Satin Island
Ratings17
Average rating3.2
Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize From the author of Remainder and C (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and a winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, comes Satin Island, an unnerving novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world—modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in. U., a “corporate anthropologist,” is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape. In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures—as only he can—the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives.
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At some point close to the end of the book, the hapless protagonist of Satin Island finds himself the centre of attention at an industry conference where he's not a speaker. The audience and the speakers alike fist-bump him and pat him on the back and congratulate him on a job well done, despite the preceding 170-odd pages of him doing and saying nothing of any substance - just musing about his childhood, having illusions of greatness, obsessing over random news stories and imagining himself smarter than everybody else. Such is the life of a straight white dude with a corporate job. That is all.
An extra star for the quality of the prose, and another for how disturbingly easy it was for me to relate to the protagonist (I don't expect anyone else to share this affinity).
There is nothing there: a collection of sort of clever, sort of obvious metaphors, presented in a sort of serious manner. No ideas to latch onto. Post-whatever in the worst kind of way.
It obviously works on some level and if you know what that level is, please let me know. Whilst we can have a little laugh about the undefined nature of the Koob-Sassen project and how a raft of talentless people have an influence in society, there is not much else to take away for mine. Devoid of character development and general interest. At least it was short and easy reading!
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