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    C
    C
    C
    Audiobook13 hours

    C

    Written by Tom McCarthy

    Narrated by Stephen Hoye

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Serge Carrefax spends his childhood at Versoie House, where his father teaches deaf children to speak when he's not experimenting with wireless telegraphy. Sophie, Serge's sister and only connection to the world at large, takes outrageous liberties with Serge's young body-which may explain the unusual sexual predilections that haunt him for the rest of his life. After recuperating from a mysterious illness at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator. C culminates in a bizarre scene in an Egyptian catacomb where all Serge's paths and relationships at last converge.

    Tom McCarthy's mesmerizing, often hilarious accomplishment effortlessly blends the generational breadth of Ian McEwan with the postmodern wit of Thomas Pynchon and marks a writer rapidly becoming one of the most significant and original voices of his generation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 7, 2010
    ISBN9781400188123
    C

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    Reviews for C

    3.5/5

    234 ratings27 reviews

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    • 3/5
      C has all the ingredients to be another Gravity's Rainbow: war, technology, sex, drugs, intrigue, prison escapes, and a touch of the mystical and supernatural. But it isn't even the same type of novel. It is a straightforward coming of age novel with some exotic locales and some interesting tidbits of cultural information thrown in. Serge Carrefax is born just before the beginning of the 20th century at the family estate in England. His father, an eccentric scientist, runs a school for the deaf and experiments with radio. His mother, who is deaf, runs the family silk works. His older sister Sophie is on her way to becoming a brilliant biologist.Serge himself is a young man with many interests, some very strong abilities, but no passions. He is so detached from reality that he can't even take an interest in his own survival. Serge is rescued from his aimless existence by World War I. He joins the Royal Flying Corps and becomes an aerial observer, spending his days flying back and forth over the trenches spotting targets for the English artillery. Observers were unofficially encouraged to sharpen their vision by rubbing cocaine on their eyeballs or simply taking it in the more conventional manner. So Serge comes out of the war with a drug habit, and his life starts downhill again. Every few pages the author gives us a vignette on some aspect of science, history, or culture: radio, silkworms, spiritualism, sound detection, medieval history, Egyptian mythology, etc. These are all to be in some way connected, with the letter "C" being only one of several symbolic links. Serge is the observer who sees the links between early radio technology and the god Osiris, between silk weaving and artillery, and so on. The culmination is a pantheistic fusion of art, technology, and spirituality.C is an entertaining novel, and its bite-sized samplings of cultural and scientific topics are all interesting. But it's a plate of tasty appetizers with no main course.
    • 4/5
      “Politically, old friend: I mean politically. There’ll be a war.”“Be a—What? Nonsense! The more we can all chatter with one another, the less likely that sort of thing becomes.”"The spark gap flashes blue each time he taps; it makes a spitting noise, so loud he’s had to build a silence box around the desk to isolate his little RX station with every session, to maintain the sleeping household’s fantasy of isolation from the vast sea of transmission roaring all around it."Serge Carrefax (C, see?) is born with a Caul (C). He Careens (C) through the early 20th Century (C), and encounters or is bombarded with myriad modes of Communication (C), especially technological ones. Yet he never really hears or is heard by those around him. He never Connects (C) in this Cautionary (C) tale. (See?)
    • 4/5
      I just finished it and immediately began to read reviews to see what others thought...a lot of 'post-modern' and 'pynchonesque' sorts of adjectives in the reviews but what it really reminded me of on some level is The Magic Mountain, only with a frenetic staccato rhythm. Serge Carrefax as Hans Castorp? Or maybe it's because these are the only two books I remember reading with the word 'naptha' in them. Well, I loved it. A real meditative loveliness to the language. I also loved "Remainder" but I was glad this one was so different from that novel, too.
    • 2/5
      A rather disappointing follow up to McCarthy's flawless Remainder. The author has clearly worked hard to layer this work with multiple recurring themes (transmission/reception, coding/recoding, communication) and metaphorical refrains. These heavy handed themes are paired with the inelegant inclusion of disjointed scientific and technological meanderings. Perhaps it ties in with a notion of the main protagonist as being a sort of temporal and narrative conduit, but McCarthy gives us an exceptionally bland character to follow through the novel. I will gladly take up a literary gauntlet, but the puzzle has to be engaging and the challenge has to feel worth the effort. C had neither of these qualities.
