When we first meet Katherine Carlyle, she’s a frozen embroyo. Eight years later, she’s born. At 19, she’s living in Rome alone, receiving what she thinks of as “messages” from the near environment – a folded €50 note found while crossing the Piazza Farnese, a “small grey elephant with a piece of frayed string round its neck”.
She’s leaving messages too, at least in a behavioural sense. She’s acting out. She’s having sex in a hotel on the Via Palermo with a man she met five minutes ago, who smiles and calls her “mia piccola strega” (my little witch). Even her friend Dani thinks this a gesture too far. But soon she’s hearing a new, powerful message – a conversation in a cinema in which she picks out the name Klaus Frings and the words “apartment” and “Berlin”. After “so many dry runs and rehearsals” this message seems right. So now instead of going to Oxford University, she’s leaving for Germany. She’s erasing her computer files; she’s throwing her smartphone in the river. It’s time.
All these actions, and the many to follow, are a behavioural language addressed to her absent father, a war correspondent always at home in some volatile situation in another country, never at home with her. Crucially, she blames him for that eight-year gap between her conception and her birth, on the grounds that he wanted her mother “to himself”. Katherine’s decision to vanish from her own life is essentially an act of revenge: she’s desperate to be found by him, or at least by someone. But it’s also an “experiment with coincidence”, in living at random. In Berlin she meets a man who deals in religious icons, another who deals in anything. Perhaps they can help her get to her next destination. She flees through the night, misses a train, gets a new name, “Misty”; she learns that icons – the real kind, not the bloated cultural metaphor – are conduits, “windows on heaven”. Are these events and discoveries as exciting as they seem? Or are they only the stories she tells herself to veil the banally dangerous reality of her choices?
Thomson’s delivery is swift on the page: fluid, visual, deft as a thriller writer’s. He creates a situation in three sentences, develops it into a scene in three more, and he’s out of it and gone three sentences after that. I counted six distinct scenes in two pages, all fleeting, all very exact. Some of this economy is achieved by the placing of cultural markers. At an art gallery shop, Katherine buys Gerard Richter postcards – “His blurred portaits seem a comment on my own existence.” That very blurring focuses her more clearly. A page or two earlier, she’s been remembering her father’s obsession with American singer Dinah Washington. Such interventions aren’t just short cuts: they’re also part of the general sensuousness, the emotional texturing of the novel. Observation and imagery are locked together. “The air smells of spinach and wet fur,” Katherine tells us. She describes someone as having “close-cropped hair of an indeterminate colour, like bean sprouts or Tupperware”. A plane “shudders when it hits the runway, lurching right then left, as if seeking a way out”. The result is charismatic: you’re gripped exactly as you would be by a movie. You’re racing along on the shoulder of the motorcyclist, you’re listening to the music spill out of the club, you’re watching the cigarette butt arc down from the terrace to the cobbles in a shower of sparks. At the same time, something about the way Thomson paces the action, his phrasing and timing, his management of scale and grain – how close you are to events, how far away, how metaphorical they might be at one time, how literal at another – lets you know that in Katherine Carlyle you’re getting something more than a thriller.
As further messages lure her from Berlin to Russia, from Russia to Svalbard in Norway, Katherine’s choices become bleaker, more sordid, more bizarre. “The path through the forest” closes behind her, “as though it was never there.” It’s less a path, of course, than the trace of her own relationship with the concept of being followed and found. Meanwhile, Rupert Thomson’s 10th novel pursues, on her behalf and ours, an understanding of what it is to have been given life in such metaphysically problematic circumstances. Katherine Carlyle was “born twice”. Can she possibly remember the conditions of that frozen wait, during which her parents inexplicably preferred to be alone together rather than with her? More importantly, can she ever forget them? Is her flight away from something or towards it? The answer to that question, when it comes, is discordant, inevitable: shocking, emotionally draining and satisfying all at once.
• M John Harrison’s latest novel is Empty Space (Gollancz). To order Katherine Carlyle for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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