Cockroach
By Rawi Hage
Hamish Hamilton, £14.99, 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

The narrator of Rawi Hage’s bleakly compelling new novel is an unhappy man. Far away from home and family in the Middle East, he is fighting poverty and indifference in cold, inhospitable Montreal. Furthermore, he is obliged to talk to a therapist every week about his recent suicide attempt – and his habit of breaking into other people’s houses.

Cockroach’s narrative is intriguing and deceptive, not unlike its protagonist. Periodic hallucinations that he is a giant cockroach inevitably bring Metamorphosis to mind. But the discomfort of Hage’s antihero is more Camus than Kafka. At the story’s opening, he says: “I felt oppressed by it all. The question of existence consumed me.”

When he gets a job as a busboy in an Iranian restaurant through his friend Reza, it seems he has a foothold in Montreal life. Instead he finds a dramatic opportunity to aid in a crime of revenge.

Long exchanges in the first half between the man and his therapist also lead us to expect that this relationship will prove central. When he breaks into his therapist’s home and steals away with an illicit souvenir, we anticipate a later confrontation. But the theft simply dead-ends in a subdued termination of their therapy. The novel, and the character, have used the therapist to unburden searing stories from the narrator’s violent past.

It is the community in Montreal that shapes the rest of his fate. That this community is chiefly made up of Iranians is an unexplained fact. Hage, author of the much-praised DeNiro’s Game, is originally from Lebanon. Though he elects not to name his protagonist’s home country, he allows the man’s friends, including his lover Shohreh and her gay friend Farhoud, detailed accounts of encounters with the Ayatollah Khomeini and other figures. The man listens to their horrifying stories of rape and murder with sympathy, while at certain key points in the plot his inability to comprehend Farsi plays an interesting role.

Given his enduring misanthropy, the narrator is surprisingly likable. He hates the bourgeois western elite who “are the filth of the planet”; the refugees he refers to as “welfare dogs” who hang out at a local café (“all they can do is howl about the past”); and finally, everyone: “They are all filth, these people, walking above the earth.”

He attributes to his insect nature his fascination with waste and its ways: drains, sewers, pipes. “Other humans gaze at the sky, but I say unto you, the only way through the world is to pass through the underground.”

Against these dark perceptions, there are moments of genuine cruelty. He steals from and mentally torments an older Algerian professor from the café. But he also loves Shohreh, and their affection slowly develops into a trusting bond that, at least, has some strength and beauty.

This relationship is not the heart of Hage’s concern in Cockroach. He seems more eager to provide a wry examination of immigrant existence, avoiding prettifying sentiment. Yet it provides what little redemption there is in the narrator’s life, and moments of escape f rom the daily grind of survival.

It is Shohreh’s past, rather than the narrator’s, which comes back to haunt them, in the form of a figure who dines at the restaurant, as the novel takes a late Death and the Maiden-like turn.

The narrator’s talents as a thief and a charmer, and his network of connections, are all employed in the dramatic denouement. The “underground” society finally takes action against one of the powerful many who live above ground, in arrogance and luxury, not caring to recall the pain they have inflicted on other people.

Sylvia Brownrigg is author of ‘Morality Tale’ and ‘The Delivery Room’ (Picador)