On Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

I read Satin Island long before it was added to this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist. It was the only longlisted book I’d previously read, and at the time I thought it was the best novel of the year. I still think so. I haven’t had a chance to really write about it—naturally, blogging about books this good is more difficult than complaining about Anne Enright—but I wanted to cover a passage that especially caught my attention when I was flipping through the book again a few days ago.

It’s from the first chapter, section 1.5. Satin Island has fairly traditional-seeming chapters, but it’s actually written in sections similar to a philosophical treatise—or perhaps an essay, report, confession, or manifesto? The narrator, U, is at an airport in Turin, and this section introduces one of the most important elements of the story, insofar as there is one.

Around me and my screen, more screens: of other laptops, mobiles, televisions. These last screens had tickers scrolling across them, text whose subjects included the air delay in which I was caught up. Behind the tickers, news footage was running. One screen showed highlights of a football game. Another showed the aftermath of a marketplace truck bombing somewhere in the Middle East, the type of scene you always see in this kind of report: hysterical, blood-spattered people running about screaming. One of these people, a man who looked straight at the camera as he ran towards it, wore a T-shirt that showed Snoopy lounging on his kennel’s roof, the word Perfection hovering in the air above him. Then the scene gave over to an oil spill that had happened somewhere in the world that morning, or the night before: aerial shots of a stricken offshore platform around which a large, dark waterflower was blooming; white-feathered sea birds, filmed from both air and ground, milling around on pristine, snowy shorelines, unaware of the black tide inching its way towards them; and, villain of the piece, shot by an underwater robot, a broken pipe gushing its endless load into the ocean.

First, I find McCarthy does a rare thing: writes realistically about immediately contemporary technology affecting daily life. I’m fine with novels that prefer to ignore the ubiquity of mobile phones, but it’s certainly interesting to me the extent to which McCarthy nails the experience of all those screens—in an airport especially.

From one perspective, U is multitasking just like any 21st-century business traveler. His eyes are on multiple screens; he’s following multiple storylines. And if the perspective is reversed, we see that each individual story happening around the world has a whole screen devoted to telling it. We’re each living our own singular life, and meanwhile we’re all keeping at least half an eye on dozens of other, just as singular, lives.

The man in the Snoopy T-shirt has also stuck with me for many months. I want to think for a minute about what McCarthy does here. U is watching a screen showing a specific thing: a specific truck bombing in a specific place. But McCarthy describes it generically—as something that everyone knows. You know, a Middle Eastern marketplace bombing. But then he goes for the novelistic detail that will make it real and immediate: the man running toward the camera in an American T-shirt. Which, itself, is completely generic—you’ve seen that too, whether it was Snoopy, Mickey Mouse, or the Chicago Bulls.

The oil spill is described in basically the same way, and the tension between the generic and the specific will follow U throughout the novel. It makes sense, as it’s also exactly what U’s task is. He’s an anthropologist whose whole purpose is to create general narratives based on his observation and study of specific events. Which is, oh yeah, a lot like writing a novel!

This is the fifth in a series of posts on the Shadow (Wo)Man Booker Prize. Four friends and I are reading this year’s Man Booker long list ahead of the short list announcement.