Tom McCarthy: How he became one of the brightest new prospects in British fiction

Literary fiction in Britain is in a quiet but deep state of crisis. While plenty of publishers and agents aspire to nothing higher than the mass-market heaven of a Richard & Judy pick, awareness-raising rituals such as the Man Booker shortlist make much more modest waves than they once did. Beyond the odd blue-moon emergence of a David Mitchell or a Zadie Smith, the business no longer knows how to lead ambitious younger novelists out of a shrinking comfort-zone of coterie approval .

So how to refresh the audience for fiction that thinks outside the formulaic boxes? The tale of Tom McCarthy suggests one answer, as new as the literary blog and as old as the stunts of the Dadaists. Take one gifted and mischievous fiction-writer, schooled in high-end literary theory and the super-cool japes of the European art world. Hitch him up with one, then another adventurous independent publisher, and knit his writing into an online network of support. Watch the ripples from this open conspiracy spread until the "cult" author of Remainder and Men in Space (Alma, £12.99) not only harvests rave reviews but even wins a contract from a hard-nosed US giant. The ascent of McCarthy shows that the paradoxical "tradition" of guerrilla culture still has life and legs.

McCarthy lives exactly where such an intellectual prankster ought, high up in a tower block on the Golden Lane estate beside the Barbican in central London. This Modernist urban village was designed by municipal architects who admired the Situationists, that nebulous grouping of artist-anarchists whose deadpan subversion also cast a spell on punk rock – and on McCarthy himself. As seriously playful as his fiction, he peppers his disquisitions on, say, Derrida or Tintin (two of his heroes) with bursts of laughter. Only once does he worry that he might start to "rant", when he talks about the plight of our publishing culture.

"In the UK, the mainstream publishing industry has almost purged itself of what should be the 'literary' in literature," he says. "Most mainstream houses are publishing competently written, ultimately quite banal, middlebrow books, nicely packaged, that maybe ask the odd question and make us think a bit. The mode of experiencing literature has moved elsewhere: into the art world." There, rather than on the orthodox literary scene, he finds a true passion for the Modernist canon that inspires him. "They've read that stuff. People in publishing haven't. It's shocking." His non-fiction study, Tintin and the Secret of Literature, not only plumbed the philosophical depths of Herg�'s quiffed boy investigator, but set out an informal manifesto for the richly enigmatic, almost cryptographic writing that he loves.

All of which tends to make McCarthy's fiction sound a scary prospect for anyone who fails to share his hard-core affiliations – from Blanchot and Beckett to JG Ballard. Do not be deterred. Remainder captivated readers with its practice, not its theory. The high-concept narrative – a traumatised accident survivor blows his compensation fortune on ever-more obsessive "reenactments" designed to resurrect the past and restore a mislaid sense of reality – was worked out with spellbinding zest, wit, precision and sheer literary craft. "For all that I love Joyce and Robbe-Grillet," says its author, "I think good literature has to do its thing as directly as it can."

Without the crackle of his prose and the buzz of his imagination, Remainder might have remained an over-wrought parable on memory, authenticity and imitation. Instead, all its seething ideas were made concrete (literally so: McCarthy writes superbly about the grainy textures of urban life) via an oddly suspenseful story. The psychotic fixation at its core transforms scruffy Brixton streets into a stage-set for bizarre spectacles that build towards a delirious – and ingenious – climax.

"I very much didn't want to write a self-consciously avant-garde novel with broken prose," McCarthy comments. His deluded narrator is carefully drawn as the geezer in the Brixton pub (The Dogstar, in fact) rather than any sort of thinker. "I realised straight away that it would blow the whole book if he were an artist or an intellectual: it would just be a day in the office... It's really important he's just some bloke, some totally average everyman."

