The Survivor

A Japanese officer deliberately crashed his plane onto an island in the Japanese-occupied Pacific during the Second World War. Though he survives, he severes himself as effectively from the real world as if he had succeeded in his suicide attempt. For loneliness, dishonour, and grief at the suicide of his daughter seem to have driven him mad. Her takes up residence in a lighthouse. While two colleagues fly around the Pacific searching for the wreckage of his plane, he enacts strange dramas with characters whose existence can not be taken for granted. A dog, an American, a girl, a native: These may be real, they may be figments of an imagination run as wild as the surrounding jungle. But either way, they are his sole companions in a series of inconclusive encounters in which even sex, violence and death take on a disquiting ambiguity.

George MacBeth is best known as a poet, and a poet's sensitivity to language and atmosphere are evident in this mysterious, multi-layered new novel as they were in his previous two novels, The Transformation and The Samurai. But The Survivor is further distinguished by a marvellously wrought sense of insanity, surrealism and unease, as if Angela Carter had written Robinson Crusoe or Yukio Mishima Picnic at the Hanging Rock.