    • 3/5
      Overall a good read. It took a while to get going and sometimes went into detailed descriptions of things that were, to me, relatively unimportant to the plot. There were some interesting themes, particularly the constant thread of the geometric and mathematical connectedness of everything.
      The plastic dustjacket of the book itself was an unnecessary gimmick and, worse, every time I opened it there was a cracking sound from the spine, as if all the pages were about to fall out!
    • 3/5
      Certainly McCarthy's least interesting novel to date with vapid overly verbose prose and confusing thematic imagery resulting in a book that is a jumbled mess in every possible way. His other books explore this book's themes better and contain imagery that actually feels like it belongs to the novel and not just a literary obligation.
    • 4/5
      I decided to take this book and The Buried Giant with me on a trip to Sweden to read. In the event, I finished The Buried Giant on the Saturday, but didn’t finish C until I’d returned to the UK on the Monday. Chiefly because I found its opening section a bit hard-going. But by the time I was settled on the plane back to the UK, I’d got past that and remained engrossed for the entirety of the flight. The story concerns a young man, Serge Carrefax, who is obsessed with signals. The opening section of the novel details his childhood, with his inventor father, who is working on wireless communication, and his deaf mother, and it was, to be honest, somewhat over-detailed and dull. I like detailed fiction, but the early chapters of C seemed to be sacrificing readability for detail. But then Carrefax’s brilliant sister dies – and, to be honest, I could see no reason why this needed to happen narratively – and the story begins to pick up. Carrefax spends several months at an Austrian spa. He then enlists as an observer in the Royal Flying Corps during WWI – and this section is especially good. And finally, he is sent out to Egypt to help set up a secret British wireless system. It’s when Carrefax is doing things, rather than reacting to things, that C is at its most interesting. There are some parts of the story which seem to serve no narrative purpose – not just the tragic death of Carrefax’s sister, but also his affair with a masseuse in… um, I no longer have the book and I can’t find a single review online which mentions the town, although I do remember that it was Central European and later had links to the Nazi regime. Much, incidentally, in those reviews is made of McCarthy’s cleverness in covering such a wide range of subjects in such detail. Er, that’s what research is for. I like a lot of detail myself, but the cleverness lies in making it palatable not in its presence. And if there’s one thing about C, much as I enjoyed it, that argued against cleverness, it was the lack of narrative cohesion. That is, it must be said a philosophy all its own, but C presented no evidence it adhered to it, no argument that it followed it. But then one of the advantages of not imposing a pattern is that people will find one anyway. I thought C a well-written novel on a prose level, and fascinating, but for me it failed at everything it claimed to want to do.
    • 4/5
      If Remainder was McCarthy's remix of Crash, this is his of Pynchon's V.
    • 4/5
      I don't think I quite did this book justice due to exorbitant amounts of work- and life-related stress this week. So, a leeetle difficulty concentrating. My overall impression was that it was really well-written, with some very well-done set pieces, but overall it didn't really hang together. I thoroughly enjoyed the first section of the book (before all that stress hit later in the week) so I might have felt differently had I been able to concentrate a little better.
    • 4/5
      Dazzling, like an intricate puzzle with a variety of themes held together with delicate threads. The sets were superb. Each vignette was special and illuminating in its own way. Juxtipositions of science and art, attraction and repulsion, life and death were compelling. The writing was dense throughout, requiring utmost concentration to fully appreciate. For readers so inclined, well worth the effort.
    • 3/5
      I greatly enjoyed the first three quarters of this book. After that, it felt it switched gears and became less interesting. I'm sure there are lots of deep layers of meaning that can be explored, but I just enjoyed the characters, the settings and the prose and really wished it could have ended as beautifully as it started.
    • 3/5
      Maybe I'm being too hard on this novel. I thought it was pretty interesting to see how the plot evolved in one sense but in another sense, it felt a little disjointed and I'm getting sick to death of creative pseudo historical fiction. I like my fiction more fiction-y and my non fiction a representation of true historic fact. Perhaps it's also that all of the creative based on some historical events, however vague, books that I've read lately are also from the same time period and if I have to read another book that goes on about Marconi for as long as I live...well, he was important but I like variety.

