Rupert Thomson's fourth is an unsettling, cerebral gem. Events begin on a Thursday evening when the young Martin Blom, having just dropped in for groceries at the supermarket, for his troubles is shot in the head. Waking, he realises that the tomato he saw as the unconsciousness lapped at his mind will be the last thing he ever sees. Martin Blom is blind.

Neurosurgeon Bruno Visser informs his reluctant charge that a metal plate will hide the hole in his skull but the sightlessness is permanent; Martin must somehow shoulder the depression and self-pity that will inevitably follow. Some patients, the doctor explains, report being hoodwinked by their own minds into thinking they can still see. On this occasion, however, Visser is fooling only himself - in the gardens of the clinic one evening, Martin realises that he really can see again. Slave to crepuscular light he may be, but seeing is seeing and secretly Mr. Blom experiments with his newly restored sense.

Upon release he flees to the anonymity of the city. He lives in a seedy hotel with what appears to be an active brothel on the second floor, meets a succession of strange and exotic men, and becomes lover to the mysterious Nina, who herself promptly vanishes when he tells her of his gift. Now, suddenly, the police are interested in this apparently blind man.

Thompson's chief skill is to convince readers of the truth of his protagonist's strange new world. At first we accept it as nothing out of the ordinary, that allusions to, say, This Is Your Life are reassuring in their familiarity. But hints about a border, the outlandish skein of names - Munck, Kolan, Loots - gradually make us think of other places, of a parallel Eastern European Kafkain land into which Martin has stepped.

Through his narration Martin Blom tells us everything and nothing - a truth - dropping shadowy hints despite himself that sight may actually be little more than simple self-delusion. How much can we trust what we are told when we don't know how much to trust the teller?

In its extravagancies, the black, only slightly absurdist comedy, we think of Jonathan Carroll and his travels in the surreal back corridors of Vienna. There are glimmers of the American's fairytale and nightmare woven through these pages, brought up sharp by references - television, cars - to the present.

Occasionally Thompson seems about to overstep his mark, but the seductiveness of the writing and eloquence of his invention compel us to linger just long enough for it to hypnotise. Whatever its oddness, The Insult transports you with it wherever it decides to go. Just maybe the place it finally decides to go is a little too Ruth Rendell to sustain everything that precedes, that Thomson is a little too ready to abandon the conspiracies and intrigues that brought us here, but by the time the last page turns it is hard to see just what other conclusion he could have drawn. The point, if point there is, is that a story like this - in the colourful images it promulgates - is possible only in the head of its narrator and therefore, uniquely, the novel.