In the case of the Man Booker, Winner (arguably) Takes All and the short-listed gem may not get the attention it deserves. Satin Island is one such albeit modest gem on the short-list, inevitably shadowed by the success of the 2015 Man Booker winner, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings.
The narrator of Satin Island we know only as U, who is a London-based anthropologist, working on the so-called Koob-Sassen project. In the great miasma or fog of his life, the disconnected U seems somehow to be at sea on land, as it were, without the sea legs for it all.
U’s boss is the brilliantly-drawn but elusive Peyton. He appears to be winging it brazenly in the great glass-partitioned temple of woffle and cod philosophy that is the Thames-side office block of the piece - that's when he can be found there.
U scarcely knows at what he works, or for whom, down in that basement of the office block, with only the sound of the ventilation system for company. However, when we first meet him, he is stranded at Turin airport, staring at the many TV screens which are showing repetitive images and news-feeds.
An oil slick has made the news, another instance of a contemporary phenomenon that haunts him for days afterwards, the oil’s particular viscosity in underwater footage fascinating him in a short video clip sent to him by an acquaintance. Then there is the mysterious, if not nefarious, death of a parachutist, which case he follows in the free newspapers he reads on the train, as he muses on just how the parachutist might have died and why.
U likes to drill down into things, to get to the secret workings of disparate events. He compiles dossiers, he attends conferences, he dutifully writes articles, but in the end, everything is flapping about in an ideas implosion - there is no precision, it's a woolly job spec, Kafka for laughs.
Thus he mulls intently over the nature of traffic jams in Lagos, studying satellite images of the sprawling African city. Or he meets his lady friend Madison and they have sex together or they go drinking. Meanwhile, another friend, who works in IT, enquires as to when he will deliver `the great report’ which will ostensibly sum up and condense the salient points of the age we live in.
McCarthy's daring 173-page novel is all about idiosyncratic x-ray pictures of modern life, tilting the picture, as indeed an anthropologist or ethnologist might do, to gain clarity. There is an interesting passage about Starbucks coffee and how it stands viz a viz its HQ city, Seattle, which almost makes you want to Google to see if it the anecdote is actually true.
Thus the novel proceeds, quite unlike most other novels you will read in its compelling, somnolent strangeness. There are vague echoes of some of the denser novels of Don DeLillo in U’s almost sickly obsessive interest in global systems and patterns, in the sinister undersides of contemporary living, the visionary perceptions. Put it this way, U wouldn't be a man for mindfullness, mind, nor indeed would anyone remotely connected with the Koob-Sassen project - they are on a hiding to god knows where.
With its restrained, pallid humour and slow-burning air of satire and gentle wind-up, Satin Island endearingly eviscerates modern life. Both RTÉ's Eileen Dunne and John Banville picked it as memorable novels of their year.
Paddy Kehoe
