Reading Outside In: Legibility’s Double Plots

This essay returns to my earlier work on narratography to compare two recent British novels. There is genre icon John le Carré’s recourse to his breakout hit The Spy Who Came in from the Cold for unflinching second thoughts in A Legacy of Spies (2017), with its prolonged ordeal of document reading for its implicated protagonist and former spook. In contrast there is Tom McCarthy’s latest volume in his characteristically pyrotechnic version of speculative science rather than sci-fi—which, with its emphasis on motion-capture technology, expands the field of inscription and reading in a broader technopoetics of the legible. Beneath the manifest narratological distinctions between frame narrative in the former and loosely braided multiplot in the latter, narratography’s granular method—tracking the phrasal microplots of larger narrational arcs—helps probe beneath the difference of these two novels, in the current Orwellian epoch of textual distrust, to a tighter network of contrast and overlap. With the two books read together, we have the making of a narrowly bounded and binary legacy in reflexive fictional options over the latest literary decade. In each case, as in the long tradition they exacerbate, narrative form is transposed on the spot to reader formation.