REMAINDER by Tom McCarthy

Reviewed by Patrick Walsh

What do an undisclosed “accident,” ₤8.5 million, and a small crack above a bathroom mirror have in common? Answer: together they are the catalysts behind Tom McCarthy’s first novel Remainder, the contemporary story of an anonymous, London-bred narrator and his painstaking efforts to precisely reconstruct specific moments in time. McCarthy begins his work slowly, as if consciously trying to preserve the ambiguity and detached nature of the narrator, who, after an inexplicable incident involving falling machinery and a resulting settlement, is left as wealthy as he is mentally distorted. Despite the deliberate start, Remainder cleverly diverges from the orderly and the methodical into what can only be described as bizarre and completely out of control.

McCarthy’s calculated writing style and flowing prose carefully reveal the mental processes of his anti-heroic narrator. His is a mind stuck in an infinite loop; a brain that constantly dissects the elements that constitute an “event,” addresses every angle, every possible circumstance, as well as the time frames in which they first occur and from which they are purposefully reconstructed. Remainder is very much a story of self-alienation and reverse progression, but at the same time, McCarthy’s writing questions societal notions of what it means to be mentally and physically “aware.” More than anything else, this novel tracks one man’s compulsory efforts to return to some state of undefined normalcy. All these aspects of McCarthy’s work combined with professional facilitators, complex stage sets and locations, well-trained re-enactors, intricate cover-ups, elaborate bank heists, unplanned hijackings, and suicidal felines, blend to create a piece of literature whose ending is as simple as it is completely unbelievable.

The real impact of McCarthy’s abilities as an up-and-coming author are not revealed in the first analysis of Remainder, but rather release over time with each and every subsequent read. It is a book which will forcibly find its way into the everyday and uncomfortably linger in the mind of the reader for weeks after it is consumed.