The Rhyl Poster by Tom McCarthy review: 'the work of a radical genius'

Tom McCarthy | Contributed

For a relatively slender work, Tom McCarthy’s new novel is breathtakingly byzantine. He is one of the most significant authors of our era, and a writer whose work has always been about signifiers, deferred, distorted, disrupted. The Anglophone literary world has always had a rather parochial sniffiness about “the novel of ideas”: it is even less tolerant of novels which are less about what we think, but how we think. Yet McCarthy is one of the handful of contemporary novelists whom I think of as not just a genius, but a radical genius. Reading Zadie Smith’s essay on McCarthy piqued my interest. Reading McCarthy himself convinced me.

The central character of The Rhyl Poster, Stanton, is a référendaire in the European Court of Justice. These are the lawyers whose “opinions”, as Stanton’s own superior explains, “will paint the touchlines, plant the corner flags and goalposts – effectively dictate the way the ruling goes”. His reputation is such that she continues, “I want you to pull out all the stops, bring your big bag of Stanton tricks to bear on it. Extrapolate, contract, assert, negate, speculate, swivel and feint and dazzle and seduce and bring all things to a head in the way that lays the law down, brooks no contradiction”. As well as this being a skilful pastiche of McCarthy’s own literary manner, it is also typified by a tiny shift. Anyone else would write “lays down the law”, not “lays the law down”. Yet Stanton may well be landing a knock-out blow on law itself. He is leaking sensitive information – photocopies in particular – to a shadowy, nebulous think-thank in exchange for pills called petits bleus. The reason he needs them is that before he was in the law, he was in the military, as a cartographical engineer, mapping the territory as they seek for weapons of mass destruction they are sure do not actually exist. As one might expect, he did something he would like to forget.

By the way, if you’re thinking that the blue pill refers to either Viagra or the other choice in The Matrix, think again. It was also the name of pneumatic vacuum tubing that once carried telegrams around Paris. It is classic McCarthy: the overlaying of technology, military, systems, trauma, copies. In many ways The Rhyl Poster engages with McCarthy’s previous work. The title refers to a moment where Stanton has a numinous epiphany, a recaptured, forgotten memory, which he thinks might involve an advertising hoarding between Cardiff and London. Like the narrator of Remainder, he attaches huge significance to recreating the moment; not for what it is but for what it means – its codedness.

Throughout the book there is an echoing question: what is the law? Different characters have different viewpoints, from the quasi-religious to the determinedly pragmatic; about it hovers the uneasy spectre of Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s jurisprudence expert, and his assertion that “the sovereign is the one who suspends the law”. In an age of tech-companies – Stanton’s “opinion” is pertinent to data, its retention and capture – this is not a dry salvage exercise. That he previously worked on the legal ramifications of different terms used in industrial waste management is both pertinent (now that he is in the online sewer system) and a neat nod to McCarthy’s own Satin Island. On the same subject, the parallel translation system within the court has thematic links with the (mis)communication networks of his Booker short-listed C (which in my opinion should have won). As he struggles to balance his espionage, his addiction and his legal duties, he is also working on his own, abstruse, weird, explosive fire sermon.

There are moments of comedy – such as Stanton’s vision of post-Brexit Britain as a starship which never reached its destination and whose generations, over centuries, are “drifting through an endless vacuum, re-enacting all the gestures of their erstwhile social and political existence in a kind of zombie half-life”. The scenes of incomprehension as he watches his girlfriend’s boys play first-person shooters are both funny, and plangent, and linked to the hyperrealities of inconsequential, virtual “deaths”. It is not quite “these fragments I have shored against my ruins”, but there is a true Modernist tradition, seen in works like Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé, Lowry’s Under The Volcano or Antonio di Benedetto’s The Silentiary, of the underlying reality of reality being revealed in madness.

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Stanton has a slight stammer, which is used to “enstrange” – a favourite word of Russian literary theorists – his spoken frame of mind. These are done with panache, the truncated words being almost an erupting subconscious; as in “Hard – hardly policy making”, “ ‘If there’s a dance... then’s who’s the core: the chor…?’ ‘The choir?’ ‘The choreographer’” or “I’ve got – the wicked: no rest… got to go”, which could be parsed six ways from Sunday.

McCarthy has always been interested in the limits of language. Here we have lists, but they are not of synonyms: no such thing truly exists. There might be points of exasperation and incredulity – “just as a historian or sociologist or epidemiologist is permitted access to both formal records and less formalised archival sources without any need to “own”’ them; and is permitted, further, to cross-tabulate among such feed-sets without hindrance… so do we presume a permission to work with data-sedimentations…” (was even the Circumlocution Office of Dickens ever so precise?) but then – astonishingly – sheer poetry – “an astronaut or foetus held in amniotic fluid, fronds of algae snaking from his underbelly down to mothership-recesses, crevices where sponges and sessile invertebrates mingled with bryozoans, hydroids, crinoids in their grottoes”. Is it easy? No. Is anything worthwhile easy? No.

The Rhyl Poster, by Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Cape, £16.99

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