocoon, trussed, waiting. It is only at the end of what seems to be his first sexual encounter, with Tania, the dark, deformed masseuse who regularly treats him, that the veil is removed from his sight. It is, in a way, a rebirth, echoing the removal of the caul in which his face was covered when he was born, but it sets too the pattern of future sexual encounters, in that he will always insist on taking his partner from behind, as though unable to bear looking at their faces.

Reading C by Tom McCarthy #4

I continue my reading of Tom McCarthy’s C, with Chapters 4 and 5.

Comments on Chapter 1 are here, Chapter 2 here, and Chapter 3 here.

Chapters 4 and 5

‘Sophie and Serge are educated together’(38), the first sentence of the chapter, sets the subject for discussion, as well as indirectly pointing up the fact that such co-education would be uncommon in pre-WW1 England, certainly for Sophie. The contrast in their approach to learning is striking. Serge ‘sees letters streaming through the air, whole blocks of them, borne on currents occupying a zone beneath the comprehensible’ (38). One thinks, inevitably, of his father’s experiments with telegraphy. Neither, oddly, can Serge do perspective in art class. ‘He sees things flat; he paints things flat’ (39).One thinks back to Chapter 2 and Serge sitting alone in a classroom looking at flat characters and shallow landscapes. And yes, in the most literal way, he has no sense of perspective.

Sophie, on the other hand, scrutinises botanical specimens and paints them in forensic detail. Unlike Serge she sees into things, and as we already know, she has already seen more than a child perhaps should (and at this stage it is not easy to determine how old Sophie actually is). As her name, Sophia, suggests, she is, or should be, the personification of wisdom. As yet, however, although Sophie has knowledge, whether she uses it wisely is another matter. She is, though, hungry for that knowledge, and whatever project she embarks on, she pursues it with single-minded devotion.

In section ii of this chapter, her new enthusiasm is cryptography, which she learns from Widsun, a friend of her father’s. Widsun, with one eye on the political situation that is brewing, is interested in the possibilities of sign language for passing covert messages in wartime. Simeon disapproves of both cryptography and sign language as he believes they subvert attempts to communicate, and for that matter refuses to accept that war is in the offing.

The question of what communication actually is hovers constantly in the background, not surprisingly when the entire house is seemingly given over exploring it from all angles. Quite apart from the deaf children being taught to speak and Simeon’s experiments with telegraphy (in which letters and words are transmitted in Morse code), there are the recordings of the pupils speaking that Sophie and Serge discover in the attic, Widsun’s gift of a projecting kinetoscope (an early form of cinema projection, and of course showing silent films on a flat screen), the elaborate communication system of strings-and-cans that the children set up around the garden to facilitate communication during their most elaborate games. Yet, with all of this, there are constant failures of communication, most notably between the children and their parents and, by extension, between them and Mr Clair, the tutor, who cannot teach Serge perspective and who has been far outstripped by Sophie’s brilliance.

No attempt at communication ever works quite as it ought to; the sense remains of words being cut off, of voices not being heard (the deaf children still can’t ‘hear’ if they have their backs to a speaker). And, of course, Simeon is constantly pipped at the post in his attempts to patent his discoveries (and we only ever have his word – and what does that actually mean – that he is actually doing the research he claims to be carrying out, and achieving those results). At other times forms of communication become corrupt, most strikingly in the way Sophie and Widsun communicate, through coded messages in the Personals columns and through a different form of sign language.

section iii of this chapter focuses on the Day School Pageant, which takes as its subject matter the Rape of Proserpine. Here we see Simeon in his element, lord of all he surveys, attempting to orchestrate every aspect of the play, which in turn underlines how little of the rest of the world he controls. Everything about Versoie is somehow always trussed up, in walls, in telegraph wires, in vines, in the threads on the loom, and in costumes.

