Not everyone will be rushing out to buy Tom McCarthy’s Booker-longlisted C after an enthusiastic review by Christopher Tayler in the Guardian’s books Review (July 31st).

“In articles, lectures and interviews, McCarthy speaks the language of post-humanism,” writes Tayler. “His allegiance is to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the French nouveau roman and post-structuralist modes of thought; with a few exceptions, such as William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, most English-language writing since modernism’s heyday can be written off as naive reactionary stuff. It’s bracing and fun,” Tayler adds, “to see these views being aired in a stubbornly non-modernistic literary culture.”

Bracing indeed. So, what’s it all about?

Well, basically it encodes a set of ideas concerning subjectivity. Siblings Serge and Sophie live in a school for deaf children in France. She’s deaf and he isn’t. She is initiated into adult sexuality and then starts receiving cryptic messages and then drinks cyanide and dies. Then he goes to a spa town to be treated for the black bile where he dials through radio frequencies and then he goes to the war where he is a wireless operator in spotter planes. Then he takes cocaine and heroin, meets spiritualists and flappers and goes to Egypt to set up a giant communications network and visits an archaeological dig, which, like everything else, is probably a symbol.

Now read on.

Read the full review here: