The predator beneath the prig

Lawrence Miller, the protagonist and narrator of The Horned Man, is an English academic working in a New York university where he sits on a sexual harassment committee. A lonely prig and fastidious purveyor of political correctness, Lawrence has unsettling memory lapses during which inexplicable and increasingly macabre events take place. Behind a history of battered and murdered women, there appears to lurk a sexually ravenous eastern European professor called Trumilcik, whom Lawrence sets out to apprehend, entirely oblivious to the possibility that he might himself be Trumilcik.

This, however, is no reassuring tale of an alter ego exposed. Lawrence's story unfolds in ever-deepening layers of self-deception, reaching back into terrible moments of childhood and speeding forward again into his abject failure to comprehend other human beings.

The Horned Man is, I think, a very fine example of literature of the fantastic; which is to say, it's about the traumatic inability to distinguish between what is real and what is not. The novel is a high-wire act, a performance which ensnares its audience with the same eerie indecisiveness that possesses its (probably) insane narrator. James Lasdun, a meticulous poet and short story writer, has extended himself to the more volatile scope of a novel without sacrificing precision, drawing his reader unfalteringly along a razor's edge of anxiety.

If this makes Lasdun's story sound like a calculated literary exercise, that is because, to some extent, it is. But it is also an exercise which summons into itself the ghosts of Stevenson, Borges and Kafka. It creates a world which consists of layer upon layer of unreliable memory, mythic allusion and mystifying clues to some unspecified crime. Certainly, you can detect Lasdun's cold hand on your shoulder as he manipulates your responses. But the grip is thrillingly tight.

This is an exquisite and frightening book. On the face of it, the notion of a thin-blooded academic narrator scratching away at tissues of memory and identity seems deeply unpromising. But, amazingly, The Horned Man is a page turner. Not because it satisfies that comfortable clichè - a clever literary work riding on the back of a conventional thriller - but because it is driven by the compulsions of pure literature. Every page tempts you with the promise of fulfilment, that the story will be fully explained, and so - therefore - will the world.

Yet, deep in Lasdun's finely wrought, painstakingly original prose lies an elemental experience of rejection. At one point, after disguising his way into a hospice for battered wives in search of his own, Lawrence is discovered and discharged. He is left, battered round the face, booted in the balls and dressed as a woman.

And there he has a moment of clarity. If you step beyond a certain social limit, he considers, there is no coming back. Not because society has forced you out, but because of something in yourself, "some unassimilable new singularity making you unfit, by your own judgment, for the company of your fellow creatures". The world is not explicable, and the only natural response is a ghastly, inchoate rage.