This is textbook post-traumatic territory, and textbook literary alienation. The necessity — and impossibility — of watching yourself from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray , or Frankenstein , or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead — and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well.
To a large extent, Men in Space is an allegory of failed transcendence, as is Remainder : this is what the two books really have in common deep down. Transcendence fails – but some radical transformation takes place. I wouldn’t call my disposition in them ‘optimistic’, and, to borrow a great line from Lacan, I never speak of freedom – but in both books disintegration induces dynamic and exhilarating states, sends people somewhere extreme: to the limits of the self, the world, the whole symbolic order. That’
The ending is a tribute to Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, as the fevered writer continues to emit while anticipating his own (resisted) end (”Soon I will stop. Soon . . .”). Like Beckett’s “unnameable”, he remains suspended between two worlds, hovering over the abyss. Tom McCarthy has drawn intelligently on his literary antecedent; but Men in Space is an original work in its own right, a confident and intelligent meditation on failed flights of transcendence.