Just a few thoughts upon reading Tom McCarthy‘s forthcoming The Rhyl Poster.
Tom McCarthy’s The Rhyl Poster is, in my opinion, one of his very best novels to date, like a Graham Greene rewritten by DeLillo with a little help from Ballard.
Remainder, his debut, opened with a reference to Simon Critchley’s work. His latest book is actually dedicated to the philosopher (who was also McCarthy’s one-time partner in crime at the International Necronautical Society).
At the outset, a taxi accidentally exits a car park through the entrance, thereby producing a remainder — “a surplus piece of paper” — in the shape of a ticket that preserves its potentiality by remaining in abeyance: “the unsurrendered ticket, paper scrap that had purloined itself, slipped through the architecture of the system it was meant to serve”. There are other similar intervals — interregna — in the novel where the order of things is subtly subverted. Benjamin Stanton, the protagonist, argues that the time of law (he is a legal expert) is in fact an aporia, “the gap, the interval, the instant of suspense” that escapes time. His strange stutter remixes his speech so that the ends of sentences come first (his sentences exit through the entrance). He is depicted at home “hand and Pilot Falcon pen suspended above a rectangular sheet” of white paper — a suspension which is the very space of literature: “Stanton found himself placed in an interval, a stretch of time that, once vacated, turned into a magnet for events”. The ur-hiatus, however, is the eponymous, and recurring, image of the Rhyl poster — that of a worker (later likened to an actor playing the part of Hamlet) on a cigarette break at a railway station, who has removed a poster from a hoarding and is yet to replace it with a new one. This hesitation between palimpsest and blank canvas, as well as the worker’s temporary désoeuvrement (the incompletion of his task, which is reminiscent of the incompletion of the ticket’s cycle) open up a space of creative freedom.
Exiting through the entrance: The Rhyl Poster is, among so many other things, a compendium of McCarthy’s favourite themes: slightly menacing bureaucratic environments (here, the Court of Justice in Strasbourg), simulacra (copies without originals), terrorism, realism, metaphor (what things — Weapons of Mass Destruction, for instance — really stand for), time, incest, entomology, voices piped in from elsewhere, speech impediments, geometry, archaeology, conceptual art, not forgetting loops, cycles, and webs. There are new themes too such as the world of video games or the “zombie half-life” of the UK now that it has “unplugged” from the European grid.
Benjamin Stanton’s origins (he is a foundling) and even nationality (he claims to have taken on Irish nationality) remain shrouded in mystery. We know that he is a veteran of the war in Iraq and is now a star référendaire at the European Court of Justice. After meeting a shadowy figure called Pirotti, who is at the head of the Centre for Juridical Collaboration, Stanton becomes a double agent: “To sweep the old order away and bring the new one in: didn’t this task call for an outlaw, for an act of violence?” Possibly under the growing influence of the little blue pills Pirotti has introduced him to and to which he becomes addicted, he sets about composing his “great counter-confession” — a demented Gesamtkunstwerk, a “universal grammar” that, he prophesies, “would do nothing less than lay the groundwork for the founding of a whole new order”. I’ll stop there — no spoilers about the ecstatic, apocalyptic denouement.
From time to time, we need to be reminded that Tom McCarthy is one of the best and most important writers of the 21st century. The Rhyl deal.
ANDREW GALLIX 