Interlaced in this narrative are the stories of seven other men, some fictional, some historical. These are recounted by the first-person narrator and rendered through the prism of his subjectivity, so that the reader holds three or more ever-alternating narrative threads: now the Föhn of the Swiss Alps, now a Sydney funeral, now a Scottish ballad. Davis Wood executes the transitions with skill, confidence, and elegance. Acutely aware of the ‘inadequacy of writing’ (to quote again from Blood and Bone), he adopts an intensely immersive approach to language that I can only describe as phenomenological, which he applies through finely honed skills of observation.

There are, in a sense, many books in this single work, and their merging is gainful, like an alloy whose molten components are improved through complexity. History and literature intersect in fascinating ways, with some chapters genre-hopping into historical fiction. Especially successful is Davis Wood’s deployment of traditional English and Scottish ballads, which function as a frame of reference for the narrator’s ruminations, as well as a study into the instability of language.

The problem of articulating the inarticulable is vital to Davis Wood’s work. The narrator frequently asks, ‘Is there a word for that?’, or else laments, ‘There’s no word.’ He becomes obsessed with filling the lacuna between experience and expression. His tormented quest for precision is more than pedantry: in it he seeks to quell his uncertainty. Repetition and variation thus become important techniques in the telling:

If exactitude is beyond your expressive capabilities, all you can do is say something that approaches what you mean and then say it over and over again in a different formulation each time. You’ll never pin down the meaning exactly, but pull together all your variants and you’ll see them haunted by its ideal, each one containing a piece of the sense you want to convey.

As the narrator grapples with his loss, an overwhelming sense of alienation sends him spiralling down a rabbit hole of philosophical quandaries. His struggle to understand how we, as individuals and as a society, give value to human lives comes up against absurdities and paradoxes. If his grief is immeasurable, how can his employer enumerate the terms of his bereavement leave? Is it possible to ‘respect each loss, each death, as its own unique and solemn disaster’ and at the same time to ‘hold it equal to that of every other’? When he turns to utilitarianism, citing victim figures to compare atrocities, a mathematical wunderkind confronts him with ‘the corruption of [his] tallied numbers, [his] failure to reckon with the ripple effects of the lives destroyed ... as if the reach of each of those lives was confined to the shell of a single fallen body’.

As anyone who has contemplated the Trolley Problem popular in ethics studies can tell you, these thought experiments leave you with an unsavoury feeling whatever the answer. When the examples are drawn from real life, as many here are – with accounts of genocides, massacres, and mass shootings – the result is harrowing. Indeed, At the Edge of the Solid World is an unapologetically demanding work. It challenges readers in terms of both form and content: facing its graphic catalogue of violence, keeping account of its many moving parts, reckoning with its philosophical deadlocks, and, at the end of a reading session, escaping its obsessive hold. Davis Wood knows what he’s asking of his readers: we sense this as the narrator gives voice to the reader’s reservations yet speeds on, like a hurtling runaway trolley, towards the very limits of reader sympathy – and sometimes beyond them.

Limits, as the title suggests, are important to this novel: of empathy, forbearance, grief, body, selfhood, knowledge, and language. It seeks to ‘understand how impossible things become possible to some’ while simultaneously exposing the limits of such an endeavour. As an increasingly solipsistic narrator probes the dark recesses of human experience, the reader is often unsympathetic towards him and other characters. The work willingly walks a tightrope and invites readers to make their own meaning. Explorations in this fraught terrain call to mind Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017).

To what end does a writer embrace such bedlam? Writing in ABR’s October issue on the topic of intellectual freedom, journalist Johanna Leggatt proposed that ‘the kind of free thinking that is required to write interestingly, with élan and a sense of daring, involves doubt and uncertainty, sometimes confusion. It may involve the ability to hold opposing concepts in one’s mind without needing to assert a clear moral position.’ In a sense, such writing plays the role of a ‘plea hearing’ as described by Helen Garner in her Walkley Award-winning essay ‘Why She Broke’ (2017): ‘working to fit the dry, clean planes of reason to the jagged edges of human wildness and suffering’. While Leggatt and Garner are concerned with journalism here, these considerations hold sway in the realm of fiction, too. Held against these criteria, At the Edge of the Solid World qualifies as interesting writing many times over.

While readers’ emotional and intellectual reactions to this work will surely vary, Davis Wood’s storytelling gifts are undeniable: At the Edge of the Solid World is a masterclass in wedding form to content. Most extraordinary is Davis Wood’s ability to blur the boundaries between narratives until, from their yielding, edgeless form, emerges a new shape. For maximum impact, this complex novel is best seized in a few concentrated sittings.