The Rhyl Poster by Tom McCarthy review – is this avant-garde spy drama worth the riddles?

The hallucinatory crisis of a war-scarred jurist with a painkiller dependency makes for frustrating reading

Of the cohort of experimental novelists whose renown grew in the wake of the 2008 financial crash – names include Deborah Levy, Eimear McBride and Claire-Louise Bennett – it was Tom McCarthy who first demonstrated the benefit of bypassing orthodox routes to market. When British publishers rejected his 2005 novel, Remainder, about an amnesiac who spends a windfall restaging his past, he released it in a limited edition from a Paris art collective. Three years later, Zadie Smith wrote an essay celebrating it as a path-breaking overthrow of establishment-sanctioned “lyrical realism”. The literary press soon began finding more room for McCarthy, whose regular denunciations of English fiction – not least for its “middlebrow” ignorance of challenging ideas from the continent – did much to shape bookish conversation at the turn of the decade.

If his zeal wasn’t to everyone’s taste – the New Statesman once called him Britain’s “most galling interviewee” – anyone lately stepping into a bookshop might well feel the last laugh belongs to McCarthy. Witness the success of Fitzcarraldo Editions: innovative Europeans are hot property. Risk-rewarding ventures such as the Goldsmiths prize, established in 2013 to spotlight formally daring fiction amid panic about the philistinism of award panels, feel a little less urgent when a novel as inscrutable as M John Harrison’s The End of Everything sits comfortably on this year’s Booker shortlist, a bestseller to boot. When the mainstream and the avant garde are now kissing cousins, where does it leave McCarthy? The Making of Incarnation (2021), a dense, Pynchonesque espionage yarn about motion capture technology, suggested that he saw the Booker-shortlisted success of both 2010’s C and 2015’s Satin Island as a green light to push readers harder. Further evidence for the theory is supplied by his riddling new novel, The Rhyl Poster, another abstruse spy drama, this time set deep inside the polyglot operations of Luxembourg’s Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It’s as if McCarthy – a longtime Berliner who, post-Brexit, holds a Swedish passport – had determined to immerse himself in the minutiae of the institution his native Britain elected to leave.

We’re in the company of a pill-popping jurist, Stanton, scarred by his past as a military geographer with the British army in Iraq. Memories of that time, opaque to the reader, don’t help him at work, where he’s meant to be drafting a landmark opinion on a privacy suit against a data analytics firm. His desire for relief from his various war wounds makes him prey to an approach from a shadowy criminal seeking EU documents in exchange for unapproved painkillers from a lab in Rotterdam – home, handily, to Stanton’s long-distance Dutch-Surinamese girlfriend, one among a catalogue of lovers whose pillow talk greases the story’s cogs.

The ensuing double-dealing zigzag around northern Europe plays out as a genre-curious mashup of trauma plot and heist narrative, steadfastly averse to closure. Suspense derives less from events than from the disorientingly stretchy syntax of McCarthy’s narration, a dry blend of legal lingo and lower-slung idiom, like a lecturer wearing a blazer with Nikes. “Interpretation,” we’re told, isn’t the same thing as “advancing to a conclusion from a set of givens guided by parameters that, fixed, are also given: that’s induction. No: interpretation, understood in its profoundest sense, is the plumb opposite … If law in general is the realm where language shapes the world, the European Court of Justice pimps this logic to the nth.”

The novel’s interest in law, or its “fundamental propensity for repeatability, its driving imperative towards self-duplication”, eventually reveals itself as another iteration of McCarthy’s abiding preoccupation with repetition. Even the most dramatic scene, a revelatory flashback to Stanton’s days in Iraq, is a replay of sorts, evoking Zadie Smith’s observation about the role Remainder gave to a black man’s fatal shooting (experimental or not, she said, “the non-white subject is still the bad conscience of the contemporary novel”).

Remainder remains McCarthy’s best book, its multifunctional concept delivering old-school psychological intrigue while poking fun at literary realism’s mimetic aspirations. Reading The Rhyl Poster, by contrast, is like trying to fill in a crossword using the wrong clues. The endeavour isn’t devoid of quixotic frisson: it’s not unfun to note, for instance, that the defendant in Stanton’s case is named Elrond – like Palantir, a lift from Tolkien – or that the claimant, Kohlhas, described as a “one-man operation”, echoes the wronged justice-seeker Michael Kohlhaas in Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 novella of that name.

Yet these are keys tinkling, not doors unlocked, and while there’s a measure of page-turning urgency in Stanton’s increasingly hallucinatory personal crisis, he’s too plainly a parody of a girl-getting hardman-savant to carry much by way of emotional weight. The mystifying title, poised between enigma and bathos, refers (no spoiler, this) to the protagonist’s half-memory of riding a train in north Wales while watching someone paste up an advert – blank, naturally.

The prank-adjacent vibe hardly subsides once the novel’s 240 pages of high-pressure buildup conclude with the word “begin”. Any takeaway perhaps lies in the acronym of the court at the book’s heart, blinking like a beacon through its pages – CJEU, c’est jeu, a game – and if you don’t get a kick out of that, be sure McCarthy does.