Within the play, Serge is cast as Ascalaphus, the witness to the rape, as Widsun observes. And this is Serge’s role at home, and indeed throughout most of the novel to come. He will rarely possess much in the way of agency, but he will bear witness, though often, particularly now, as a child, he will not entirely understand what he sees. He stands as a contrast to Sophie, who observes and understands and already carries the weight of knowledge. Thus, Serge sees Widsun and Sophie signing to one another but doesn’t understand what they say, and in turn doesn’t understand why Sophie’s stage special effects go slightly awry throughout, until as the play ends, everyone is desperate for refreshments, leaving her to vanish. After noise comes silence, and Serge’s standing witness to a strange event which the adult reader interprets as two people copulating behind a screen, their shadows thrown onto the screen but which for Serge simply makes no sense at all as he renders it in terms of two-dimensional objects. As he never quite gets to see behind the screen, he remains in ignorance and we are left to assume that Sophie and Widsun have had an assignation, not least because Widsun leaves so rapidly afterwards.

The image of the screen returns again at the end of this chapter, but first, in section i, we meet Serge, a teenager now, listening into the world via his transmitting and receiving chamber, buried away in a silence chamber he has constructed somewhere in the house. This picks up, once again, on the sense of the labyrinth: the estate hidden away, the house hidden within the estate, the buildings that seem to fold in on themselves, and now another layer within, like Chinese boxes, embedded one inside another. And inside the silence chamber, the smallest box of all, the world unfolds and multiplies as Serge goes through his nightly routine of scanning the wavebands, first for local traffic and then, gradually, reading out to the world beyond, to the ‘vast sea of transmission’ (64), set again the ‘little household’s fantasy of isolation’ (64). No coincidence, then, that Serge chooses to recall the night he intercepted a distress call from a sinking ship.

To Serge, ‘[t]he static’s like the sound of thinking’. It is more than a person or a group. ‘It’s bigger than that, wider – and more direct.’ ‘It’s like the sound of thought itself.’ (63). And what is striking here is how Serge sees words in sounds, picking up that image from the previous chapter. Of all of them, even Simeon, Serge is the only one who seems to be fully aware of the wider picture, of the world beyond, and even then he can only apprehend it by hiding away in the silence chamber. But he, at least, is aware. Simeon, Mrs Carrefax and Sophie are all looking inward, each contained in their own cocoon of workshop, weaving shed and laboratory. There is no real world beyond.

Moving to section ii, it is not clear at what point Sophie leaves Versoie to study in London. We encounter her only after her return, after two terms, for no immediate reason. She works obsessively and sleep-walks. When Serge speaks to her, her responses are fractured, disjointed, echoed in her constant work of dissection, her deconstructing of flowers and insects, the way in which she mingles newspaper headlines and charts and diagrams of her work on the wall of her laboratory.

When she confides, finally, in Serge and tells him she has a lover, the reader is left with a jumble of possibilities. Is it Widsun? Or someone else? Is she pregnant, as she seems to be suggesting? And, critically, is she suggesting that Simeon is not their father? One thinks back to the pageant of the previous chapter and the mysterious muddle of the crowning of Widsun and Mrs Carrefax, rather than Mrs Carrefax and Simeon as originally intended. The signals are muddled, and her death, from taking poison, is glossed as an accident. Only Simeon knows that she said ‘I’ll have to kill him in me’ (74).

Section iii is the funeral, another, darker pageant orchestrated by Simeon; in this instance, there can be no return to the light, although Simeon decides that Sophie’s coffin must be fitted with a Morse code transmitter in case she is not actually dead. What is striking throughout is his seeming oblivion that this is his daughter who is dead, whose funeral he has arranged, rather than it being one more general event. His lack of emotional involvement is extraordinary. The event is a farce rather than a moving ceremony.

For Serge, ‘[b]oth death and she are elsewhere, like a signal, dispersed.’ At the same time, ‘Serge feels a heaviness enter his stomach, as though something foreign were being lodged there’ (83).

The day-school children, inevitably, recite at the ceremony, and Serge, or is it McCarthy, comments on their under-rehearsed performance.

