a kind of simulation but better than the real thing ever was - the Tom McCarthy thread

See what you did there

C++

yeah its actually more like a D but felt the joke was *just* worth making.

in the darkness of his lair a wizard schemes

Just finished Remainder and thought it was good

But also seemed like the kind of book somebody who was really into Inception would like

Reviews I've seen for this so far have tended to be about how much does the reviewer like the French theory they were exposed to when they went to uni not about the book.

the french theory is frankly token here. it's *really* conventional and fails badly on that conventional level.

:-/ i haven't read it yet but my gf started and abandoned it already

sometimes writers are best when they're not allowed to indulge themselves

Bring back socialist realism.

I've been thinking and I think Remainder is just like a more literary version of Fight Club

Ok bye

fight club meets synecdoche new york on BEER

which book are you guys talking about? i just bought "c"

this'll be a bit incoherent cos i've been piecing it together in a rush at work:

so, this book was very bad and I almost threw it down in irritation a couple of times. feel analysis is dignifying it with too much attention (yes I feel jilted). I'm p certain much of it is a book about not being able to write a book, and the book that it's about not being able to write is this book.

its a continuation of one of aesthetic areas of the end of C - that there's a black substance that underlies all existence. this presumably a form of the chain of being theory, with a protean black corruption underlying all (Thomas Vaughan - "beneath all degrees of sense there is a certain horrible, inexpressible darkness. The magicians call it tenebrae activae"). In C, where one of the main notions is that which lasts of us after death is the physical, or rather what we call 'spiritual' is in fact our physical mode, this black substance represents the medium through which things are translated into other things.

The subsequent essays of varying quality have suggested that he sees this base medium as the place where a base code is reconfigured.

Satin Island takes that and converts it in numerous ways rendered meaningless through their variety - it's the shapeless electronic 'plasma' in which images and communications form on computer screens, it's cancer, it's rubber, it's the primal element of the world that accumulates over time, and it is - the main point in the book this - oil, insidiously spilling into the ocean, its polymers the base for plastics. In other words this black stuff is the base material manifestation of humankind. The point is made that it doesn't mix with water, and thus represents material differentiation - that which is created into the world. there's perhaps a ballardian sense in which it is transformative in a topopgraphical and psychological way, but frankly i've already given far too much definition to things that are only hazily tossed out and are more or less meaningless unless the book is able to make them so, which it isn't.

Hazily tossed out? That in itself lacks clarity: that haziness is a result of poor narrative voice, a strong whiff of wikipedia, an inability to convert detail of subject matter into metaphor that - why? he doesn't know enough about the detail? In fact if one thing characterises this book it's that TMcC doesn't know what he's writing about.

The narrative voice: He's an unreliable narrator ('Call me U' -_-) with the cop-out author-proxy job of a 'corporate ethnologist'. I mean, corporate ethnologist is a job, I know a couple, but he doesn't really bother with what they actually do, apart from in one paragraph, which looks like a cut and paste from an email from someone he asked. So I'm just assuming he felt this 'job' allowed him to be a sort of embedded author, as journalists are embedded in military units, with something of the same relationship - his hazy asseverations about offices and the world of work and corporate life are well meant, but will cause for anyone. The voice is so incompetent that you assume it's an unreliable narrator, but there's no double strand of irony to play the voice off against. It just reads like a more purposeless version of TMcC's essay writing.

The narrator is deliberately incurious and vague on detail. Vagueness seems to be one of the 'rules' that the novel sets itself, but of course it's not a rule because there's no constraint, it allows for an inartistic flatulence. Obviously TMcC's books have always been characterised by an affectless approach to the world, with only an attenuated sense of perceptual association of cause and effect. With the background perceptual noise tuned up, conceptual processing is dialed down. Mathematical rules and physical laws tend to provide ontological structure. It's part, I'm assuming, of creating a zone of code reconfiguration.

But Remainder had an obsessive narrator - that was the *point*. C, at least in its good parts, used unusual elements next to each other - the imaginative landscape was odd, and the play between the 'real' world, and the mythological and scientific elemental, through prose that loosened its concern with the 'ineluctable reality of the visual,' was strange and interesting. I mean, he's always been a bit of an awkward writer - part of the point of Remainder again, and the lumpiness in 'C' worked to a degree.

Here the prose wobbles in undifferentiated fashion between the unexamined cliche ('perenially attractive staff who manned the reception desk'), old-style literary word order (for the narrator and his fluting rhetoricisms), and his aspergersy unmetred modernism (not strictly unmetred of course - but flat, sentences of equal length - instruction manual style). Again, the lack of ironic counterpoint and lack of differentiation means that 'perenially attractive staff' in no way appears to be intended comically.

