Double trouble

A pianist abandons her instrument on stage and runs away only to find herself in pursuit of a doppelganger

- M John Harrison

EIsa Anderson, orphan, ex-prodigy and popular piano virtuoso, dyed her hair blue on a whim, then lost her nerve and walked off stage during a recital of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 2 in Vienna. Now she's travelling across Europe, teaching piano, while she tries to understand why. Her hands are still insured for millions of dollars: before she walked off stage, they played two minutes and 12 seconds of a composition of her own. In Athens, adrift and dissociated, self-image in ruins, she watches a woman buy the last two cheap toys at a flea market stall. The toys are mechanical dancing horses; the woman is herself.

Deborah Levy's ninth novel flickers constantly between comedy and darkness. Her prose is as quick and bare as ever, her manner excitingly abrupt. By page six she has set out her stall: the story is to be about how you construct yourself, and how that will always be a reconstruction. Elsa and her double are to be aware of one another from the outset, and in a sense their very doubledness will cancel - or at least unravel the idea of what we might call identity. "My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more me than I was."