Deep Country
(Book)

What is the plot of this novel? Some might ask this question, but then where are the plot lines of life? Ed Ford, an American expat living in Berlin, Germany, is busy with the quotidian chores of survival and the more colorful episodes of his ragged life. The narrative chronicles a chain of seemingly unrelated events, and an impatient reader may ask: Where is all this going? Fair enough, but an unseen logic governs Ford's progress. Driven through the Berliner underworld, both physical and psychic, he is consumed by, among other things, a WWII mystery involving his own grandfather, at the time a German submarine captain.Returning stateside finally, Ford finds no rest, driven onward by random events he cannot explain. Eventually caught up in a case of mistaken identity, he becomes a wanted man, a fugitive, yet his headlong flight leads him to the solution of the decades old mystery he'd failed to solve during his years in Germany. Looking back, he concludes that, sometimes, it's the serpentine roads which are most direct.