The CounterText interview : Tom McCarthy

Abstract

In Tom McCarthy’s 2015 novel, Satin Island, the protagonist U. spends some of his time investigating a series of crimes involving parachutes. He is particularly interested by the case of a parachutist who has fallen to his death, his chute failing to open because it has been sabotaged. This leads U. to a series of reflections: a murder has taken place, but where and when? Where was the crime scene and when did the crime take place? He concludes that the crime scene wasn’t the spot where the body hit the earth, the crime scene was the sky. And when had the crime taken place? That is to say, ‘at what precise point in time had he been murdered?’ Invoking Schrödinger’s cat, U. argues that although the parachutist ‘hadn’t actually been killed until the moment of his impact, to all intents and purposes, he had. For the last hours – days, perhaps – of his life, he had (this is how Schrödinger would formulate it) been murdered without realizing it’. He was ‘already effectively dead’.