The Rhyl Poster
An excellent novel, a perfect fit for an over-circuited world ... Offers the rewards of a thriller but with frequent doses of modernist excess.
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As I plodded through The Rhyl Poster, I had the irritating sense that McCarthy was hovering somewhere over my shoulder, chuckling at my dutiful annotations and frequently exasperated comments ... If the experience of reading Remainder was like stepping into the cool and quiet of a gallery, then reading The Rhyl Poster reminded me of stumbling into a junk shop, cluttered and overflowing with the bits and bobs McCarthy has collected throughout his career. I made it to the end and put the book aside. Only then, oddly, did it start to grow on me ... He might never again write a novel as clean and spare—or plainly enjoyable—as Remainder. But the novelist who once found his inspiration in the art world’s curated spaces seems, in these moments, to be finding his way toward another kind of book: one that stops trying to X-ray bureaucracies and institutions and starts, more simply, looking at the world.
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The Rhyl Poster is something of a compromise, a partial throwback to McCarthy’s first three novels, for it has a detailed backstory of a protagonist whose physical and psychological needs instigate a plot about stolen information with consequences: it may well get the protagonist killed ... McCarthy deftly manages the thin lines connecting his frequent and dominant blocks of exposition, description, rumination, speculation, and, ultimately, confabulation ... Described as a 'legal thriller' by the publisher, The Rhyl Poster becomes a high-concept legal comedy, full of bleak humor and brainy satire ... An original, instructive, and (for me) corrective representation of McCarthy’s way of writing in time.
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