      So, keep all of this in mind when you look at how I reviewed this. My friend Lindsey says his earlier novel, Remainder was an inspiration for Synechdoche so I'm going to look into that...Tom McCarthy has an interesting writing style and I'm convinced that if this book would have garnered at least a 4/5 if it has been merely about a different topic OR if the book had focused on the male protagonist's much more interesting sister, Sophie. Alas, instead we follow Serge as he copes with death and narrowly avoids it taking cocaine in the British air force for WWII and avoiding death in battle and in further ways then, of all places. We follow him as he toys with being an architect, does cocaine and heroin, learning the secret codes on British buildings, and is taken to seances. We follow some mistresses and affairs and even a very interesting trip to Cairo...but, I guess I never really liked our protagonist Serge as much as I enjoyed hearing about his sister. He's the boring brother and could really only hold my attention for a couple of chapters maximum. Plus, I'm not a fan of reading about any war to be honest, even if McCarthy has clearly done his research.

      So, if these above things sound interesting to you, this book is well written and thoughtful and you'll probably enjoy it.


    • 2/5
      Major let down. And Serge is Hermes.
    • 1/5
      Hugely disappointing book. I wasn't happy with "Remainder," but McCarthy is an art world fixture, and I expected something experimental here. Given his psychotically disengaged, affectless narrator in "Remainder," I expected unresolved existential puzzles, meditations on reality and presence, and maybe some Oulipo-style games. I expected that all the technical material in the novel, which impressed some reviewers, would add to some elaborate theory about the illegible codes of the world and their inadequate representations, as in "Remainder," or as in the late-surrealist manifestos of the International Necronautical Society. I thought each chapter would be a set up for something elaborate that would be developed in the next chapter: the main character, Serge Carrefax, hunts down strange radio signals at the limits of his receiver's range, listening to the aurora borealis -- and around that time, his sister kills herself. His father is experimenting with radio and dreaming of television, and his household is full of botanical, chemical, and entomological pursuits. All that, it seems, should lead toward some inevitably failed system of signification that would allegorize the main character's emotionally frozen state. (If I'd read Charles Baxter's excellent review in the New York Review of Books, I wouldn't have thought all this; his review is posted on this site, but it's better to read it on the NYRB site, with the footnotes intact; November 25, 2010. More on that at the end.)The reviews praise the book's ambition, its originality. It's ambitious only in the most abjectly old-fashioned manner: it's Hollywood-bound. The opening scenes describing Serge Carrefax's childhood home are clichéd evocations of a late nineteenth-century English estate. There's a chapter-long set piece about a spa in Poland, with all the details so familiar from early 20th c. novels. (The acknowledgments name a person who helped McCarthy find "a perfect spa town," but why did he bother? All these descriptions come straight from novels written 80 years ago.) There's another long set-piece on flying reconnaissance over the trenches in WWI: again, dusty material, stocked with all the clichés of that genre. And another long set piece about Egypt, complete with mini-lectures on Isis and Osiris, the Book of the Dead, Sekmet, Upper and Lower Egypt, the meaning of "pharaoh," and other things: astonishing they aren't tongue in cheek. Astonishing McCarthy thinks he's woven them into his narrative. Astonishing they've been read as evidence of the author's erudition.The book is studded with short expositions of supposedly esoteric or technical subjects: the silkworm industry, a chemistry manual, a dung beetle, how the sound from cannons is picked up using piano wires; how gunners learn to site their targets. There are lots of those, and they could have accumulated into an impressive sense of the world's codes, or an obsessive sense of the main character's disengagement from the human and pathological attachment to affectless semiotics. They could have, except that they're too short. They're hardly up and running as metaphors before McCarthy turns to something else. It's as if his sources (old journals, whatever he's found in libraries) were all brief, so his exposition had to be brief; or as if he thinks he'd bore readers if he kept going on such subjects, or -- the strangest option, but the one I suspect might account for the book's collage of little lectures -- as if he thought that even his psychotically detached narrator couldn't plausibly be that detached. But the whole point of elaborate, technical descriptions is that they can carry dense loads of meaning, and when they're sustained over pages or chapters they become resoundingly strange and compelling. I think, for example, of