Confounding reading: "Satin Island" by Tom McCarthy.

I may as well start by admitting it: I was pretty much flummoxed by this curious little book, which has little in the way of plot or even progression, and the meaning of which is frankly pretty obscure. Nonetheless, it was also readable and enjoyable, carrying me along quite nicely in its strange anthropological universe. 

To try to summarise at least minimally what it is about, it centres on a first-person narrator, known to us only as "U", an anthropologist who, having made a name for himself with an analysis of 1990's clubbing culture, has been hired by a swish, trendy London outfit, known only as the Company, as its "house" anthropologist. U helps the company devise its advice to its clients, which include corporates, governments and international organisations (including the European Commission and the European Parliament - a rare fictional mention for my employer), assisting them in gaining purchase in the lives of consumers, clients and citizens, according to need. It is a little vague (to say the least), but U's activities, largely from an idiosyncratic underground office far removed from the slick, glass-walled corporate paradise on the Company's upper floors, seem to be quite crucial, his insights into human systems delivering substantial returns for clients. 

Formally, U has received two principal tasks from his CEO, a deliciously sketched corporate wunderkind called Peyman: charismatic, aphoristic, media-beloved, VIP back-slapping, jet-setting and conference hopping. First, U is to contribute to the huge and prestigious contract the Company has just landed, the Koob-Sassen project. What exactly this project entails remains highly mysterious. It involves ministers, thus governments, but goes much further into the realm of the supra-national, supra-international, supra-everything, seems to be about connecting things and will affect the lives of absolutely everyone, though without them actually noticing. So yes, it is potentially rather sinister, this fact dawning on U (arousing sex-fuelled Patty Hearst and Baader-Meinhof related fantasies of destruction) even as he contributes, very successfully, to its progress. 

Second, he has been told by Peyman, in his own time, to produce the "Great Report". This will be the great work of anthropology which, in Peyman's name will connect everything and give it a name. Many of U's energies in the book are dedicated to considering how to go about this task, which he is sure will emerge from his relentless and serendipitous collecting of observations. These are catalogued into what he calls "dossiers", but which seem to us to be the obsessive seeking of generic patterns in particular events, such as the death of a parachutist or a disastrous oil spill. Notwithstanding copious notes, records, files and assiduous material preparation, however, the Great Report, the connection of everything, unlike the Koob-Sassen project, never really seems to get anywhere. 

Narrative events intrude only obliquely into these constant reflections: a connection-filled delay at Turin airport which opens the book, a over-intellectualised conference in Frankfurt, occasional meetings with Peyman, more frequent trysts with his seemingly rather distant girlfriend, Madison, an on-off dialogue with a colleague dying of cancer and a climactic (but anti-climactic visit to New York, which, either way, might tell us something rather important for the Great Report. 

What does it all add up to? McCarthy is an avant garde author, not given to pandering to bourgeois expectations of narrative convention, for sure, but what is this book about?  

Oddly, as I say, I found it readable and enjoyable. There is a constant cascade of ideas, funny, intriguing, insightful. There is the great depiction of the professional world where an anthropologist serves a glitzy, government-advising, google-officed corporate in post-industrial London, something which manages to be intellectually appealing and bitingly satirical at the same time. There is the interior life of one perhaps almost autistic individual, viewing the world though eyes which constantly seek to genericise the particular, and seem strangely aloof from the human realities of the people around him. There are numerous anthropological asides, notably drawing on the work of Lévi-Strauss, relating the slide of the world into a inter-connected monoculture. There are even moments of comedy, such as U's meticulous, but doomed attempts to create the perfect environment to write his Great Report, which, though, will not only not be written, but is actually unwritable.  

As I say, I don't actually quite know what to make of it, while actually having quite enjoyed the process of not knowing what to make of it. 

Intrigued? That would be a reason to read this book. 

Tom McCarthy and the alternative cover design for his book