‘The looping, repeating lines mutate and distort so much that, even when the words come out correctly, they seem like a mispronounced version of something else, other sentences that are trying to worm their way to the surface, make themselves heard’ (78)

One returns, in that case, to ‘the letters streaming through the air, whole blocks of them, borne on currents occupying a zone beneath the comprehensible’ at the beginning of Chapter 4. (Also, it made me think of electronic voice phenomena, supposedly the communications of spirits from beyond the grave.) There are indeed ghosts in the machine, but what sort of ghosts, what kind of machine?

Reading C by Tom McCarthy #3

I continue my reading of Tom McCarthy’s C. Commentary on Chapter 1 is here and on Chapter 2, here

Chapter 3

Chapter 2 began with Simeon’s restatement of the opening words of Genesis, appropriated to promulgate his theories on the importance of speech for the deaf, this chapter offers a different kind of foundational myth, concerning the creation of the estate of Versoie.

The similarity between Versoie and Versailles ought not to be ignored. It perhaps points up the pretensions of the estate’s founder but more importantly, I think it also emphasises the sense of the place as some sort of mysterious playground. No Marie Antoinette playing at being a shepherdess this time. Instead, alongside Simeon Carrefax’s curious school for the deaf, there is a fully-fledged silk industry, from the breeding of the silkworm to the weaving of fabric. It is even echoed in the name of the estate, with ‘soie’ being French for silk. (McCarthy’s well-developed taste for wordplay goes further, with Surin’s name echoing the Latin – Serinus canaria domestica – for the canaries he brought with him, to drown out the noise of the silk looms, and perhaps also the serin finch – Serinus serinus – an uncommon summer visitor to the south of England, not unlike Surin and his descendants, the Carrefax family.)

What also to make of Surin’s styling himself as a latter-day Noah, the ultimate patriarch, though the dynasty he founds is apparently entirely female, which indicates that Versoie is not Simeon’s but his wife’s. Indeed, as Sections i and ii reveal, it is she who runs the silk-weaving business, and it is not clear whether Simeon’s school is anything more than the whim of a dilettante working out his theories to their ultimate extent.

Sections i and ii focus exclusively with the silk industry, this time with Serge as guide, as he tours the rooms, looking for his mother. Again, there is an emphasis on sound, or rather, the lack of it. ‘Serge was loud and panting when he cleared the threshold but, after adjusting both his pace and breathing to the room’s quiet, steady rhythm […]’. (28) The sounds are small – ‘A kind of click sound pervades the air: a fidgety, unsatisfying, low-level chafe’ (29), the sound of the silk moths mating in a pit – but again they dominate.

This is a highly sexualised encounter, not just because Serge is witnessing the organised breeding of creatures. He watches the women kneeling, bent over the egg-laying trays, all bottom, their faces barely visible. The larvae are composed of ‘greyish-brown flesh soft and wrinkled, the trunks of miniature elephants’. (29) The contrasts between sexual availability and immaturity keep on multiplying. Sex is a mechanism, fecundity is industrialised; there is no love present in this place, although there is a strange tenderness in the way they lay out the hatching larvae in rows, like babies in a hospital nursery.

And make no mistake, the women are in control here. All the silk workers are female; the silk buyer is male and there is Bodner the deaf gardener, and of course, Serge as the reader’s guide, but it is the women who run the place. However, it is Serge who leans in to pick up a pair of coupling moths out of the pit, throws them into the air, calling them Orville and Wilbur (clearly we are at a point where powered human flight is the newest thing). What is not said is that the moths fall to the ground not so much because they are coupled but because they can’t fly anyway – silk moths do not have the power. When Serge removes the wings from one of them his cruelty is set against the fact that the wings are entirely useless to begin with.

