The Rhyl Poster - by Tom McCarthy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A political and legal thriller about money and power--featuring mind-altering substances, shadowy power players, and EU politics--by the author of Remainder and Satin Island.

Benjamin Stanton--decorated Gulf War veteran, celebrated legal theorist, orphan, addict, spy--embodies both the dynamism and the risk, the promise and the trauma, of our twenty first-century moment. A star jurist at the Court of Justice of the European Union, he is responsible for transforming Europe's biggest cases into laws that shape the lives of millions. But when he meets the enigmatic Pirotti at a conference in the Swiss Alps, his allegiance begins to shift. Introduced by his new handler to the petit bleu pills that soothe the pain of the war wound which still troubles him, he finds himself surrendering to intermittent visions: of sublime nerve-rays conjoining all spaces and all humanity in a great web of pure benevolence--a web or labyrinth, too, in which lurk traces of a primal violent incident back in Iraq.

Soon Stanton finds himself passing out Court documents to Pirotti's colleagues--or just passing out. When the Court begins to detect leaks in security, its suspicion falls on anyone but Stanton, who can do no wrong. Indeed, it is he who has been charged with the task of drafting an epochal, landmark ruling, more important and far-reaching than anything he has written before. But Stanton has been working on something else: a vast, sprawling document made up of markings, patterns and revelations, that has the power to change the world which he and those around him have so carefully constructed--to destroy it, certainly, but maybe also, from that very act of ruination, to draw into view, and bring down to the people, the new Law, new beginning, founding the new dispensation that our era desperately craves.

The Rhyl Poster crafts a hallucinatory landscape in which the literary descendant of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov and Conrad's Razumov is cast adrift in the gamespace of Grand Theft Auto, the spirit of Kafka's Franz or K. amidst the environs of Bad Lieutenant; a world where guilt--our own, and our whole era's--is endlessly replayable, but never quite expungeable.

About the Author

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. McCarthy is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. He contributes regularly to publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper's, and Artforum. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021.