Most are fictional: a young computer nerd who makes viruses and is traced through sophisticated techniques because of the secret he carries, his kidnapped girlfriend, a pianist, an Israeli scientist who has to abandon his family at a critical moment and assume a new identity. Their lives intermittently overlap in a world that seems overrun by electronic detection and espionage, computer crime, international political conspiracies and terrorism, war crimes, liquidations, and cover-ups. The action takes place mainly in Europe and the United States, Israel and Palestine.

One recurring motif is how impossible it is to compile a total picture from a glut of fragments and details, of making a clear and comprehensible survey of our current overstrung world. ‘As always, there are more invisible things than visible, and the invisible things are the fundamental ones,’ says one character. The author also uses secret codes and symbols.

For example, the page numbers run from 666 (the number of the Beast) to zero, the ‘black hole’ into which everything disappears. The typography is also assigned a separate function. The initial ‘V’ of ‘virus’, for example, also refers to the hope for a new future for the totally contaminated world of today.

Peter Verhelst has produced a tour de force. With its unusual structure and strong cinematic composition, Zwerm is overwhelming. Its concepts are strong and exciting, and its style powerful and enthusiastic. Its puzzling, fragmentary plot lacking any conclusion, a striking example of present-day modernist prose, without precedent. This is a book that will find its own public.