The images of stacking, of mating moths piled up on one another, of rows of hatching larvae being laid out, are echoed when Serge, now accompanied by Sophie, moves from the breeding area to the processing section, where the silk cocoons are unwound and the thread. Here there are more trellises, frames, grids, the indoors echoing the outdoors of Chapter 1, although in this instance it is about structure and containment, reflecting the tightly wound cocoons rather than the overflowing vegetal abundance of the garden. Sophie, untidily wound in strips of silk, part of her costume in the forthcoming pageant, is the antithesis of the silkworms, neatly swathed.

In section ii, there are so many images of death: cocoons boiled to kill the caterpillars within. Too-wise Sophie, who has clearly spied not only on Serge’s birth but on something else as well, likens the dead caterpillars to an aborted baby. In the Dyeing Room, a mass of thread in a vat is poked ‘as though trying to drown a kitten’. (31) Berries become ‘medicine’. The rural idyll is rapidly coming undone as we come closer and closer to the commercial heart of the estate, the room where the fabric is woven. There is an increasing rhythmic intensity too, as the children pass by the pounding loom, ‘its piston-levers shoving a huge comb through warp into which weft-silk is fed from a bobbin that unwinds jerkily at the loom’s edge.’ (32) And in the Store Room, the folded and pleated fabrics seem to resonate with the folded and pleated landscape outside, falling in on themselves, over and over.

Finally, Serge and Sophie, accompanied by the silent Bodner, reach the heart of the enterprise, the room where Mrs Carrefax is doing business. Again, there is an emphasis on her exoticism; she sits comfortably on cushions at a low table; the cloth dealer kneels awkwardly. She is in control. But note too her reaction when she sees her children. ‘Her face drops – though the look she gives them isn’t unkind.’ (33) Like the women tending the moths, Mrs Carrefax is entirely detached. Her children are like moth larvae to her; this does not bode well for the future. Here too we learn that they are to play Rhea and Cronus in the pageant, brother and sister who became king and queen of the gods, producing children in an incestuous relationship, with Cronus devouring his own offspring. One thinks back to the berries.

The nature of Mrs Carrefax’s relationship with Bodner also comes to the fore, for the reader if not the children, when Sophie announces that he is signing the word ‘poppies’. Serge is sceptical but again one wonders just how much Sophie, unnoticed, sees around her.

Section iii moves from their mother’s domain to their father’s, the workshop, and here Sophie is clearly much more at home. She reminds one constantly of her father, loud on the page, inquisitive, engaged with the world, experimenting. The chemistry set is Serge’s, but she has already appropriated it and the children experiment with making coloured sparks until something goes terribly wrong and they produce a huge explosion which, somehow, they survive. A simple chemical experiment perhaps, yet it’s difficult to avoid seeing this, in the light of the rest of the chapter, as anything other than one more sexual encounter, an alchemical marriage between Sophie and Serge, Rhea and Cronus, the uncontrollable chemical reaction, the metaphysical orgasm.

And already we know this will be as good as it will ever get: they experiment to recreate the effect, but ‘[a]ll they ever get are small-fry phutts and phizzes, unsatisfying placebos.’ (37)

Three chapters in, McCarthy’s approach seems clear enough: each chapter jumping forward in time, linear but unpredictable; each section focusing in intense detail on a particular incident in Serge’s young life. We construct a strange and confusing picture of Versoie, a place which makes no topographical sense, a place in which the parents leave the children to their own devices while in turn pursuing their own interests. There is a sharp contrast between a male technological world and a female world of animal husbandry and textile processing, though birth and death have become industrialised. Yet Serge seems more in tune with his mother’s world while Sophie is attracted to her father’s. There is an obvious dichotomy in play.

And it is this obviousness that bothers me. McCarthy isn’t so much laying his cards on the table as inviting the reader to inspect them in great detail. The delight in wordplay, the obvious resonance of images, it all seems just a little too easy. The novel is filled with complexity, yes, but it is … well, yes, why not, ‘telegraphed’. I find myself wondering constantly what it is I am missing, because I do have the feeling I am being deliberately misdirected with this abundance and obvious confusion.