Again, i know his method tends to the attenuated, but there are what I feel safe in saying some plain Lanchesterisms here, unexcused by legitimate method:

That Friday, when I went up to see him, he greeted me, without removing his gaze from the hand-held into which he was typing a message, with a question.

The book roams across its chosen areas without differentiation - extending the attenuation of material reality in previous books to subject matter - as if this is the same as the sort of associational enlightenment that you might get in yer Claude Magrises or William Sebalds of the world. It's not. It looks haphazard and silly, and ill-informed. He perceives a world of figures here but not the form of what he should attend.

In this light, his metaphor is worth examining briefly - analysis of the technological and corporate environmental and mental spaces quickly slips into romantic/gothic style metaphors - oriental cities, crumbled towers. I was hoping one of Tom McCarthy's general aims as a writer was to create an aesthetic space that undermined and attacked this sort of writing - generating a new metaphorical landscape. this is painfully conventional - dragging the curious and modern (marketing, coporatism, a flattening of the difference between 'real' world and a 'virtual' world) into old lit manners and images.

There's a classic Martin Amis style diffusion of detail in a metaphor (Amis hangs fairly heavily over this book). To give an example, where he is describing the air conditioning system:

Other, vaguer voices hovered in the general noise - or if not voices, at least patterns, with their ridges and their troughs, their repetition frequencies, their cadences and codas.

It's the way the specific detail (the air-conditioning noises) is transformed into the generically musical rather than the specifically musical. Something of the subject needs to inform the metaphor drawn from it. Here the words are used only to balance sentence sound. They are not precise. Working the other way, making music which takes the specific noises of industry and internal plumbing, produces something exotic - the Stockhausen sense of deriving music from communication wavelengths. TMcC produces something generic.

The central vehicle of anthropology is delivered almost exclusively through meditations on Claude LS and cargo cults. (The whole book feels out of date in fact - the narrator has a big pinboard full of notes. Has he not got Ever-note on his hand-held?) He has no idea how anthropology and ethnology is used commercially (apart from a brief, more or less accurate section, presumably given to him by someone who does the job). You're much much better off going to Tom Ewing's Blackbeard Blog if you want to get a sense of modern marketing. In fact the book generally had the curious effect of making every single cultural artefact encountered since seem like it was doing a better version of what TMcC was trying to do. Even the most nugatory of tweets seemed to carry a symbolic effect greater than Satin Island's undernourished explanations.

There's a 'Project' that he's working on - it's kept symbolic and abstract, so this is the post-industrial device of the 'corporation' as a form of secular governing system, in a loose-ish tradition I have in my head that includes Melville's Barlteby, Kafka, PKD.

So some of this book is about the processes of corporations and offices, and the basic problem here, as elsewhere in the book, is that TMc doesn't seem to have a clue what goes on. He has no idea about the aesthetic of offices for a start. I think the 'how' of things are achieved in the modern world - the project delivery mechanisms, the trackers and methodologies - are fascinating. It's the bureaucratic form of a demi-urge - how do we bring things bigger than us into being? Tom McCarthy seems interested in this but without any of the detail that makes it interesting.

Allow him *all* his latitudes. Say, 'Ok, this is a book about how our processing runs out of things to input, and therefore its mode is that of a lenten intellect. It is a book about how there is no code in the objects we process, only in their disintegration and reintegration into black plasma, which in fact contains the true code. Therefore this book is also about the inability to find truth in our human impedimenta. It's about a lazy mind unable to find meaning. It does its job.' Say you allow him all that, there's still the problem that the proportions of content (oil, dying parachutists, cancer, anthropology) are all out of whack. It's like a conventional domestic object so badly made that it can't stay upright.

I read some Muriel Spark after (Mandelbaum Gate, and it was like being one of those house cats that goes outside for the first time.

http://cdn77.sadanduseless.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/cat-reaction14.jpg

In fact fairly early on there's a sentence that pretty much sums up much of what Satin Island is trying to do:

All it meant was that her habits of mind were inadquate to cope with the whole of her experience, and thus Barbara Vaughan was in a state of conflict, like practically everyone else, in some mode or another.

short version. it's not v well written. i preferred pattern recognition.

booming post, fizzles.

cheers etc. oh and TMcC here:

But it all works its way back into the work. Satin Island is, to some extent, a book about a restless struggle with the impossibility of writing the Book.

think I'd prefer this book rather than the Book tbf.

a+ cat photo deployment, laughed out loud

I'm glad I have Fizzles to explain to me why John Lanchester and Tom McCarthy are so bad.

