Well, this was grim. I mean, it's brilliantly written, masterfully constructed and a dazzling literary accomplishment, but it's a bit of a trip through various modern hells, some real, as with the bleak desert vistas and the carnage of incompetence and corruption that is Iraq, or the existential mental disintegration of a man trying patiently, ploddingly, to vanish but who seems to end up multiplying.

There's a lot of vanishing in this book, people disappearing in various sinister ways, some victims, some perpetrators of appalling crimes, and some just fall away or become confused and almost forgetful. There's the hideously banality of the motiveless murder and the hunt for the various versions of one particular vanishee. There aren't any answers - mostly there are just disappearances and vanishments, but as the book moves from place to place and character to character there is most definitely a story, or a series of stories. None of it amounts to the significance one might hope for in a thriller - a deliberate thematic choice - but lives are nonetheless devastated in various ways. Mostly it's about lives being devastated, corrupted, poisoned, derailed by venal, random, indifferent, greedy or malevolent agencies, all a microcosm of the geopolitical world, really. So, a bit grim and unremitting, but written with brilliance and a deep, troubling intelligence about the ugly mediocrity of evil, even on a grand scale.