The Rhyl Poster

A brilliant and troubled jurist in Europe’s highest courts becomes a double agent, in the thrilling and atmospheric new novel from Booker-shortlisted Tom McCarthy

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.