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”.

The literary press soon began finding more room for McCarthy, whose regular denunciations of English fiction – not least for its “middlebrow” ignorance of challenging ideas from the continent – did much to shape bookish conversation at the turn of the decade. If his zeal wasn’t to everyone’s taste – the New Statesman once called him Britain’s “most galling interviewee” – anyone lately stepping into a bookshop might well feel the last laugh belongs to McCarthy. Witness the success of Fitzcarraldo Editions: innovative Europeans are hot property. Risk-rewarding ventures such as the Goldsmiths prize, established in 2013 to spotlight formally daring fiction amid panic about the philistinism of award panels, feel a little less urgent when a novel as inscrutable as M John Harrison’s The End of Everything sits comfortably on this year’s Booker shortlist, a bestseller to boot. When the mainstream and the avant garde are now kissing cousins,…