Tom McCarthy’s The Rhyl Poster

More than twenty years have passed since the publication of Tom McCarthy’s debut novel, Remainder, about a young man in London who is struck down in the street one day by a hunk of metal that comes hurtling from the sky. Maybe it was the broken part of an orbiting satellite or a random piece of space junk. Whatever it was, it nearly killed him. But the young man survives and receives a massive financial settlement (eight and a half million pounds) from an unidentified enterprise, in return for his silence. The catch is that he couldn’t say anything about the accident anyway, because it has totally obliterated his memory. He can’t remember who he is or what he was doing before he was nearly pulverized.

In his amnesia, McCarthy’s protagonist, a first-person narrator who is never named, becomes a physical wreck, a social disaster, and in many ways a pushy, despicable person with no filter and no moral compass who throws his money around to get what he wants. In the neoliberalism of the early aughts, he becomes an archetypal gentrifier, buying up buildings to pursue fanciful projects. But above all, in trying to piece together the fragments of his memory—in trying to make himself whole, solid, and real—what he really becomes is an artist. First, he draws what he sees in flashes of recollection. Then he builds cardboard models. Then large-scale installations. Soon he is hiring staff, running a studio, and orchestrating ever more elaborate re-enactments.

Four novels, two essay collections, and a book-length reflection on Hergé’s Tintin later, McCarthy has now written another novel that tells one story on the surface—this time about the law, crime, loopholes in European bureaucracies, and PTSD from the war in Iraq—while stabbing away at the substance of art underneath. Unlike Remainder, however, The Rhyl Poster revolves around a protagonist who is not only named but also overburdened by a surfeit of biographical details. Benjamin Stanton is an orphan, “a foundling,” vaguely Irish, who was raised in a series of care homes and escaped them all to attend law school in London. He is also a veteran of the war in Iraq, where he was attached to a small convoy of engineers in the British army who were assigned to survey areas that hadn’t previously been mapped. “Which Iraq war?” asks a petulant critic in Paris. “The second one,” he shoots back.

Stanton is capable of direct and fluid retorts, but only sparingly. Otherwise, he stutters, quite severely, and was ruthlessly bullied for it as a child—until he learned to box as a means of bringing the name-calling (“Stammering Stan”) to an end. McCarthy conveys the way he speaks through an unexpected combination of punctuation marks. Defying all known categories of impediment, Stanton’s speech, in McCarthy’s vivid description of it, isn’t about repetition or false starts but rather tumbles through a series of “temporal rearrangements,” where the last clause in a sentence jumps in front of the verb, or the verb jumps in front of the subject, but always without a clear pattern emerging to confirm the generation of meaning. In any conversation, this arrhythmic stutter hypnotizes Stanton’s audience and keeps them guessing. It also proves to be irresistible to women, and moreover, it is complemented by Stanton’s remarkable facility for writing, for inventing a system of indelible shorthand, and for representing the inner workings of the world through powerful but enigmatic marks on paper.

In the present tense of The Rhyl Poster, Stanton is a brilliant référendaire in the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg. In cases involving areas of wide-open ambiguity, where no pre-existing laws, legislation, or precedents apply, référendaires like Stanton write reports, opinions, and preliminary or final judgments for judge rapporteurs and advocates general. It is these texts that ultimately create, forge, and establish the law, and they do so through acts of interpretation. “Discursively,” writes McCarthy, “he could move through material, slide between modes—from exposition to conjecture, reason to procedure—in ways none of the other référendaires could; in ways, what’s more, that not only drew into the tip point of his argument the force and dynamism of these contexts but also, in doing so, stirred up in its trail disturbances that transformed the field’s own contours.”

For a case with global consequences and implications for privacy and big data, Stanton has been asked to write one such text for his mentor, Sorcha Gerachty. Unbeknownst to her, however, Stanton has been compromised. In a refrain running throughout the book, he is marked—singled out either for greatness or infamy, scarred by the war in Iraq, and turned into an easy target for a drug dealer, or rather, for a criminal enterprise using small batches of off-prescription pills called petits bleus, beautiful objects with beveled edges and mottled surfaces and “dark skeins of navy streaking and divagating over a pale cyan background in a delta pattern” to entrap him.

Two years earlier, at a conference or summit or retreat on the arcane subject of legal theory in the Swiss commune of Monte Verità, tucked into the mountains of the Italian-speaking region of Ticino, Stanton met the novel’s charismatic but creepy villain, Pirotti, who works for an organization, likely a front, called the Centre for Juridical Collaboration. Pirotti flatters Stanton, notes the dull pain of his war wound, gives him two petit bleus, warns him not to take more than one at a time, and then settles him in for a mind-bending art performance en plein air involving kites and sound. Soon after, Stanton finds himself shuttling back and forth to Rotterdam to meet with Pirotti or his proxy, Ruud Mehrtens, exchanging papers smuggled from the court for small bottles of petits bleus.

His alibi is a girlfriend, Mariska, who lives in Rotterdam via Suriname and works as a sketch artist for the International Criminal Court. Instead of portraits, she makes Agnes Martin–style drawings of minimal but decisive lines. It is those lines that first catch Stanton’s attention. Mariska has two sons who are gamers, and their raucous creativity in “free roam” mode, where a game’s narrative is suspended, allowing players to appreciate and contribute to the modifications of the game-world by superfans, entrances him. Meanwhile, his legal brief goes unwritten, settles into a kind of desperate writer’s block, and transforms into a monumental counter-document, a massive confession of stealing confidential court documents and handing them over to a shadowy party with financial interests in the outcome of the case he is working on, written in his characteristic glyphs. Although he tells himself he will give it to Gerachty to read, exposing himself and his serious misdeeds alongside some epochal inner truth, what he is actually producing are schematic but indecipherable drawings that sound a lot like Julie Mehretu’s early abstract paintings.

In the end, Stanton’s wound is a symptom of trauma but not the trauma itself. Throughout the novel, he is haunted by patchy, hazy, seemingly random memories. One of them (the poster of the title, seen through the window of a passing train in a Welsh town whose name even Stanton doesn’t know how to pronounce) is a red herring, but another one is real and becomes bracingly clear. When McCarthy reveals that memory, it comes as a shock, the language blunt and brutal, even if readers have seen it coming all along. And it points to the larger tension running through the novel, between creating the systems and structures of a better world and destroying them in order to show the horrors they’ve been used to conceal. “I’m a writer through and through,” McCarthy said in an interview eleven years ago with the writer Frederic Tuten, “but the art world—to a large extent—provides the arena in which literature can be vigorously addressed, transformed, and expanded.”1 Like Remainder, The Rhyl Poster is a novel of ideas that digs into the purpose of art, broadly construed. Why do we make it, what does it respond to, and how does it make a difference in the world? In many ways, by melding art not only to an economic system but also to the war machines it has enabled, and to the immunity from war crimes that its supposedly regulatory legal systems have ensured, McCarthy’s latest novel is also his darkest—though its urgency may be lost in the fineness of its style.

The Rhyl Poster details the beauty and artistry of building a world alongside the tremendous destruction of tearing it down. His novel is filled with drawings, paintings, performances, geometries, and abstractions, and yet at its core is an expression of guilt, which presents itself in the opening pages, when Stanton attends a talk on predictive crime analytics at the French Ministry of Justice, and concludes that we may all be already guilty. Of what? Maybe of not really subscribing to a rules-based order, well before DOGE or the dismantling of international aid. Maybe of destroying Iraq and so much else under the now laughable guise of promoting democracy. Maybe of not really believing in one another and in what we know, what we remember so well, so insistently and obsessively, of the past.