the descriptions of sunlight or banana plants in Robbe-Grillet's "Voyeur," or the endless technicalities in "Locus Solus," or, for that matter, the children's textbook in "Finnegans Wake." Why sample what should be endlessly repeated? Why be coy about the very signs of disengagement that are the book's theme?These brief episodes are also unbelievable judged as conventional realist fiction. I can't believe that Serge, growing up in a family that is engaged with science and natural history, doesn't know what a spittle bug is (according to the novel, his sister tells him about it, and he briefly relishes its Latin name). I can't believe that he doesn't have more experience in the chemistry lab (the novel makes it sound as if he went in one or two times, and tried a couple of experiments without have any previous acquaintance with chemicals). I can't believe that when he finds a book a German soldier left behind, it happens to be Hölderlin, whom he apparently has never read before even though he has fluent German; and I can't believe that when an English soldier is reading poetry it happens to be A.E. Houseman (and I can't believe that McCarthy has to incorporate a lesson in the relative merits of those two poets, as if it fits seamlessly into his narrative simply because his narrative is stuffed with detail). I can't believe that he first notices some of the stages in silk manufacture, even though it's the principal industry on his father's estate, when he's almost a teenager and -- supposedly -- just happens to wander through the rooms. Realism, and writerly work, aren't McCarthy's strengths. At the level of writing, the book is often weak. Charles Baxter noted actual misspellings; I noted awkward sentences like this one:"At the beginning of September, an arrival creates a small eddy in the flow of leavers from the town."(A "flow of leavers"?) The next sentences are also typical: "She turns up in the Grand Hotel's lobby with a large round hatbox, a mink stole, a folded parasol of the same light blue as the hatbox, a black handbag and a flotilla of smaller bags and boxes. As porters duck and tack around her, she stands static as a lighthouse in a busy harbour, leaving her older chaperone to issue instructions and distribute tips." (pp. 98-99)McCarthy is not parading stereotypes here: he is only writing a period-piece description -- so he doesn't really have an excuse to be piling on the clichés. The lighthouse metaphor is like one of the overdone pieces in Roussel's "New Impressions of Africa," except that it's not generated by any compulsive rule: it's simply an attempt at a realist metaphor. But "duck and tack," which prefigures the harbor image, is the only well-written phrase in the sentence, and its function as an ornament to the marine metaphor ruins it as description. So at the level of writing -- realist craft, in this case -- the book is often distractingly dysfunctional.I kept reading, hoping the Hollywood-style set pieces would finally congeal into a pattern, a theory, a systematic hallucination of meaning (as in "Remainder"), a language game, anything experimental. But no: this is a profoundly, resolutely old-fashioned sort of novel, interlarded with what the author thinks are unusual and fascinating pieces of period detail and technical information. (Baxter is good on the reasons why McCarthy was mistaken by people in the art world as an experimental novelist.) But the period detail is hackneyed and unconvincing (he isn't a good historical novelist), and the technical information is too sparse, didactic, unfelt, and undeveloped. And too unconvincing. I was hoping I could get ideas about the state of the experimental novel from this: instead I see McCarthy's headed for a different sort of career.
    • 3/5
      Its hard to describe a coming of age novel set at the turn of the 20th century that has both epic and yet interior themes. Its very modern in language and its focus on Serge the narrator's description of the world. He has beautiful ways of seeing through the vale of everyday reality; looking instead to the elements of the natural world, and even electrons of the new medium of radio, for example. So its very aware of science and nature and not as much interested in morality or redemption. It has some heart in the character of the young boy, Serge, but it loses this feeling after he lost his sister. His struggle to regain her is made clear in the end, but I felt she had been gone from the book for too long.
    • 4/5
      At times, this book dragged me along like a page-turner (it certainly kept me hooked throughout an 8-hour train journey), yet at other times it was a really tough read, dare I say it, a bit of a chore. Most sections needed reading a couple of times to try to understand them properly. However, on the whole, it was worth it. Multi-layered, often confusing and opaque, I had to read it more like an A-level study, but in tackling it in this way, I got a lot more out of it. I would not say that this book would be for everyone, which is why I have hesitated from giving it 5 stars, but for those who like a challenge and like to work hard to appreciate a book, do give it a try.
