02 Nov 2026, 03:20 PM

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

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