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.
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.
A kind of anti-thriller, dense with information and McCarthy’s usual affinity for unspoken meanings in the flawed system of language ... Perhaps the greatest joy of the novel is the evolution of McCarthy’s prose, particularly his use of metaphor ... What The Rhyl Poster achieves is to use the legal system—particularly the European model—to evoke the deep existential anxieties we feel when in pursuit of some kind of purpose, when we want to ascertain the meaning of something, and how ultimately we are all, in our journeys, a small part of a grand and unknowable whole.
A high-style legal conspiracy novel whose linguistic virtuosity can be both seductive and wearying ...
Part of the point of Tom McCarthy’s new novel seems to be complexity for its own sake ... Sometimes Tom McCarthy’s adventures with language—and English isn’t the only one with which he dances—are splendidly entertaining. Often they are musical. Some readers will be delighted by those adventures. Some will become impatient.
On paper, the plot of this novel sounds like the stuff of a thriller, following a one-time soldier through a world of international legal intrigue. Like many of McCarthy’s other novels, however, this is a work in which familiar tropes are upended or cast aside ... For readers on the book’s wavelength, it’s a rewarding combination of big ideas and intrigue ... This deconstructed existential thriller memorably upends genre conventions.
