What is it? What is it about?

Tom McCarthy is too cool to write a plot, as such. Instead this ‘anti-novel’ comprises two or three skimpy plot-lines that float independent of each other, mostly, occasionally touching like strands of seaweed in an ocean of words. Tom McCarthy is a human thesaurus. In each sentence he tries out several ways of saying the same thing, then side-tracks himself by thinking of an amazingly random-seeming connection between what he’s writing about & something else, then he introduces several subclauses, & finally loops back to - you’ve forgotten where. It’s like navigating Spaghetti Junction with a map written in Elvish. Also, he’s an artist, venturing into technology, & occasionally science. A scientist would make their prose plain, so as to render something complicated in a comprehensible way. Tom McCarthy does the exact opposite, maybe to convey something of the dizzy bewilderment one gets from trying to contemplate everything in connection with everything else, all at once. For the Audio-book the narration is, frankly, quite poor (although obviously one sympathises - this must be awful prose to speak aloud). Having said all that - the “Making of Incarnation” has kind of got to me a bit, & I can imagine going back to it for another bite. As the plotting is irrelevant I wouldn’t have to read the whole thing, & it does have a distinctive flavour.

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