The English novelist Tom McCarthy got his start as a writer in the late ’80s. Thatcher’s Britain, like much of the North Atlantic, was in the midst of a decade-long recessionary spiral. To get people off the dole, Thatcher’s administration came up with a rather inventive solution—the “Enterprise Allowance Scheme,” which provided individuals with a weekly stipend to start a business and then become their business’s sole employee. It was a way for the Iron Lady and her successor, John Major, to provide much-needed relief while also keeping the unemployment numbers down. Over 300,000 people received grants, including many artists who were encouraged to apply.

McCarthy was awarded a stipend through the scheme shortly after graduating Oxford and headed off to Prague. It was just after the Velvet Revolution; the country was run by a rag-tag group of dissidents and intellectuals—including its president, the absurdist playwright Václav Havel. “You’d go to a gig in a bar,” McCarthy recalled, “and the drummer smoking a joint with five earrings in his ear was, like, the minister of whatever.”

McCarthy found a large, drafty apartment and a girlfriend, and spent most of his time drinking and burning unused furniture to stay warm. What he did write—a novel about doubles and forgeries—was laced with opaque references to Christian iconography and French surrealism. Its plot, as he later confessed, was “more or less lifted straight from The Broken Ear,” a volume in Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin series, and the novel was rejected by every publisher that considered it. McCarthy called it Men in Space.

Men in Space was eventually published under the same name more than a decade later as a follow-up to McCarthy’s first published novel, Remainder. McCarthy, at that point, had moved on to more marketable subjects: bank heists, Victorian love triangles, crypts on the Upper Nile, the haze of inter-war Europe. Remainder was critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic—Zadie Smith hailed it as “a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might ... travel forward”—and C, his magic mountain of a third novel, was shortlisted for the Man Booker.

McCarthy also wrote two rather accomplished, if quixotic, works of literary criticism—Tintin and the Secret of Literature and the T. S. Eliot–inspired Transmission and the Individual Remix—and continued to produce a set of playful, mock-serious manifestos for the International Necronautical Society (INS), an avant-garde group of which he and his friend, the philosopher Simon Critchley, are quite possibly its only living members. (In one of their many high-jinx stunts, they purged one of their members for “not being dead.”)