THE PINE ISLANDS

by Marion Poschmann (Serpent’s Tail £12.99, 192 pp) THIS is a male mid-life crisis novel, but probably unlike any you have read before. Gilbert Silvester, a lowly German lecturer, dreams that his wife is having an affair, and promptly takes a plane to Tokyo.

There, he discovers the work of Japanese poet Basho who, 500 years previously, sought to rid himself of worldly cares, and Gilbert determines to make a pilgrimage to the archipelago covered in pine trees that inspired his poetry.

Accompanying Gilbert is a young man, Yosa, who is determined to commit suicide, obsessively consulting a manual on how to do it. There is a strong whiff of farce about this odd couple, compounded by Gilbert’s contempt for Yosa.

Poschmann walks a fine line between skewering Gilbert’s pomposity and taking seriously the crises of both men in this blackly funny novel, in which the rhythms of modern life slowly give way to the restorative poetry of the natural world.