    • 1/5
      Started reading this book, but couldnt get into it at all. I have given up after 80 Pages. Definately isnt for everyone
    • 5/5
      Not for everyone, however once you get past the first section it begins to bewitch you, and it will reverberate into your life and reading for months. Would have been a much more worthy Booker winner than the Finkler Question, IMHO
    • 4/5
      At sometimes brilliant, at other times a struggle to get through. Nevertheless, reading the book filled me with a tingling sensation of having read something extraordinary, not from this reality. You can easily find fault, it's problems with the narrative structure, or the lack of emotions. Still, the observations made are often mesmerizing, especially when the author describes the passing of time and nature or the thin line between reality and what lies beyond.
    • 3/5
      This was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker prize and at one time it was the Bookies favourite to win. I can see why, but for me this novel flatters to deceive.I remember reading plenty of novels like this in the 1960's written in the modernist tradition. Reading C took me back to that time , but in 2011 I found this stylistic approach to be out dated. The detachment of the anti-hero Serge Carrefax from the events around him did not work for me.There are four parts to the novel: Caul, Chute, Crash and Call which relate major events in the life of Serge. Caul describes his childhood and his fascination/obsession with radio/codes and his sister and his sojourn at a health spa. Chute finds him with the RAF as an observer in the first world war, seemingly unaffected by the death and destruction around him and and admitting that he enjoyed the war. He is leading the life of a dilettante in Crash; roaming around London and nurturing his addiction to hard drugs. Finally in Call he is in colonial/post colonial Egypt working on a new radio installation.Serge leads a charmed life, violent and disturbing events happen around him and he seems somehow not to be a part of them. His detachment even when facing death makes it hard for the reader to have any connection with him. He is like a cypher that logs incidents/occurrences in his vicinity, shallow and unfeeling. McCarthy is very good at setting the scene and his descriptions of: the regime of the Spa town, the confusion and stupidity of much of the war, the bungling determination of colonialism are very well described. A constant theme throughout the novel is the codes, signals and the just audible presence of machinery that Serge is more in tune with than other people. This effectively places Serge outside of normal human existence, to continue with his observations and obsessions. The writing is witty at times but naming the female Egyptian tomb archaeologist Laura is a poor joke. Obsession and addiction is another major theme, many of the characters share these characteristics with Serge.There is a good novel trying to get out of this stylistic mess. McCarthy is too clever by half. The blurb on the back cover suggests that this book can be enjoyed as much as dissected and discussed: why bother I would say
    • 4/5
      The Short of It: As if written in code, C is a novel that needs to be interpreted before it can be appreciated. The Rest of It: The cover should have warned me. It depicts a lovely chap covered in Morse Code. The blips, the dashes…all serve as a warning for what is contained within the pages but I plowed forth and pushed through the first half and what a first half it was! The story begins around the turn of the 20th century at Versoie House, a school for the deaf. This is a deaf school like no other. Here, the students are not taught to sign. Instead, they are encouraged to vocalize their wants via an abbreviated language focusing on long and short sounds. Mr. Carrefax, the founder of the school is also a scientist. He’s fascinated with the idea of wireless communication and spends much of his time out in his workshop. While puttering around his shop, his wife is in the midst of delivering their son. He sort of leaves her to her business and their son is born. In an environment focusing on communication, Serge Carrefax is born into silence as his mother is deaf, and to top it off, he greets the world with a caul over his head. For those who are superstitious, a caul usually means that the child will be gifted in some way, or that he will be able to predict the future. This led me to believe that Serge would become a very important person later in life. Not so. Serge ends up poisoned. He begins to leach blackness out of his body (think carbon) and his vision is covered by a dark veil. Now, I read this part carefully and I do believe the poisoning was done by his sister Sophie. She fed him poisoned berries. Whether intentional or not, it doesn’t really matter because Sophie kills herself when she finds herself impregnanted by her father’s close friend. Serge, grief-stricken over Sophie’s death and leaching out this horrible blackness, heads to a spa that specializes in such things. The doctor, though very odd in his ways, manages to cure Serge. It’s at this point that things get very weird. Things happen. I say things because the writing was so disjointed in places that I had a hard time figuring out what was going