Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson review – swift, shocking and satisfying

How can you be ‘born twice’? A young woman’s existential road trip takes her from Rome to Russia and beyond

When we first meet Katherine Carlyle, she’s a frozen embroyo. Eight years later, she’s born. At 19, she’s living in Rome alone, receiving what she thinks of as “messages” from the near environment – a folded €50 note found while crossing the Piazza Farnese, a “small grey elephant with a piece of frayed string round its neck”.

She’s leaving messages too, at least in a behavioural sense. She’s acting out. She’s having sex in a hotel on the Via Palermo with a man she met five minutes ago, who smiles and calls her “mia piccola strega” (my little witch). Even her friend Dani thinks this a gesture too far. But soon she’s hearing a new, powerful message – a conversation in a cinema in which she picks out the name Klaus Frings and the words “apartment” and “Berlin”. After “so many dry runs and rehearsals” this message seems right. So now instead of going to Oxford University, she’s leaving for Germany. She’s erasing her computer files; she’s throwing her smartphone in the river. It’s time.

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