The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

British Writer Tom McCarthy‘s latest novel, which is simply called C, was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, and on that occasion Radio 4′s Front Row had an interview with him that made it to their weekly podcast (warning, 22 Mb MP3 download).

C is a strange book, a combination of explicit modernism and quite classically philosophical themes.  It tells the life of one Serge Carrefax, who is born in 1898 to an inventor with a passion for speech technology, and a deaf silk manufacturer.  Serge gets completely obsessed with that new technology, wireless transmission, and goes to work as a radio operator at the front of World War I.  Later, when he’s sent to Egypt to work on a communications network for the British Empire, he somehow gets involved with the discovery of Tutanhamun’s tomb.  Amidst all this, Serge is not so much part of the story, as more of an observer, who looks at the world and receives impressions the way his radio does.

Front Row‘s Kirsty Lang, herself a professed Tintin fan, spotted a lot of Tintin in Serge Carrefax, and McCarthy agreed :

“Tintin is a big presence in this book.  In Tintin you have these two great houses : the family estate of Marlinspike, where Captain Haddock lives, which also has a family secret buried underneath it, and on the other hands you have the pyramids, the Inca temples, and crypts that he digs up.  They’re both flipsides of each other.   Tintin is also a radio-operator.  He’s meant to be a journalist, but he only ever files one article.  What he does repeatedly throughout the books, is tune in to these mysterious wireless messages, hunt them down and decode them.  And also, Tintin is neutral; he’s blank : whereas all the other characters are colourful and full of personality, Tintin is this Candide-type, neutral, passive character who, like a prism, defracts his whole era.  That was something that I wanted very much for Serge as well.”

It’s not the first time that McCarthy has dug up Tintin himself.  In 2006 he wrote an essay called Tintin and The Secret Of Literature, in which he tried to apply structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory from people like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida to Hergé’s books.  That was met with mixed reviews, but it remains a very clever piece of writing, if you look beyond its rather French hyperbole.