These are serious, intelligent, considered judgements I can rely on when I hear other people carelessly talking them up.

thanks pf, tho i have to say my review was more disappointment that it didn't live up to expectations set by his other fiction.

and apologies - quickly skimming my hastily put together screed i see that some of the sentences don't.

did you ever get on with magris

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWDc22Cobwo

yeah i like magris - i have a problem with the diffuseness that associational writing brings to the categories of the world. Ontology - quite easily defined as 'what is there' - becomes 'what my investigations reveal'. It's the inverse of 'nothing will bring nothing' - 'everything will give evereything'. it feels like writers makes it too easy sometimes. if you want to do that everything thing, do finnegans wake.

lol thats meaningless pissed shit.

http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19940713-0

Mark McGurl with some interesting observations on on TMcC here - http://www.publicbooks.org/fiction/the-novels-forking-path

not entirely with all that article - is "experimental fiction that works" rare? looks suspiciously like they're asking experimental fiction to work according to non-experimental standards.

but he's right about a lot of satin island. this is an appalling piece of writing:

We see things shroudedly, as through a veil, an over-pixellated screen. When the shapeless plasma takes on form and resolution, like a fish approaching us through murky waters or an image looming into view from noxious liquid in a darkroom, when it begins to coalesce into a figure that’s discernible, if ciphered, we can say: This is it, stirring, looming, even if it isn’t really, if it’s all just ink-blots.

the overused Pauline quote, the subsequent inability to counterpoint the biblical cadences, the quick rendering of technological modernity into hackneyed "fish coming out of dark waters" and "ink blots" all add up to a seriously uninspired, underworked example of satin island's style and content.

oh and a+ find nakh.

The description of a Sebald/Cole personalized and lyricized encounter with theory resonated for me, particularly in recent TMcC essays. I think you're spot on that experimental fiction that 'works' is a conveniently moving target in the essay.

Remainder adaptation is pretty good then

not quite better than the real thing ever was but not far off

Have this. Might start it tonight.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/typewriters-bombs-jellyfish?variant=29933062407

things that make u go hmm. be interested to hear how you find it, gom.

At least a couple of his LRB essays, which will be in this book, are dreadful.

I'm pretty convinced Remainder was a happy accident, given how abysmal C was

Also, did anyone else see the Remainder film?

no, i didn't really feel v compelled to tbh.

by the way pinefox there's a post upthread where you say you weren't able to understand a post i'd made. i read the post again and literally i did not have the first clue what the hell i was on about. couldn't make head nor tail of it. i found this reassuring.

Thank you Fizzles! Glad we agree :D

"It's that hacking of literary register to find a single plane where close impossibilities forge a landscape. The alkahest is the code of information, variously understood and manipulated via fantasy into something that looks very like materially embodied reality."

!! :P

i think i know what i'm on about there, but it's much easier to say differently. in both C and Satin Island (badly, boringly), he updates the old notion of a sort of black and formless crudely sentient and primal darkness. This is what our organic forms descend into on death (and it is a physical or material condition). For McCarthy it has the capacity to preserve information/data in it as well, for reconfiguring material reality again. It is also oil and oil derivatives like plastics, and celluloid etc.

Out of this you can create things, including alternate realities. 'Hacking of the literary register' was a bad way of saying, these can be... nope, gone again. Broadly though, because it's so protean you can create worlds from things that have no real connections. It implies at base an inherent fungibility.

Now of course none of this makes him 'good' or 'bad' particularly (he is both - Remainder and parts of C are good, Satin Island is very bad, and his essays are extremely variable). But it does seem to be his central subject matter.

There. You are going to tell me that it doesn't make sense again, I know it. Still, I think it's right. This isn't about simulation, in this case, tho that is clearly his other obsession and probably linked somewhere. It's been a while since I've read any of his stuff.

I'm sure it makes sense to you, Fizzles! :D

For me, I think it's either beyond me or perhaps the message is so simple ('writing can imagine alternate realities' or something) that we already know it. Probably it's just beyond me.

