Faye, a writer and mother of two children, is just emerging from the devastation of divorce when Outline begins. These are post-apocalyptic novels not of society or environment but of the soul, with Faye, the traumatised survivor of a destroyed inner world, blindly making her way through the wreckage. The reader pieces together her story from fragments, clues, unreliable mentions dropped in conversation. We search these conversations for significance, wondering whether they perhaps figure aspects of her own story. In Kudos, saturated with stories of violence, cruelty, and humiliation, this is an even more unsettling game than before.

Outline and Transit made a satisfying pair. In the first book, Faye is unmoored and adrift in Greece, teaching a writing workshop, while Transit shows a new sense of purpose: she moves back to London, buys a wreck of a house, and doggedly makes a new place for herself and her family, rebuilding. Romance beckons. She begins to come back to life. ‘For a long time,’ she says in Transit to the man who seems to be falling in love with her, ‘I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry.’

Anger dominates this final instalment. Kudos opens, like Outline, with the narrator on a plane from England to Europe (this time, for a writers’ festival), seated next to an arrogant man who reveals more about himself than he intends. Characters return, such as Ryan, the faintly ridiculous Irish writer in Outline, now horribly emaciated (or, as he believes, fashionably thin), a commercially successful, repugnant version of his former self. (He embodies one idea of kudos, in the sense of status and recognition, but in its ugliest form.) The narrator finds herself accommodated at a hotel with a disorienting circular structure, prompting reflections on ideas of progress, direction, and finding one’s way by accident rather than through intention, which seems to invite comparison with the trilogy’s own project.

Rather than another step forward, Kudos feels like a disconcerting return, and a refusal of the notion of progress suggested so tentatively by Transit. Faye has remarried, we learn, although we do not learn to whom or in what circumstances. There is no mention of the house in London – has it been restored? Does she live there with her husband? The story so far has invited these questions; now this final volume seems to regard them with mistrust. ‘What I don’t understand,’ a woman says to Faye, after describing her own abusive marriage (sitting underneath a reproduction of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, in case we missed the point), ‘is why you have married again, when you know what you know. You have put it in writing … and that brings with it all the laws.’ Faye’s answer is typically oblique: ‘I hoped to get the better of those laws, I said, by living within them.’

This interruption of readerly expectations and desires matches the trilogy’s interest in upending traditional narrative structure; still, it is hard to know quite how to take it. Faye’s absolute reticence was different when it came across as a symptom of shock; it still reads like a response to lasting trauma, but in the company of anger it is something else, more oppositional, more stubbornly opaque. Kudos feels like a return not simply to the wandering structure of Outline but further back to the excoriating, bitter satire of Cusk’s preceding novels, Arlington Park (2006) and The Bradshaw Variations (2009), and, more disturbingly, the primal agony of Aftermath (2012), her memoir of divorce.

For a novel set entirely in and around a writers’ festival, this story has an awful lot of dead animals in it, including the unforgettable tale of the nanny who kills a boy’s pet rabbit as punishment ‘and appeared the next day wearing the muff she had fashioned from its skin’. What was previously rendered as symbolic violence, or its traces, is now made brutally literal. The novel circles obsessively around questions of suffering and its relation to art, fate, and justice, and women suffer most, as Cusk draws ever more sharply an image of the world determined by a literal battle of the sexes.

Amid all the idiocy, death-dealing, and cruelty of heterosexual relations, the redeeming relationship that emerges is the one between mother and child; an exchange between Faye and her son towards the end of the novel is the only genuine dialogue in Kudos, a plea for comfort and connection that the narrator answers without hesitation or cynicism.

There are darkly funny moments, such as the earnest male writer who actually begins a defence of masculinity with the words ‘not all men’. His wife is very ‘satisfied’ by her life looking after their three children and supporting his career, he says, though he admits that ‘she did do a bit of writing in her spare time and had recently written a book for children that had been a surprise hit’. One can sense Cusk’s carefully bounded anger here, the fury of a blazing sun condensed through a miracle of physics into a bright spark of light, shining through the page.

This woman who says she wants to live within the laws, who steps so deliberately into the water at the end of Kudos, is not the woman who swam into the ocean in Outline and wanted to swim forever, heedless of her own safety, having abandoned the structures of convention. That sense of terrifying, exhilarating possibility has begun to close, and it is hard not to miss it.