"Me? Call me U," says Tom McCarthy's protagonist towards the beginning of his fourth novel Satin Island, echoing the famous opening line of Melville's Moby Dick. U, however, is no old man of the sea; he's a corporate anthropologist, but he's chasing his own illusive Great White all the same: the "Great Report" (his boss Peyton's idea), "The Document […] the Book. The First and Last Word on our age."
After achieving a degree of fame when he published his thesis in the 90s (the result of a couple of years infiltrating the club scene in London), U was hired by a consultancy – “the Company” – which advises other companies “how to contextualize and nuance their services and products […] cities how to brand and re-brand themselves, regions how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies; governments how to narrate their policy agendas – to the press, the public and, not least, themselves.”
The Company has just won the Koob-Sassen Project. This is clearly a big deal since everyone is celebrating the good news. What it is exactly, we’re never told – an obvious but pointed omission, we can only assume, that stands as a metaphor for the baloney the Company (and others like it) peddles; not to mention a nod to the Kafkaesque.
As a “corporate ethnographer”, U’s “official” job is to “garner meaning from all types of situation – to extract it, like a physicist distilling some pure, unadulterated essence out of common-mongrel compounds, or a miner drawing gold ore from deep within the earth’s bowels”, thus, in anticipation of the day he can pull it all together in his “Great Report”, he keeps dossiers on everything and anything (“Write Everything Down” he’s learnt from Bronislaw Malinowski, the father of modern anthropology): from oil spills to parachuting accidents, buffering to South Pacific cargo cults.
Satin Island is most coherently interpreted as the collection of these dossiers, since each chapter is dissected into numbered paragraphs, each one something of a separate chunk of information or cultural analysis, interspersed with titbits of information about U's life – namely his relationship with a woman named Madison who eventually tells him a story from her past that's just so "weird" I was as unsure of what to make of it as U seems himself; and his friend dying of thyroid cancer – rather than a narrative structured around the protagonist's life, punctuated with morsels of information. This use of cultural theory is nothing new in McCarthy's work, but it dominates Satin Island to the extent that I found myself pondering his decision to retain traditions of plot and character given they appear in such diluted guises. This will, undoubtedly, put many readers off, but then again no one who knows anything about McCarthy's fiction settles down with one of his books expecting a traditional yarn. As U warns in an aside: "Events! If you want those, you'd best stop reading now."
Somewhat surprisingly, though, I couldn’t help but find it all strangely compelling; frustrating, too, but compelling and frustrating in equal measure. It’s all a search for significance; and the message that this is the holy grail that lingers just out of reach in our modern world of scrolling through endless feeds of information, and the perpetual buffering of a computer screen, rings out loud and clear. It all seems a little too bleak in the end though, as U stands “suspended between two types of meaninglessness”. “Did I choose the right one?” he wonders. “I don’t know.”
At this point I wanted to wallop U (and his creator) round the head, but I also had an equally strong yearning to begin the book all over again – had McCarthy secreted an elusive codex of the like U's looking for among the pages? – thus subjecting myself to the precise circuitous repetition that has haunted McCarthy's work since his first novel Remainder was published in 2005 (the story of a man helplessly condemned to reconstructing and re-enacting nebulously recalled scenes from his past in the aftermath of an accident that leaves him traumatised and disjointed from reality, but £8.5 million in compensation richer).
McCarthy revisited similar themes – repetition, trauma, memory – in the Man Booker shortlisted C in 2010; a novel that drew on both high modernism and post-structuralism. Does it matter that there's a feeling of having been here before? McCarthy, I suspect, would argue not, readily conceding in the acknowledgements at the end of Satin Island that, "like all books", it "contains hundreds of borrowings, echoes, re-mixes and straight repetitions".
• The book is available from Amazon.co.uk.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.