SO I ended up picking up his latest, The Making of Incarnation, despite being embarrassed by his most recent piece in the LRB, and thinking Satin Island was crap.

uneven doesn't cover it. so, more or less at random - I'm only two chapters in:

the 'prolegomena' (yes, ok, just) is fine, and more than fine in bits. it's about the Versuchsanstal für Wasserbau und Schiffbau (Research Institute for Hydraulic Engineering and Shipbuilding), which it turns out does actually exist:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Berlin-tiergarten_vws_20050404_291.jpg/1920px-Berlin-tiergarten_vws_20050404_291.jpg

the fact of its actual existence means that what is really just documentary reporting is rendered into Tom McCarthy's particular prose diction and... well, i think it makes that diction look a bit silly. Take the very first sentence of the book:

From the S-Bahn, through shuttling latticework of tree branch and bridge truss, you glimpse it just below Tiergarten as you travel east-to-west, or west-to-east: a five-storey blue hulk.

Why not 'through *a* shuttling latticework of tree *branches* and bridge *trusses*'? Well presumably because McCarthy is trying to establish a form of poetic cadence across both reportage and the content that won't fit in there so well. Only I'm really not sure this is the *right* cadence for what he's trying to do. It feels underexamined and inherited from other forms of 'literariness'.

This friction is there through most of this first section, but then there is the first of a couple of moments so far where you feel what he's doing thicken and intensify - in this case how the vectors of water affect the physical model of oil rigs and boats and cities in the hydraulic tank: 'Computer modelling won't show you everything. Sometimes you have to actually *do* it, make a little world, get down amidst dumb objects and their messiness.' What is notable about these sections is that the force literary cadence is far less present and noticeable.

Remainder worked very well because the central character's desire to recreate a simulated world was entirely cognate with the writer's task - the authorial/narrative voice was very much unified with the actions and thoughts of this character v much on an obsessive part of the spectrum. that's not the case here.

anyway, prolegomena, C+: hasn't caused me to throw the book down, colour me mildly interested enough to carry on reading.

which is more than can be said for the first chapter. this throws us back into the '80s, and a school bus trip of 10 year olds to the Tate. Fine.

Across the side of one (bus) someone has finger-scrawled the word *Fuck*; beneath this, somebody (the same person perhaps) has written *Thatcher*; but this name has since been scored through, substituted by *GLC Commies* – which, in turn, has been struck out and replaced with *You*.

My immediate response to this was 'no'. I think it was 'GLC Commies' that was the immediate cause (tho I had registered that i didn't like 'finger-scrawled'). It just didn't sit right as van-dust graffiti. Then I realised that 'Fuck You' was also problematic. Now, I hope someone older and wiser can correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't really feel Fuck You entered into British vernacular from the US until later than the '80s? Fuck off was pretty standard, and fuck you sounded wrong and american, and not right here.

then they get to the tate after some uneven description of the bus trip (some bits good, some bits... not so good).

... his voice seems to rise from the the whorled depths of the staircase down which the floor's two-tone mosaic disappears.

again, ready to be corrected here, but that's a description of the entrance and 'rotunda', which wasn't rennovated until 2013 and according to my recollection of the Tate back then, wasn't a feature in the 80s.

so anyway, so far so subeditor.

scene drifts momentarily to peckham swimming baths a couple of weeks earlier, when the main character in this chapter, Markie, and his friend are getting changed and realise they're in a changing room next to some girls and peer under the cubicle to take a look.

They had to press their cheeks right to the quartz-and-granite slab to reach the vantage point: from there ... they saw two sets of bare legs towering above them like the trunks of redwood trees, paralllels playing perspectival tricks by narrwing *and* widening out into thighs before converging, at what should have been infinity but was in truth a mere two feet away, into unfoliaged waist canopies...

never mind the 'redwood tree' set-up, 'unfoliaged waist canopies' in this context is one of the very worst things i have ever seen committed to print. i feel bad about even reproducing it here, but its so unutterably awful it needs to have witness.

absolutely not, no, was my immediate response and i very nearly put the book down there and then.

oddly, the chapter very much improves later - again, something of an intensity as McCarthy moves onto his area of obsession - that is to say the orientation and relative positioning of things to each other in time, space and simulation. this is often managed in quite a dull way, with the description of how lines connect - A to B to C - objects with each other. The inevitability of geometric vectors across time. This was where McCarthy headed in the latter, much less successful half of C and there are ofc elements of Gravity's Rainbow in this obsession. Beckett's use of geometric intersection in the Trilogy is much more successful ofc, but McCarthy's own obsession here means it produces a different style and motive of interest that make sections of the book outside these particular occasions seem bad and unnecessary, stylistically gauche and pointless.

so that's one obsession, another is that inanimate objects - like the models of the city in the hyrdraulic tank, and a bird in a picture in the tate - are aware of and somehow will their own destruction, through a glitch in cause and effect caused by replays and simulations. i guess this is a perverted form of immanence in his world. here i think McCarthy gets closer to genuine points of interest in his writing. in the first, very good, section of C this took the form of constructing a metaphysics for how what survives of us after we die is communicated physically rather than spiritually.

unfortunately i think the fundamental problem is that outside Remainder the mode he picks for this is all wrong. his style needs to be radically different from what feels like very baggy writing generally inappropriate to precision.

anyway, i'm going to carry on.