on. McCarthy manages to create Serge without any admirable qualities. He’s not wretched, at least not in an obvious way, but he’s composed of cells and matter and that’s about it. Oh, and of course Carbon which is the element of life and what the title of the book represents. As for the rest of the story, Serge meets people, has a great deal of sex, becomes addicted to cocaine and heroin and fights in the Great War. I wouldn’t say that he stumbles through life because he doesn’t. He does everything with a purpose but one wonders about the end result. I’ve never met a character like Serge. I know virtually nothing about him and it seems that McCarthy did this intentionally. I mean, why follow a man through life if you care nothing about him? After thinking about it a bit and considering the meaning of the title, I’ve come to the conclusion that the entire book is about the components of life, but not life itself. Therefore, Serge is just one of many pawns inhabiting the planet. After figuring this out, I went back through the novel and things that I had overlooked before or only glanced at briefly, began to make sense. This was not an easy book to read. It had to be decoded and picked apart and since there is so little in the way of character development, many will find it difficult to read. I, on the other hand, sort of enjoyed it by the time I finished. As humans, we are just another form of life. No different from the insects or animals that we share space with. It’s quite humbling to be reduced to nothingness in a world as vast as ours.
    • 3/5
      I think this book is a case of ambition out-stripping ability—either for me or the author, I'm not sure which. I could tell that there were a number of rich themes and motifs running through the book that tied the disparate parts together in interesting ways but they were either too subtle or obscure for me to pick up on or they were clumsily handled. This meant my attention wandered and I didn't really care very much about the disaffected Serge. I felt that the story was aimlessly plodding along a lot of the time—too caught up in its web of symbol-laden prose.I'm willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt on this one. I suspect there are some very clever ideas in there and others would really get a kick out of it. I just wasn't up to working too hard for what was meant to be a relaxing holiday read.
    • 3/5
      McCarthy is a hell of a writer, but I feel like this book never quite came together. It has some moments of unquestionable brilliance - the science vs. seance sequence, for one - but I couldn't help shake the feeling that the novel never quite figured out where it was going. Lump it in with all those titles that are easy to admire, but hard to really enjoy.
    • 4/5
       This book is too good for me and I think I'm okay with that. I'm going through a phase of admitting, even flaunting personal weakness, such that I can, with any luck, recognize patterns of things in myself that aren't lame. To that effect, yeah, Tom McCarthy is probably a little bit more smarty pants than I am capable of internalizing, at least in terms of post-modernist literature that reads like a light delirium.Still, it's bound to make a person huffy at times, when they feel nose-thumbed at. I can at least use the excuse that I've never read Joyce's Ulysses (many reviewers hold it up as a comparison point), that maybe I'm missing some vital key to the code because of that particular reading list omission. But that's not going to cut it because I've read a lot of Nabokov, in particular "Ada" (also cited in multiple reviews), and there are striking tonal similarities. Like Nabokov in "Ada", McCarthy builds in weird incestual innuendo and obscure technology.You can spend some time searching for echoes of the book's eponymous letter, C, to the point of missing the point*. Is the letter C the entire shooting match or a blasted red herring? And how far should we take C, beyond cocaine, caul, Cairo, Carrefax... What about the sibilant variant that the Latin letter can represent? Sssss... Sister (both Serge's Sister Sophie and as a slang term for heroin), signal, silk, scarab. Or taking it further, the harder, Germanic sounds--K--while Serge is on the continent fighting/watching/getting turned on by WWI. Klodebrady, the eastern European farcical spa town where a teen Serge goes to see a quack doctor about a sort of fecal blockage (the dislodging of which seems to also send Europe off into its nationalistic-frenzy fighting). "Kennscht mi noch?"--"Do you recognize me now?"--taunts American GIs from the bottom of a Luftwaffe plane.Serge spends his life trying to channel or untangle some of these hidden meanings and signals. Or maybe he's just a channel himself, emotionally mute, something not alive unless current is running through it on its way somewhere else. He's hopeless, spineless, oddly disassociated: his slightly disappointment at the Armistice devolves into debauched opiate abuse in rowdy, vapid London. Eventually he decamps to Egypt to help site radio towers, rattling around in the shards of a dying empire (the nation has just gained its independence). He never really finds what he's looking for. It's likely he wasn't looking for anything.I don't exactly know what happened.Nothing happened.* Wait, what's the point?
