Like McCarthy, I used to get exasperated by the self-impoverished narrowness of mainstream British so-called ‘literary’ literature, its obsession with Amises and McEwans, its deliberate ignorance of so much else; after a while, I realised this was not a literary but a cultic matter, to do with fertility rites and myths of social renewal. I remember that in the early 1980s on Channel 4 there was a chaotic late-night chat show, which my memory frames as having on it Vi Subversa from the Poison Girls, crowning Boy George as the young god of the year just out. As she did so, she warned him that the promise of regeneration embodied by his figure could be made good only with his sacrifice. As with hindsight, it duly was, as for Jesus and Osiris and Gazza and Martin Amis.

The ultimate aim of the necronaut, the INS manifesto says, is to construct ‘a craft that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist’, with one example of such a craft being ‘the rehabilitation of sacrifice as an accepted social ritual’. From this perspective, it’s not important whether or not McCarthy’s novel is reviewed well or badly, allowed to win the Booker or any other gong. Whatever happens to this novel or to this writer, a chain of events has been set in motion. Nothing and no one is going to stop it going on and on.