A lonely ice maiden

‘Mystery comes through clarity’, is how Rupert Thomson recently described the effect he was trying to achieve in writing. It’s an apt phrase for his latest book, Katherine Carlyle. Thomson has previously published nine novels but has never achieved wide public recognition, partly because of their lack of uniformity. This, though, is what has attracted other writers, who admire his range, the visionary and haunting nature of his stories, the precision of his imagery, and his lack of agenda. For these, Jonathan Lethem has called him ‘a pure novelist’.

Katherine Carlyle displays all of these qualities, and may well come to be thought of as his defining book, but it is also a work with limitations. The story, told in the first person, is of a young woman conceived by IVF. A prologue informs us that as an embryo Katherine was frozen for eight years before being implanted into her mother. Following her mother’s death from cancer, her father’s long absences from home, and her consequent sense of abandonment, she has come to regard this early state of suspension, when she was made but unwanted in the world (‘like being a ghost, only the wrong way round’), as the ruling metaphor of her life.

Most popular

Tom Bower

Labour is destroying London’s nightlife

Now, as a 19-year-old living in Rome, Katharine attends a screening of Antonioni’s The Passenger, and afterwards overhears scraps of a conversation: a man’s name and address. With only these fragmented ‘messages’ to guide her she cuts all links to her former life and takes the train to Berlin where she tracks the man down. He is beguiled by her youth and beauty and she stays with him for a while before taking up with other men, discarding them as they lose their usefulness.

Her trajectory is mysterious and, rather as in Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, Katherine makes something of a private religion out of her ecstatic quest, looking for signs to guide her next move among the city’s tribes of wealthy, criminal and peripheral people.