THE FIFTH Dimension is a troubling, comfortless and problematic book for a universe full of reasons.

Against the backdrop of European austerity, Jakub’s career has collapsed. To provide for his family he has accepted a shadowy organisation’s challenge to live in total isolation on a remote Argentinian plateau. If he completes the task and accords with all the various requirements of the contract, including the regular monitoring of his bodily functions, he will receive $200,000. If he doesn’t, he gets nothing.

Martin Vopenka’s novel, translated by Hana Sklenkova, enters into Jakub’s mind and soul as he acclimatises not only to the high altitude but to his state of aloneness and his heightened psychic connection — or maybe paranoia — with his wife and family back in the Czech Republic.

This ability to witness another’s actions and thoughts is, it seems, the fifth dimension — the sphere of thought and spirit.

Echoing his tentative explorations around his purpose-built dwelling which contains a vital red button to abort the mission, Jakub takes to cogitating on the one book he has been allowed to bring with him, a large tome about black holes and the start and end of the universe.

As he makes discoveries about the fourth dimension of space-time, he expands the boundaries of his knowledge of his immediate location and his own condition. Just as the occasional eureka moments in understanding the book‚ Jakub’s propositions agitate him. The resultant eruption of human contact and its attendant violence startles.

The protagonist suffers the self-seeking desires of one of the agency’s workers sent to inspect the project. He sees his wife back home having an affair with the boss of the agency and, watching a group of four fellow Czechs hiking near to his bunker, observes the woman among them being sacrificed at a nearby Inca shrine.

Page by page, Jakub becomes more fearful and paranoid and it is to the writer’s credit that we largely shares in these emotions. But a sense of orientation and concentration are lost amid the chunks of unedited theoretical physics and Jakub’s musings on them.

Ultimately, the reader must decide whether to continue following Jakub’s mental and physical exhaustion or for their own wellbeing press the red button and exit the book early.

I’m afraid I had to take the latter option. The publishers’ blurb describes the book as a Czech classic. It may be very knowingly Czech but I doubt it will become a classic.

Review by Paul Simon