A review containing no information whatsoever.

Right. Here is everything I can safely tell you about this book.

It is a book. It has a title, and the title is already doing more damage than I'd like, so let's hurry past it. It has chapters. I'm not telling you how many.

My copy is a paperback with an orange spine and a train on the front, because obviously there's a train on the front, and somebody at that publisher also chose to put the single most important object of the final stretch on the cover, a decision I would like to discuss with them at length, in a car park.

The paper is nice. Slightly cream. The typeface is one of the ones with the pointy bits on the serifs.

I bought it in a charity shop in Whitstable for a pound fifty and there's an inscription inside the front cover reading "Malcolm, sorry about Tuesday, x". I have thought about Malcolm considerably more than is reasonable.

I read most of it in a beer garden and the rest in bed, and at no stage did anyone ask me what it was about, which was lucky, because I'd have had to get up and leave.

What I will confirm: two men. A train, briefly. A conversation. After that you are entirely on your own, and I'd suggest skipping the back cover as well, and definitely the introduction, which in my edition lays out the whole architecture of the novel in its second paragraph as though it were doing me a favour.

Eight out of ten. It drops the other two somewhere late on, for reasons I can't begin to give you without doing the exact thing I have spent five paragraphs declining to do.

Ask me again in a year and I will decline again.

Do NOT watch the film first.