Writing weeks after the 11 September attacks, the novelist Colson Whitehead observed that ‘you start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it’, making a personal skyline infused with memory. Even the most public tragedy, then, is an array of private ones, the awful spectacle refracted differently by every watching eye. This is the predicament confronted by the young terrorist in James Meek’s seventh novel, Your Life Without Me. Before the book begins, Raf, a promising engineer, decided to destroy St Paul’s Cathedral. He plotted carefully, placing explosives in and around the building under the guise of conducting research on vibration for his PhD. But as he got closer to pressing the button, he started to doubt the chances of getting his point across. He had imagined ‘a crowd, a huge audience, reacting to a single event as one’. But now he saw how blowing up the landmark ‘might rather be a catalyst for the many to sublimate their personal griefs’. His aim had been for people to ‘see the present for what it was, not start an orgy of weeping over their personal losses and disappointments’.

The chasm between public and private, intention and effect, haunts Meek’s novel. Its protagonist is not Raf, but one of his former teachers, Mr Burman. An exacting aesthete living in an unnamed northern town, Mr Burman – he is given no other name, as if to show him always from