TOM MCCARTHY’S ODD first novel, Remainder, was one of the great sleeper hits of the past two years – a young man unexpectedly finds himself receiving a £8 million compensation payout and descends into visions of megalomania, ending with him hijacking a plane that he flies across the sky in the shape of an infinity symbol – an eight on its side.

Its successor, Men in Space, has that same instinct for clever geometric motif-making. Set mainly in Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution, it strings together the lives of Nicholas Boardaman, an art critic living in Prague, his flatmate Ivan Manásek, who has been ordered to copy a stolen painting by a gang of sinister Bulgarian gangsters, a motley crew of Bohemian artists and a KGB spy surveying proceedings with a directional microphone. All these characters orbit around the stolen painting – much like the book’s central metaphor, the Soviet astronaut left in space after the fall of communism, whose flight is itself mirrored by the ellipse around the head of the saint in Manásek’s painting.

Remainder felt more like an art-installation than a novel. Surprisingly, the same high-art aesthetic occasionally lets this book down. Men in Spaceis not just like art, it’s about the art world. Caught up with its own construction, drawing parallels and matching up situations, it sometimes feels more like a Miró mobile than a Rauschenberg happening – finely balanced and lovely to look at, but a bit inconsequential.

It works largely because McCarthy draws on sources less esoteric than he might care to admit. Men in Spaceis a noirish thriller – abeit with arthouse trimmings – that echoes Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation and, as unlikely as it may sound, The Da Vinci Code. It hints at a writer trying to break new ground rather than run on the spot – and in that respect should be taken as evidence that McCarthy’s progress should be monitored closely.

Men in Space by Tom McCarthy
Alma, £12.99; 300pp

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