THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

At one point The Bathroom’s hero even buys himself a dartboard, ‘sober-looking’ and ‘concentric’, and, drawing on a round table columns representing various countries, plays out a darts ‘world cup’ – alone, of course. There are echoes here of Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, who abandons the countries of the world in favour of their simulacra. But Toussaint’s is a next generation decadent: where Des Esseintes’s creations convey the smells, sounds and colours of the landscapes they replace, Toussaint’s narrator has excised all mimesis. His world-in-absentia has been reduced to a shorthand cartography, the dartboard’s intersections and the circular chart: abstract globes made up of characterless vectors. 

McCarthy/Jellyfish