IN A SPEECH LAST YEAR, Tony Blair urged the people of Britain to forgo US-style “compensation culture” in favour of “common sense culture”. Tom McCarthy has turned the logic of the Prime Minister’s plea on its head and made a novel of it.

The unnamed narrator of Remainder has been involved in an accident, but apart from that “it involved something falling from the sky”, he doesn’t know much about it. Three weeks in a coma have left his memory wanting. What he does know is that he is now in possession of £8 million compensation. This poses a problem — what to do with it? Charity? Class A drugs? The answer comes to him as a sub-Proustian epiphany in the bathroom. He decides that all his money will be spent on re-creating a vague fragment from his impaired memory: an old tenement-style apartment block with the smell of pan-fried liver wafting up from the floor below, a pianist practising cadences across the yard and black cats mincing about on a red-tiled roof.

A building in Brixton is bought, livers are fried en masse and actors hired to keep this piece of performance art in “on” mode for six hours each day. If Samuel Beckett had known more about insurance policies and loft conversions, he might have worked out a similar scenario.

With its clever set-pieces about texting, loyalty cards and pub etiquette, Remainder is an intelligent and absurd satire on consumer culture.

Yet this is more than just a comedy of modern manners. McCarthy’s hero moves on to re-enact more recent memories, then memories that are not even his own and, finally, memories of events that have yet to happen. It soon becomes clear that the author has his eye set on big philosophical fish, not just zeitgeisty small fry. The after-effects of trauma, the aesthetics of violence, the postmodern sensation of “living in exclamation marks” are all thrown into the mix as the novel picks up its own strange momentum.

Tintin and the Secret of Literature, McCarthy’s other publication out at present, is a similarly aspirational work, drawing on Barthes, Bataille and psychoanalysis. But where McCarthy’s nonfiction effort often gets stuck in its own lit-crit jargon, his novel carves out its ideas with precision and style.

Remainder is a book of repetitions. It toys with the idea that events become better, not worse, as we repeat them. And its publication history is appropriately repetitive: it was first brought out by the eccentric French publisher Metronome Press in 2005, will now receive its first mainstream airing through Alma Books and Time Warner has acquired the US rights. If talent is rewarded we should see it again soon — perhaps when the judges announce the nominees for the 2006 Booker in August. by Tom McCarthy Alma, £10.99; 290pp

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