    • 3/5
      Patchy stuff. Partly this is deliberate - the book works through Serge's life chronologically but in disconnected episodes, so he never builds up a 'character' - what is important is the world around him, rather than Serge himself. It's an interesting approach and for a while it works, but the lack of a character's story isn't compensated sufficiently elsewhere, and towards the end the book rather drifts as a result. I thought it started slowly but after 50 pages picked up and I was really into it, but about 2/3 through it really needed to kick on and I felt it didn't. Instead there was more of the same rumination on connectedness and the effects of communications technology magnifying or putting a new face on what has always been there, but no build to a satisfying climax. By the end I was glad to finish it, which was a shame. Not dreadful, but for me this goes down as a good idea and setup not carried through well enough to become a really good novel.
    • 4/5
      This book was beautifully written and so full of ideas (and information and research on a huge variety of topics) that it was a joy to read, though your mind could never relax! The complexity of the connections and ideas makes it wonderful to think about afterward. Someone starting the book should watch for examples of trips to the underworld (and literally underground), crypts and the afterlife, 19th- and early 20th-century drug addiction, all sorts of ways people, animals and even things communicate, sister-brother combinations, the idea of language in general, codes and encryptions, and Greek (and Roman?) and Egyptian mythologies. The first part of the last section, set in Egypt, was difficult for me to get through, but mostly because I could not be troubled to understand the politics; but I very much enjoyed the sections dealing with early radio transmissions using Morse code, a cottage industry of spinning silk, the education of the deaf, turn-of-the-century cures at a naturalist retreat (this section reminded me of TC Boyle's The Road to Wellness), WWI flying and tunneling missions, the spiritualism of the early 20th century and Egyptian archaeological digs. A unique book in every way and very moving at the end. Lots and lots to think about.
    • 4/5
      C is for Serge Carrefax who is, I guess, what passes for the hero in this tale of the son of a wealthy family whose patriarch runs a school that teaches deaf children how to speak. Set in the early 1900s the book is split into four sections that deal with his adolescence and his intense relationship with his sister, his teenage years at a spa in Central Europe to treat his unexplained build up of what historically would have been called black bile, his young adulthood as a spotter/navigator in the budding air force of the First World War and finally his life in Egypt as the representative of the murky Empire Wireless Chain scrambling to deal with an country in the throes of a struggle for independence.If C is for Carrefax then it is also for communication as a strong theme that runs through the novel. As a child Serge is fascinated by CB radio, tracking the beeps and background noises he picks up on the waves. His father is also interested in communications and as he experiments with an ammeter he believes that the world reverberates to the echoes of past conversations and thoughts, what he believes makes up white noise and that if it was possible to isolate the individual strands of thought and expression then one might be able to listen to the words Jesus said on the cross.Tom McCarthy is an unusual author whose own pretensions to avant-gardism and involvement in the semi-fictional (whatever that might mean) group the International Necronautical Society makes me think he is either an interesting and boundary pushing author or someone whose head has been sucked in by the vortex created in the general area of his backside. This is certainly not a book without flaws as the plotting is patchy and the last quarter is disappointing, ending on more of a whimper than a bang. However there are some interesting scenes such as one early on where Serge and his sister start playing an early version of Monopoly then take to making it a physical game played around their estate and finally one of the imagination directed from their bird's eye view of their grounds up in the attic of the house.McCarthy has previously written about Tintin and aspects of C hearken back to Herge's creation but given the post-modern treatment. Serge's character whilst at school studying architecture has troubles drawing buildings with any perspective and so creates a portfolio made entirely of top-down plans and that is very reflective of a character who has little depth. As booker prize prospects go I would be tempted to put my money on this one to win (although my previous selection didn't even make it into the shortlist) as the strongest of the picks I've read so far despite the problems I've found with the book but there is the chance that the judges might think it too inaccessible generally to be a suitable pick.Interesting if not flawed