The Rhyl Poster

A brilliant and troubled jurist becomes a double agent, in the thrilling new novel from twice Booker-shortlisted Tom McCarthy

Benjamin Stanton — decorated Gulf War veteran, star jurist in Europe’s highest courts, orphan, addict. But after an unexpected encounter his allegiance begins to shift. Introduced by his new handler to the petit bleu pills, 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 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 a landmark ruling, more important than anything he has written before.

But Stanton has been working on something else: a vast, sprawling document 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 world where guilt — our own, and our whole era’s — is endlessly replayable, but never quite expungeable.