Initially, Remainder made no headway with the larger UK publishers who saw it. But the Paris art house Metronome's tiny edition found a tribe of eager disciples, and led to a second publication of the novel from Elisabetta Minervini and Alessandro Gallenzi's Alma Books in London. Then Marty Asher, legendary editor-in-chief of Vintage in the US, sent the author an excited email, and McCarthy joined his star-spangled list. Remainder, a drily offbeat tale about repetition and replication in consciousness and culture, ended up doing a fair bit of that itself. At this point, a couple of big houses who had turned it down flat expressed a belated interest. McCarthy's response? "Well, fuck off: it's the same book as it was two years ago."

For an author so intrigued by patterns and sequences, and the forces that disrupt them, it makes a sort of sense that the "new" Men in Space has an earlier origin than his debut novel. It stems from McCarthy's life-changing if grungy Czech idyll, a couple of years after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Living in Prague after graduation from Oxford, with a dirt-cheap apartment paid for by modelling sessions at the art school, meant "an incredibly exciting time". The Revolution fashioned a carnival out of government. "It was probably unique in that artists were literally running the country. Havel came to power, this absurdist playwright, and he just filled parliament with his mates. You'd go to a gig in some club and the drummer in the band with the big spliff in his mouth and five earrings was the minister of culture."

In Men in Space, the English expat Nick finds himself drawn into the consequences of an art heist staged by Bulgarian criminals who seize a mysterious icon adorned with dislocated figures. They move – like Nick, like Havel-era Prague, like the abandoned Soviet cosmonaut who becomes a mascot for the book, like new Europe itself – through a limbo where boundaries disappear and perspective distorts. "I don't think that its main purpose is to give a socoiological account of that time," says McCarthy, "but it is quite accurate." Yet behind these Bohemian high jinks lies a keen designing intelligence that prises out patterns and plugs in connections, watching these people like an air passenger with an angel's view of the "markings cutting up the earth". As for his characters, they all aspire to higher things... and they all (like the Velvet Revolution itself) come crashing down. "If they're about one thing," says McCarthy in relation to both his novels, "they're about failed transcendence."

Down to earth, McCarthy lived in Berlin and then Amsterdam ("That was Kafka, much more than eastern Europe: it was the most bureaucratised place"). Back in London, he worked as a script editor in television and founded a "semi-fictitious" art faction, the International Necronautical Society, devoted to mind-bending projects that would do for death what the Surrealists had done for sex: "The INS was a putting into play of lots of the fictions of Burroughs, of Kafka, of Conrad: committees, sub-committees, networks." At the ICA, he ran a series of radio transmissions designed – as in Cocteau's film Orph�e – to ruffle the surface of everyday perception with the breath of angels. As in the anti-tradition that runs from Futurists to punks and YBAs, the border between the joke, the stunt and the artwork dissolved. "You could call it a fiction or a fake, " says the "general secretary" of the INS, "but once it gets played out through various institutions, it sort of becomes real."

Unsurprisingly, this young master of duplicates and replicas calls Andy Warhol, a presiding deity of his Prague years, "The greatest artist of all time ever, including Michelangelo. He's absolutely the artist for me." So I'm not sure quite what it means to label McCarthy "the real thing". Yet he has perversely managed to make fiction that feels exuberantly fresh and alive out of a conviction that stories are always destined to mimic and enclose other stories. As he points out, this is a belief hard-wired into the DNA of fiction, and one that dates back four centuries to Cervantes and his romance-devouring knight. "The whole premise of Don Quixote is that books don't work: it's over," he notes. "And that's more or less the first novel. Literature is always premised on its own impossibility."

Biography: Tom McCarthy

Born in 1969, Tom McCarthy grew up in Greenwich, south London, and studied English at New College, Oxford. After a couple of years in Prague in the early 1990s, he lived in Amsterdam as literary editor of the local Time Out, and later worked in British television as well as co-editing Mute magazine. In the late 1990s, he founded and directed an art group, the " International Necronautical Society", and wrote its manifestos. His books include the critical study Tintin and the Secret of Literature (Granta), and the novels Remainder and the new Men in Space (both Alma Books). He lives in a tower-block in central London.