But why though

well, cos i’m interested in some of his central ideas. there’s also at this early stage a sort of “which way will it fall” fascination.

My immediate response to this was 'no'. I think it was 'GLC Commies' that was the immediate cause (tho I had registered that i didn't like 'finger-scrawled'). It just didn't sit right as van-dust graffiti. Then I realised that 'Fuck You' was also problematic. Now, I hope someone older and wiser can correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't really feel Fuck You entered into British vernacular from the US until later than the '80s? Fuck off was pretty standard, and fuck you sounded wrong and american, and not right here.

Good critique, Fizzles.

In what way can you 'finger-scrawl' something on a van? In the dust? If no dust, then you could use your fingernail - and it would come off badly.

'GLC Commies' is all wrong - that diction wasn't used, and there's surely the simpler issue that someone engaged in scrawling on a van isn't going to be McCarthyite (Joseph, not Tom) in that way. It's ridiculous.

Your observation on 'Fuck you' also looks sound to me.

Your criticism of the changing-room scene looks sound.

his area of obsession - that is to say the orientation and relative positioning of things to each other in time, space and simulation

I don't understand how this is interesting. 'Things occupy different places in space'. 'Things move through to space, and their spatial relations to each other therefore change'. Those statements are true. I don't see them as, in themselves, an interesting theme.

I don't like this writer, and won't read him if I can avoid it. Perhaps I should be glad you're doing it for us.

I don't like this writer, and won't read him if I can avoid it. Perhaps I should be glad you're doing it for us.

i live to serve.

I think you're right on the GLC Commies, though the stronger reaction is against the diction. on the question of politics, i do find myself asking *why* that doesn't seem right (I agree it doesn't), and find myself wondering what it is that isn't conducive to right wing opinions in the dust scrawling classes. one option is that vehement phatic expressions of anti left sentiment are relatively new? that doesn't quite work for me. I think it's probably more because GLC Commies suggests a sort of structural analysis, rather than directed against a hate figure like Thatcher. But then fuck the tories is ofc perfectly plausible. Anyway. Not sure why.

On the things occupy different places in space, I'd agree with you that's not intrinsically interesting, though I would ask what it is in Beckett (or even possibly the Ithaca section in Ulysses), where the relentless depiction of objects, their relation and interrelation, is of interest? I feel you will be able to answer this!

More generally this book is about how we consittute our simulations, in this case a film (Incarnation) with the modern technologies available.

This twitter thread on copywrighting motion capture is very relevant to the book's subject matter:

Jet Li on the ethical reasons why he rejected the role of Seraph in the Matrix movies. Li clearly saw the direction Hollywood was headed. pic.twitter.com/P5mhvZ3AOr

— Minovsky (@MinovskyArticle) December 26, 2021

He plays around with this - eg where motion capture posits points of dynamism that exist *outside* or in a theoretical position

The problem is, it's dull, because there's very little psychological engagement or dramatic tension to show why any of this matters or why it might be interesting. It's descriptions of people talking about and using motion capture, or cataloguing histories of iterated movements in industry. None of these things are without interest as subjects of course, but as fiction, McCarthy has done a bad job here.

he's always been interested in defining co-ordinate space - what does it mean to say 'x marks the spot'? In this novel via descirptions of how motion capture technology works, he's saying that 'the marked position's not the final goal. It's not the spot you want' - the true root of 'solving' the kinetic problem of the human body exists at a conjectured spot. I guess a version of this might 'the archimedean point' or those paintings by Saenredam, where the vanishing point exists outside the picture frame.

again, to come to your point, why is any of this interesting? well, i do think he's *trying* (not successfully - he just sort of throws techbnology descriptions at the reader) to do something I am interested in, which is to explore what constitutes aesthetic comprehension of digital spaces and simulations. and i'm afraid i'm going to have to let that rather opaque observation hanging, because i want to try and put some thoughts together about that anyway!

lol proofing, christ.

