This is a book about identity. The central character remains elusive and changeable despite being written from a third person point of view, a first person point of view, psychoanalysed and twice observed from another first person viewpoint at the beginning and end of the work. It is not certain if the narrator is likeable and this appears to be part of the overall point. Dramatically, the story is well plotted but structurally and thematically it is something of a collision between worlds - a pre-war Viennese drama and a Le Carre style spy thriller. Perhaps because of this, and perhaps because the idea that identity is malleable is not enough of an insight to carry a book, the work left me feeling as if I had been brought on a journey to nowhere and left there without a ticket home.