Satin Island by Tom McCarthyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
From all the Booker shortlist picks, 'Satin Island' was the one that stood out as different enough to be enjoyable.
Tom McCarthy is a volatile figure in the literary world and is obsessed with all things avant-garde. Well, at least that comes out in his book as well. I haven't read anything else by him, but 'Satin Island' felt the most relevant among the shortlisted entries. Not because, U the protagonist is an anthropologist, but because the corporate mechanisations that he is embroiled in feel familiar and realistic. (For all intents and purposes, U is male, though I don't recall any direct reference to his gender).
There is no plot to the book, in fact the narrator states emphatically near the beginning of the book that if the reader is looking for events they're not likely to get any. And honestly, the book doesn't need a plot, because life has no plot.
Probably the only weak link in the entire book is Madison, our protagonist's part-time girlfriend. Off late I've realised that when a man writes a book they give themselves away - usually through their female characters. They are unable to write these women as characters, they must be very different, very 'other'. This 'otherness' always seems artificial and contrived. Madison's backstory, shoe-horned into the book in chapter 13 is the definition of 'otherness' - written to subvert our expectation it continues to keep her femaleness outside of the normality spectrum. I kept thinking, while reading that chapter, that the author would not have written these events for a male character or even thought of them in context with a male character. Why such treatment just because Madison is a woman?
All in all, however, this meandering tale of nothing was an enjoyable read and despite its senselessness it made a lot of sense.
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