In Remainder, the extraordinary debut novel by author Tom McCarthy, the nameless victim of an unexplained accident uses compensation money to painstakingly reconstruct and re-enact his memories of a London apartment building. A darkly comic and unpredictable exploration of memory and identity, it was originally published by underground French publisher Metronome Press, and is now available to a wider readership courtesy of Alma Books.

Tom McCarthy’s non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature is published by Granta Books (also available from Raincoast), and Remainder will be published in North America by Vintage in 2007. Tom is also the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network.  He was born in 1969, and lives in London, England.

Raincoast Blog: Remainder has several incidental moments that appear significant but are ultimately unexplained. Do you know exactly what happens?

Tom McCarthy: If you mean do I know what exactly the ‘accident’ consisted of, no. It’s not Memento: it’s not important what the accident is, simply that it happened, that we’re in its aftermath. If you want to be literal about it, some bits of a satellite or plane falling on the hero’s head wouldn’t be a bad guess; if you want to be allegorical, you might think more along the lines that the ‘accident’ is history, time, being thrown into the world in the first place. All the other loose ends have their place and function at one level or another - short councillors, extra cups of coffee, even cordite…

RB: Is ambiguity a virtue?

TM: For sure. If you were simply communicating a message you were certain about it wouldn’t be any good as literature.

RB: So did you work out the precise details of the characters and plot first or did you just see where the initial idea would take you?

TM: The whole thing came in a flash, in half-an-hour of mad scribbling at a party after I’d seen a crack in the bathroom wall and had a moment of deja-vu, just like the hero. The rest was carpentry. Of course, details and whole sub-sequences came while I was developing and executing it, but essentially it was pretty much all there in the crack-moment.

RB: Is the apartment building in Remainder based on a real location?

TM: I went walking around Brixton (in South London) looking for a building corresponding to the one I had as a picture in my mind, just like the hero does. I found one that wasn’t exactly the same, but close enough to provide a base to work from, just like he does. It even had little roof-access cabins which I realised could be used for putting out the cats his vision requires to be slinking around (and which plummet to their deaths one after the other). The real building’s not called ‘Madlyn Mansions’ either: that’s a nod to Proust’s madeleine moment - and, of course, to madness.

RB: Do you think there is a unique London sensibility about the book? Will a North American audience read it differently to a British audience?

TM: It’s very integrated into the landscape of London, but I think that’s more incidental than fundamental. It’s by no means certain that the forthcoming movie will be set in London. Any big city that has dilapidated areas undergoing gentrification, coffee-shop chains and social hierarchies that break down along racial lines (and which big Western city doesn’t have all these?) could host its action. The only place it couldn’t be is LA, because then all its unreality and re-enactment scenes would play out as an allegory about the movies, which they’re not.

RB: I read in your fantastic Ready Steady Book interview with Mark Thwaite that you researched trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders for Remainder. Did you find that research interesting?

TM: It was absolutely fascinating. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, but PTSD is an extremely creative condition. It instils a propensity for repetition alongside a need to disguise the scene being repeated, i.e. to generate other scenes and contexts for the primal event to morph through. It also leaves you with a sense that everything is somehow artificial, secondary, fake. Andy Warhol said that from the moment he was shot for the rest of his life onwards he felt he was just watching TV. The only ‘real’ thing for PTSD sufferers is the traumatic moment itself, which remains outside of proper memory, hence outside of all narrative, all representation. Again, that’s why the ‘accident’ must remain unnamed.

Part Two of this interview will appear tomorrow.

Read Part 2

Read Part 3

Tom McCarthy will be appearing at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on October 27th and 28th, 2006.