FICTION: Things We Didn't See Coming,By Steven Amsterdam, Harvill Secker, 199pp, £12.99

SURVIVAL WAS never so strange, so terrifying, so absurdly logical. Steven Amsterdam pushes the realities of the apocalypse to its limits and further, in a narrative that goes spinning beyond all possibilities. Things We Didn't See Comingbegins as a story and then settles into a dream that owes a debt to JG Ballard and a little something to Yevgeny Zamyatin. A small boy attempts to explain what is happening: "For the first time, Dad is letting me help pack the car, but only because it's getting to be kind of an emergency."

They are going to visit his grandparents. But his father is packing the toolbox and the first-aid kit. Mother is curiously detached. The boy narrator is watching everything, if understanding little. Finally he turns to his father – “we’re bringing vegetables to a farm?”. Flight is in the air. The specific is left unsaid until Grandpa announces: “We’ll be one hundred per cent fine. I bought a box of candles the other day. And heaven knows you won’t let us go hungry. Nothing’s going to be different in the morning.” So everyone waits for the expected fallout as all the computers are due to crash. This is the very end of the 20th century, and of so much else.

The narrator realises his father is not in the house and goes outside to find him, noting that “the grass has gotten damp and chilled and almost icy from the night air, so it crunches under my feet”. His grandmother has scant faith in her son-in-law: “Nobody’s better off by themselves when they’re like he is.”

In Amsterdam’s novel, set in a recognisable US, although it could be anywhere, it is as if the narrator’s father is a prophet to whom no one wants to listen. On the way to the farm, he crashes into the car ahead of him and drives away leaving the woman driver bemused. It is an incident that reverberates throughout this original, daring, quasi-futuristic book about what could happen, what will happen and what, in fact, is happening, furtively, irreversibly.

Suddenly, checkpoints are a fact of life. All movement is monitored. The old order has broken down and a new one is being put in place. Amsterdam suggests a sense of menace. Outside in the dark the boy’s father says: “Listen, I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” The image of the father rocking his son and repeating how sorry he is becomes symbolic.

This is far less portentously written than Cormac McCarthy's sonorous father/son epic, The Road(2006). Amsterdam shifts the scene and creates the sense of a procession of offbeat and disturbing dreams. There is no safety left. Flash forward and the narrator is a few years older and is now caring for his grandparents. His grandmother is ill, while his grandfather has had his driver's licence revoked because of his age. The world seems to have become a wasteland, and theft is the only way to survive.

Time flashes by and the narrator is alone, entrusted with a bizarre task, that of evacuating anyone he meets. One such encounter pits him against a mother and daughter. The girl believes in keeping a record of everything that happens: “I write it all down, everything that’s gone on with the farms too. Families being scattered, friends making enemies just so as to stay alive . . . I’m keeping the pages safe till that time they become ready for the truth.”

The narrator describes her as a romantic, determined to record every indignity she experiences. But she is more than an ineffectual dreamer; she wants to be a witness. Meanwhile, her mother has a different agenda: she just wants to stay drunk, and is drinking her way through the wine cellar in the abandoned house where they are squatting when the narrator arrives to take shelter.

This is a world gone badly wrong – some great upheaval has occurred and the rain simply won’t stop. Amsterdam appears to be suggesting that in the end it will be climate change, not war, that will decide man’s fate.

Yet nothing is certain, or easy. The narrator becomes an Everyman figure caught up in a life of crime. He is a thief. His relationship with the elusive Margo settles into a torment of dependency – his, not hers. Throughout the novel, the rules of the game are continually altering; the narrator is caught in a freefall. The things that we didn’t see are in fact the things we know about, the fears, the losses, the inevitable.

Amsterdam has shaped a novel that becomes a fast-moving, nightmarish extravaganza. It is fantastic and gripping and utterly original – now you see it, now you don’t, or perhaps you missed it all? It doesn’t matter; read it again. The writing is cryptic and exact. We enter the narrator’s mind and see life heaving and pulsating as if it were a jellyfish floating through water.

Abstract and philosophical, this book is a journey towards acceptance of many things, including death, all considered through a series of set pieces. The narrative pulls you in and then darts off. It is a maze, an adventure, a lesson, a lament. Read it once and then read it twice, often.

“This is an era of violence. Border clashes, the flu, the weather and all the migrations they caused – none of it has fostered anything like camaraderie.” Rarely has the darkness of life been looked at with such buoyant irony, imaginative grace and disarming candour.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times and author of Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty,published by Liberties Press