Das dunkle Schiff tells the story of Kerim, whose father, owner of a small restaurant in Iraq, is casually murdered by Saddam Hussein's security forces. On the eve of the Bush-Blair War, Kerim falls into the hands of Kurdish Islamic guerrillas when they hijack his car. They recruit him, but he is able to escape after a while, and makes his way illegally to Berlin, where his uncle helps him to gain asylum. But he soon finds that you can't escape from past traumas simply by moving away.

This is an odd and rather disconcerting mixture of adventure story and dark introspective psychological drama, but it seems to work as a novel despite that. Kerim is at times a cunning and endearing protagonist, but he's ultimately a failed human being, who can't achieve dramatic resolution by any of the conventional means. We are shown pretty clearly where the roots of that failure lie, and how little chance he had of avoiding them.

The account of the guerrilla fighters is at the heart of the book, and it is carefully calibrated to allow us to be revolted by their violence and its consequences, as Kerim is, but still take us at least part of the way into understanding the emotional and political logic that leads them into the belief that violence is right and necessary. Fatah's clean, undemonstrative writing style is probably the key to making this approach work — and making you feel afterwards that you'd rather not have been where you just were — and so is his insistence on keeping the viewpoint strictly with the Kurds, so that we never get to see the Western invaders as anything other than murderous intruders.

The nightmarish voyage as a stowaway in a cargo ship from Turkey, which gives the novel its title, is also grippingly described, but it doesn't seem to mesh very well with the rest of the book: it's almost as though it was pasted in as an afterthought. It acts as a kind of intermezzo to separate the Iraqi and German parts of the story, and it reinforces Kerim's sense of himself as unreliable, but it doesn't really advance the plot much.

Obviously, this is a book that's meant to leave you feeling uncomfortable and less sure of your ideas than you were when you started, and it does that very effectively. But it isn't much fun... ( )