Books

Ultimate puppeteer yanks on the strings

Amnesia, obsession and a whole lot of money re-create a wild vision of reality.

By KIT REED
Published April 1, 2007

It would be possible to talk smartly about memory and imagination, time-motion study, metaphysics and deconstruction in this cheeky, outrageous new novel, but it won't happen here.

The story is too much fun to talk about.

So is the finicky, bemused narrator, who brings us up to speed as quickly as he can, given that he lost his memory - and probably his marbles - in an accident that left him comatose for weeks.

It also left him tremendously rich, as our nameless hero discovers in the early pages. Although he doesn't have a grip on what happened to him (he keeps smelling cordite), his lawyers do. They've come back with 8.5-million pounds sterling.

He says, "Later still, during the weeks I sat in bed able to think and talk but not yet to remember anything about myself, the Settlement was held up to me as a future strong enough to counterbalance my no-past, a moment that would make me better, whole, complete."

In an oddly wonderful way, it does.

Putting it all into the hands of a broker, he discovers that when you have a fortune, it keeps making money. Now all he has to do is figure out what to do with it.

It doesn't take him long.

He's obsessed by detail. Instead of changing trains, he ends up trapped in the Green Park tube station, contemplating the escalator: "You think of an escalator as one object, a looped, moving bracelet, but in fact it's made of loads of individual, separate steps woven together into one smooth system. . . . I was staring at them so intently that I stepped onto the wrong escalator, the up one, and was jolted into the concourse again."

Having had to re-learn everything from speech to pick- ing up a carrot during the long convalescence, he feels like an impostor in his own life. "My movements are all fake. Second-hand."

The feeling persists until he zones out on a crack in the wall at a party: "The sense of deja vu was very strong. I'd been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at the crack . . . Out of the window there'd been roofs with cats on them. Red roofs, black cats . . ." He remembers a botched piano rehearsal, liver cooking, "as clear as in a vision."

The man without a clue hatches a plan.

Like a very large child with an extremely small and thickly populated doll house, he attempts to re-create the world. The thrill is in the exactness of duplication. He doesn't know what he wants, exactly, but he can afford to do whatever it takes to get it.

He hires a whip-sharp organizer named Naz and a gaggle of assistants and staff to replicate not just the bathroom but the flat he remembers: everything in the building down to the pattern in the floor, the neighbors and the buildings surrounding, up to and including the cats on the roof opposite which - pesky critters - keep falling off, at least in his "re-enactments."

Naz hires fake neighbors to be on call 24/7, proving that people will do anything if there's enough money in it. They can do as they want when it's in the "off" mode, but must snap to when the building is "on," going through the same motions over and over until he turns them off again. These are his "re-enactors."

The better it gets, the more exacting Nameless becomes. The injury turned him into a control freak. Now power makes him willful and capricious. He delights in putting his people through the motions over and over again.

Every once in a while everything goes just right and Nameless slips into a trance state, the kind of rush that junkies go looking for.

Of course, nothing is ever enough in the world of instant gratification, especially for a man with millions. Pretty soon he's hiring new re-enactors, re-re-enactors, backup people and backup-backup people to replicate a series of local murders.

Then somebody introduces the phrase "pre-enactment" and our hero is off to the races, in the inevitable and wonderfully funny countdown to the ending.

Now, McCarthy gets to the novel's real business. "Not only was total control of movement and matter necessary - every surface, every gesture, every last half-trip on a carpet's kink - but so, too, was control of information."

He says, "We had to treat information as matter: stop it spilling, seeping, trickling, dribbling, whatever: getting in the wrong place and becoming mess."

It's lovely to watch him do it.

Kit Reed's most recent novel is "The Baby Merchant." She is at work on a new novel.

The book

Remainder

By Tom McCarthy

Vintage paperback, 320 pages, $13.95

[Last modified March 29, 2007, 13:33:19]