The Detour

Sometimes a novel feels like a closed circle - you reach the last page and sense that everything has been tidied away. This is not one of those novels. Though it reaches a natural conclusion, it lingers like a thick stink. Everything is elliptical.

A Dutch woman arrives in rural Wales to begin an indefinite stay at a rented farm cottage. As she settles into her new life, we are drip-fed details. She is an academic fleeing some sort of scandal. Her marriage is in tatters and she is plagued by aches and vivid dreams. She begins to unwind and seems little surprised when a stranger wanders in off the hills one morning, and established himself in her home. The perspective switches and suddenly we are with her husband. He is working to piece his life back together and soon he is on her trail, accompanied by a weirdly over-familiar detective. The novel skips back and forth between these strands until they become inevitably knotted.

This is an accomplished work and the author has won his fair share of prizes and plaudits, most notably  from J M Coetzee, a writer with whom there are many clear parallels: both authors dish out their novels in spare, economic prose and manage the trick of skirting on the surface of their characters whilst hinting at great storms of emotion underneath.