The Rhyl Poster by Tom McCarthy review – is this avant-garde spy drama worth the riddles?

The hallucinatory crisis of a war-scarred jurist with a painkiller dependency makes for frustrating reading

Of the cohort of experimental novelists whose renown grew in the wake of the 2008 financial crash – names include Deborah Levy, Eimear McBride and Claire-Louise Bennett – it was Tom McCarthy who first demonstrated the benefit of bypassing orthodox routes to market. When British publishers rejected his 2005 novel, Remainder, about an amnesiac who spends a windfall restaging his past, he released it in a limited edition from a Paris art collective. Three years later, Zadie Smith wrote an essay celebrating it as a path-breaking overthrow of establishment-sanctioned “lyrical realism”.