“I was made in a small square dish,” says Rupert Thomson’s eponymous character Katherine Carlyle at the start of his 10th novel and her epic tale.
She was conceived by IVF, stored as a frozen embryo in a London hospital for eight years, before finally being implanted into her mother.
But at the age of 19 her life has been rocked by seismic changes: she now lives in Rome, her mother has died of cancer, and her journalist father is frequently away on foreign assignments, leaving her to cope with her loss alone.
Then one day she overhears a couple discussing a mutual German friend called Klaus Frinks. Katherine registers the name and feels a “sense of being summoned, singled out”.
Instead of heading to Oxford to start university, she throws her phone in the Tiber, dumps her laptop under a bridge, withdraws her inheritance and heads to Berlin to track down a man she has never met.
So begins her peripatetic adventures, with each stage and transit point designated by random comments and arbitrary signals.
She makes contact with her Berliner after days of stalking him. Flattered but nonplussed, he asks her why she has come. “Let’s just say that I’m experimenting with coincidence.”
Katherine Carlyle is a novel about fate, luck and happenstance. Thomson's character lives recklessly, makes spontaneous decisions, relies upon complete strangers and defies considerable odds.
She moves in with Klaus, then ditches him, and her real identity. Using a false name, she latches on to Cheadle, a rich American “philanthropist” who wants to adopt her.
After a hazardous rendezvous in a grand Berlin hotel with a shady Croatian she realises she has outstayed her welcome. She packs her bags, jumps on a train and embarks for Moscow, and thence to the outer rim of the Arctic Circle.
Thomson is an original storyteller who with each new novel offers his readers something bracingly or daringly different. The Book of Revelation (1999) catalogued the psychological trauma of a kidnapped man; Divided Kingdom (2005) presented a dystopian vision of Great Britain; and his last novel Secrecy (2013) was a study of scandal, intrigue and wax statues in 17th century Florence.
What binds them all – Katherine Carlyle included – is Thomson's precise and deceptively simple prose, together with his ability to jolt, unsettle and move the reader with gothic drama, strange antics and moments of carefully calibrated tension.
His latest novel is a triumph, all the more so for overcoming a decidedly rickety premise. Katherine’s wanderings could have been directionless, her aims whimsical, and her character scatty and self-indulgent.
But Thomson creates a gutsy, strong-minded protagonist whose mission to find inner calm and meaning is both credible and compelling.
The Berlin segment has all the mystery and impetus of a good spy novel. As Katherine ventures northwards through Russia and the landscape becomes less traversable and more unknowable, there is a palpable shift in momentum whereby we are gripped not so much by her actions and impulses but by her thoughts and quandaries.
What is she fleeing from and can her journey to “the end of the world” bring her the solace she craves?
Katherine’s quest acquires emotional heft by way of routine flashbacks to her time spent with her healthy and then dying mother.
But it isn’t only one parent she misses, and Thomson weaves in more detours in the form of Katherine’s imagined scenarios of her guilt-wracked father piecing together the clues to determine his daughter’s whereabouts.
We discover that Katherine’s flight is also an attempt to punish her aloof father, and a plea for reconciliation.
At regular intervals Katherine must gauge whether she has encountered friend of foe. People are kind and cruel, but Thomson keeps us guessing as to whether a character has honourable intentions or ulterior motives.
After trusting her instincts for so long, and nearly coming unstuck in a sinister little shop selling, of all things, snow globes, Katherine gets a nasty, life-threatening surprise in the closing pages.
Thomson has the reader on tenterhooks wondering if his heroine’s luck has finally run out.
“Sometimes I have to prove that I exist,” Katherine tells us at one point.
“That I’m vibrant on the inside.”
She is very much alive throughout this chilly, haunting and masterful novel, and the reader cheers her on every step of the way.
Malcolm Forbes writes for The Economist, the Financial Times and the Literary Review. He lives in Edinburgh.