Thanks, Fizzles, for your extended thoughts.

I'm afraid your comments about objects in space lost me. I don't understand why this is an issue of interest. The motion-capture issue may be another matter. I know nothing about it.

though I would ask what it is in Beckett (or even possibly the Ithaca section in Ulysses), where the relentless depiction of objects, their relation and interrelation, is of interest?

This looks a worryingly hefty challenge. I think my short answer is that the relation of objects in space is not, as such, what's interesting about those texts, to me.

Most of us admire Beckett, but for me what counts about him would be other matters, like his grasp of finitude, mortality, death, and also his incredible control of language, including in black humour. The Beckett who makes diagrams of A, B, C and D moving around -- is not for me.

'Ithaca' is one of the best things I've ever read, and I concede that it has something to do with standing far back and seeing people 'in space' (even interstellar space) more than the rest of the book - an aesthetic effect, yes, but again, that doesn't seem to me the most interesting aspect of the episode, which is crammed with vast amounts of detail - historical, comic, poignant, poetic.

We strongly agree about the GLC graffiti issue. I think I might as a reader have just passed over it, whereas, as with Lanchester, you're very good at noticing things that are off. But with this, I might have picked up on it too. I was there at the time of the GLC, and this doesn't ring true at all.

i agree on the 'relation of objects in space' observations. i think it can be seen as a comic mode - the spasticity of the human body and the slapstick interrelation of things feel like a beckettian comic style, with an existential edge. And yes, the Ithaca section is much more than that - I mentioned it as I understand it was quite influential on Beckett, but you'll know more than me on that.

The McCarthy book itself has settled into a fairly adequate rhythm. It's really just a series of technical analyses, described in a fairly mediocre literary style. Lilian Gilbreth and here time and motion wireframes are a major theme:

https://miro.medium.com/max/638/1*ebDVK7NB8CVQocw23FFSrA.jpeg

He's beginning to suggest some sort of revelatory moment beyond these graphical reproductions and reconstructions of motion, but it's not clear if this is a major through line that will be resolved or speculation.

A lot of it reads like essays put into literary language. Still, he's expanding spaces and pushing at boundaries. It's just they're boundaries and spaces that have been described and pushed at elsewhere. There's an army drone-flying vet, who's never left the warehouse in his home country, retiring from the warzone with PTSD. One of the characters expresses surprise - 'warzone?' This way drone warfare causes problematises the notion of the 'theatre of war' has already been well explored.

Similarly, the rather feeble drone display in one section only sends you to youtube, and the remarkable light shows that have been a staple of Chinese light spectacles for a while and are being seen more elsewhere too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44KvHwRHb3A

The points when he plugs some emotional state into what's happening are better - characters fall into fugue states watching the analysis of motion taking place, so that they start throwing adjectives and metaphorical fancies at what they're seeing. Well, it's better than the v plain and stilted interactions between characters that feel almost transcribed.

Occasionally it works. Two of the characters are using skeletal analysis to try and assess the impact of non-progressive cerebral palsy on a child's motion. They go through the analysis, which starts getting processed, and McCarthy describes the machines winding 'their way back to dark secretes, mysteries of origin, her child's sad incunabula.'

'sad incunabula'. a book written before any level of analysable medicine is available. Something intrinsic, ancient and not available for processing. It's a reach, but I quite liked it. The fans of an aerodynamic testing tunnel starting up at a high pitch, 'soprano, an urgent and indefinitely long *fermata*, drawn from the fraught diaphragm of some mechanical Rhinemaiden' not so much.

It's all very odd, the book does seem to be tending towards some sort of alteration of the ideas its treating, and i'll be interested to see how that comes out. but frankly if McCarthy had submitted this to me i'd've said that it was all very interesting, but he should go away and rewrite it entirely, unrecognisable. At the moment it feels like a set of half-digested LRB essays.

If something like this is going to succeeded he needs to go madder, go stranger. Ada, or Adour or Against the Day, wildly unsatisfactory as they are in many ways, are models here.

A minor solecism, but irritating all the same: In a not-as-bad-as-it-sounds extended sequence looking at the wind-tunnel test of a bobsleigh there is that old literary cliche. A German is asked a question, to which he answer 'Ja, naturlich' before falling back into German. It's the old Poirot trick, where they are unable to translate the easiest phrases and words in their language, but speak fluent English for the rest, a recurrent tic in fiction, completely the opposite of real world behaviour, which while sort of understandable, is always irritating when you notice it.

https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article23246907.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200c/0_New-Years-celebrations.jpg