Tom McCarthy's career is itself the most interesting thing about The Rhyl Poster. When Remainder was rejected by British publishers and released through a Paris art collective in 2005, it felt like an act of aesthetic necessity — a novel so formally strange it could only exist outside the establishment. Zadie Smith's subsequent essay canonised it, McCarthy became the house provocateur of a certain literary London, and suddenly the middlebrow-bashing continental modernist was shortlisted for the Booker twice. The new novel arrives in a cultural moment McCarthy arguably engineered: Fitzcarraldo Editions thrives, M John Harrison's The End of Everything sits on the Booker shortlist as a bestseller. The avant-garde has been absorbed. So what does McCarthy do? Push harder. The Rhyl Poster drops us into Luxembourg's Court of Justice of the European Union — the CJEU — alongside Stanton, a pill-dependent jurist and former British military geographer in Iraq, tasked with drafting an opinion on a privacy suit against a data analytics firm named Elrond. A shadowy criminal offers him unapproved painkillers from a Rotterdam lab in exchange for EU documents. His Dutch-Surinamese girlfriend lives in Rotterdam. Her pillow talk greases the cogs. The double-dealing unfolds across northern Europe in a genre mashup of trauma plot and heist narrative that remains, by deliberate design, steadfastly averse to closure. The prose is where McCarthy earns and loses simultaneously. The syntax is disorientingly elastic — legal lingo stitched to lower-register idiom, 'like a lecturer wearing a blazer with Nikes,' as the novel puts it with characteristic self-awareness. There are passages of genuine conceptual energy, particularly in the extended meditation on interpretation versus induction: 'If law in general is the realm where language shapes the world, the European Court of Justice pimps this logic to the nth.' McCarthy can still write a sentence that makes you stop. The problem is what the sentences add up to. The novel's intellectual architecture is familiar to anyone who has spent time with McCarthy's previous work. Repetition — 'law's fundamental propensity for repeatability, its driving imperative towards self-duplication' — is again the central preoccupation, as it was in Remainder, in C, in Satin Island, in The Making of Incarnation. The Tolkien lifts are droll: the defendant named Elrond, like Palantir a corporate raid on that mythology; the claimant Kohlhas echoing Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, the wronged justice-seeker of the 1810 novella. These are genuine pleasures. But the reviewer's comparison to filling in a crossword with the wrong clues is accurate — these are keys tinkling, not doors unlocked. Stanton himself is the structural problem McCarthy can't solve. He is, as the Guardian review notes, 'too plainly a parody of a girl-getting hardman-savant to carry much by way of emotional weight.' McCarthy's formal commitments have always created friction with character investment, but Remainder got away with it because the amnesiac's compulsive restaging had its own accumulating dread. Stanton's increasingly hallucinatory personal crisis generates page-turning urgency without generating stakes. We watch him malfunction without caring whether he reboots. The novel's 240 pages of high-pressure buildup conclude with the word 'begin.' The title's blank poster — a half-remembered image of someone pasting up an advert in north Wales, unseen contents — is the novel's thesis statement in object form: the signifier present, the signified withheld. McCarthy is clearly having fun. The CJEU acronym blinks through the pages like a beacon — CJEU, c'est jeu, a game — and if you catch it, you feel briefly clever. The question is whether cleverness is sufficient, whether the game is worth the candle. For readers who found The Making of Incarnation's density rewarding, the answer may be yes. For everyone else, Remainder remains the better argument for why McCarthy matters.
