The man who disappeared

Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan — is a common staple of fantasy, and therefore fiction. But why, when we spend so much of the rest of the time fretting about losing what we have and hatching plans to safeguard it? In this short, powerful novel, the Swiss writer Peter Stamm, suggests some oblique but compelling possibilities.

Thomas and Astrid have returned from a holiday with their two children and begun the ordinary business of resettling: unpacking, laundry, a last glass of wine in the garden. As Astrid tends to the house, Thomas walks down the path and, after only a momentary hesitation, through the gate. His journey swiftly takes him beyond suburban houses and light industry and into woodland and, eventually, far more rugged terrain.

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Douglas Murray

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Stamm’s detached style barely even flirts with the idea of suspense. Even though we don’t know how Thomas’s departure will play out, and even though we’d like to find out, the narrative quietly and repeatedly insists that its chief purpose is elsewhere.Why is Thomas, an outwardly conforming, family-centred accountant, impelled to surrender himself to a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress through a contemporary urban and rural landscape that Stamm inflects with loss and entropy? Why are Astrid’s logical attempts to locate her missing husband —alerting the police, setting out to track him herself, managing their children’s and her own distress in the meantime — noticeably tempered with an acceptance that he will not return?

Despite its muted tone, expertly handled by the translator Michael Hofmann, To The Back of Beyond excels in deploying compact descriptions to evoke mental states, as here: ‘At the edge of a swampy clearing stood some old oaks, their contorted limbs in the gloaming resembling the outstretched claws of mythical beings.’