MotherTown - “Remainder,” the debut novel by Londoner Tom McCarthy, is a distinctive piece of fiction. Its plot is peculiar and outlandish, presenting a set of circumstances that tests fixed notions of acceptable behavior and aberrant behavior and questions the validity of existence. It’s a metaphysical treatise too, which explores the ideas of cause and effect as well as the character and limits of human comprehension.

Originally published in Paris, France, in 2005, “Remainder” was an underground darling until it was named best novel of 2005 by theBritLit blogosphere. And, according to the Web site 21st Century Lit (www.21stcenturylit.com) a British blogger recommended “Remainder” to a friend at Random House, which lead to its acquisition and this 2007 U.S. publication.

The book begins enigmatically. The main character, who narrates the tale and is never named, makes reference to an accident. It is soon revealed that the 30-year-old was hit by “something falling from the sky,” which left him comatose for several months and damaged his memory. He cannot discuss the details of the trauma due to the nondisclosure clause of the £8.5 million settlement he received from the “parties … responsible for what happened to [him].” And, really, he remembers very little of the incident:

 “I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been — or, more precisely, being about to be — hit. … But who’s to say that these are genuine memories? Who’s to say my traumatized mind didn’t just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap — the crater — that the accident had blown? Mindsare versatile and wily things. Real chancers.”

Memory — its existence, its purpose, its free-flowing nature, it being the thing that fundamentally forms us as individuals, its loss — is the central aspect that guides the main character’s surreal and unconventional actions yet to come. He feels no connection to the memories in his head. They come to him as “moving images” that “could have been another history, another set of actions and events, like when there’s been a mix-up and you get the wrong holiday photos back from the chemist’s. I wouldn’t have known or cared differently, and would have accepted them the same.”

And, after coming out of his coma, his brain injury left him unable to move. He worked on “rerouting,” which redirects the circuits in the brain that transmit commands to limbs and muscles to another “unused, fallow” area of brain. In order to “cut and lay the new circuits,” he had to visualize and comprehend how every action operated. “Everything,” he says, “each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work first, break them down into each constituent part, then execute them. Walking, for example: now that’s very complicated. There are seventy-five manoeuvres involved in taking a single step forward, and each manoeuvre has its own command.”

This distance from his memory and process of rerouting heightened in the main character the sense that he’d become an inauthentic person. Fake. Plastic. An imperfect being with “second-hand” memories.

 All things in his life crystallize one evening when he visits a friend’s flat. The main character sees a crack in the bathroom’s plaster wall, and instantly a memory of his own comes bursting into his mind. He thinks that he might have once lived in a building identical to this one. This recollection is, aside from the accident, the “most significant” event of his entire life. “I had a sudden sense of déjà vu. … I’d been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at … a crack that had jutted and meandered in the same way. … I remembered it all, but I couldn’t remember where … [o]r when.”

Thrilled by the experience of remembrance, the main character decides that he will take his settlement money and replicate every last detail of his “remembered building,” including the crack in the plaster wall, the staircase’s wrought-iron banisters with their oxidized hue, the undulating red roof of a second building located across a courtyard from his building, the faded black-and-white flooring in the lobby.

He — with the help of his crack “facilitator,” Nazrul Vyas — enlists “re-enactors” to act as his neighbors and perform specific tasks that he remembers them doing. For instance, there’s an old woman who fries liver every day, and there’s a pianist who practices sonatas and fugues. If “re-enactment” of this memory is to be successful, then it is completely necessary that the main character be surrounded by the aroma of frying liver at all times, hear Rachmaninov compositions played nonstop and be in the presence of the “nondescript,” “anonymous” residents who inhabit his “remembered building.”

He accomplishes his building re-enactment, but his satisfaction is short-lived. He begins to organize re-enactments of other scenarios according to his whimsy, and each one gets a little more bizarre, a little more insidious, a little more dangerous until events reach a violent point of no return and the main character cannot control his appetite:

“[The re-enactments] all had the same goal, their only goal: to allow me to be fluent, natural, to merge with actions and with objects until there was nothing separating me from the experience that I was having: no understanding, no learning first and emulating second-hand, no self-reflection, nothing: no detour. I’d gone to these extraordinary lengths in order to be real. And yet I’d never stopped and asked myself if it had worked. …The realness I was after wasn’t something you could just “do” once and then have “got”: it was a state, a mode — one that I needed to return to again and again and again. … A drug addict doesn’t stop to ask himself: Did it work? He just wants more — bigger doses, more often: more.” 

“Remainder” is clever and well-written. Its prose is fresh despite certain sections that ramble and slow the narrative. The main character is an interesting, yet untrustworthy storyteller, and his incongruity intensifies the novel’s absurdism. “Remainder” will not appeal to all readers — fans of the novels by J.G. Ballard (“Crash,” 1973) and Chuck Palahniuk (“Fight Club,” 1996) will likely enjoy McCarthy’s avant-garde tale. Nevertheless, “Remainder” is a book to be read, and one that inspires contemplation and deep thinking.

McCarthy himself sums it up best in his 2005 interview with Mark Thwaite for the on-line journal Ready Steady Book (www.readysteadybook.com): “I never thought of ‘Remainder’ as just a psychological drama. What excited me right from the crack-moment onwards was that the premise clearly had much wider implications: it was about history and time, simulation, questions of authenticity and, by extension, of our whole state of being-in-the-world. And it was about the world's state of being-in-the-universe as well: the world, matter, this shard left over from some unnameably violent disaster — a remainder.”

Amy O’Loughlin is a native of Clinton and a regular contributor to MotherTown.