Quite early in this melancholy, unsettling, and slightly sinister novel, one character asks another “Do you ever get a bad feeling about something?  A bad feeling about something that’s going to happen?”  A lot of bad things have already happened to Futh by the time we meet him on the ferry taking him to his solitary walking holiday in Germany.  His mother abandons him in childhood, leaving him with his closed-off, unpredictable, violent father.  He drifts through his school years, unnoticed and friendless.  His wife leaves him too, perhaps because they can’t have children, but more likely because she’s repulsed by the cold, unreachable heart that Futh seems to have inherited from his father.  Does this sound very bleak? It is.  Reading the acclaimed novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I was reminded often of the famous lines from Philip Larkin’s poem: Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf/Get out as early as you can/And don’t have any kids yourself.

Futh moves through his walking tour of Germany as he moves through his life, as someone to whom bad things happen, as someone unable to impose himself on his surroundings and relationships, as someone no one else seems to see, as someone entirely controlled by the fear of imminent dangers mostly imagined.  Everything of significance in Huth’s life has already happened, the profound and decisive influences that shape him, so it’s no surprise that nothing happens in this eerie story.  This is a cold, hard, memorable novel.