Rawi Hage’s Cockroach is the kind of alienated-outsider book they just don’t write anymore. Credit that to the range and dark humour Hage extracts from his unnamed immigrant narrator who hails from an unnamed Arabic country and whose suicide attempt opens up the Montreal-set novel. (Reviewers, by the way, hate unnamed narrators, no matter how good a story is, because dropping “the narrator” into every other sentence makes a review sound like a precocious Grade 11 book report… but I digress).

Driven by poverty and a criminal past into seeing himself as a cockroach, and sometimes lapsing into an arthropod fantasy life, the narrator bounces from the cold and smoke of downtown Montreal’s Middle-Eastern cafes, to apartments he breaks into for voyeuristic thrills, to the office of Genevieve, his court-mandated therapist. It’s through her that Hage relays his narrator’s history and while that may be a stagey technique it’s enlivened by his multitude of opinions regarding female masturbation. No static, depressive figure, the narrator moves the first part of Cockroach along at a manic clip, introducing us to characters ranging from the “lazy, pretentious, Algerian pseudo-French intellectual” Professor Youssef to the swishy Farhoud, the hardened beauty Shohreh, and the coked-out musician Reza. All, like the narrator himself, are escapees in one way or another from complicated hells more brutal than the Montreal winter.

The narrator may become more and more of a self-righteous lunatic (and a Henry Miller–like alpha jerk when telling tales of bedroom athleticism) as the book progresses, but he’s an entertaining one. When the narrator describes his alienation he cuts, and one rant against Montreal hippies absolutely sings: “I despised how these pale-faced vegans held their little spoons, humbling themselves. Who do they think they’re fooling, those bleached Brahmins? Filth, make-believers, comedians on a Greek stage! Those Buddhists will eventually float down, take off their colourful, exotic costumes, and wear their father’s three piece suits.”

Later on, his boss is also excoriated, but with an added dimension of self-loathing: “The elite of the Third World are the filth of the planet and I do not feel affinity with their jingling-jewelry wives, their arrogance, their large TV screens. Filth! They consider themselves royalty when all they are is the residue of colonial power. They walk like they are aristocrats, owners from the land of spice and honey, yet they are nothing but the descendants of porters, colonial servants, gardeners, and sell-out soldiers for invading empires.” While his narrator stumbles through existence, cleaning toilets, and going in and out of lucid and devastating observations, Hage subtly builds a thriller in the background that climaxes with a revenge killing, written Jim Thompson-cold.

With rants, delusions, and temporal shifts, Hage’s game this time around is an ambitious one. There are a few abrupt transitions and lost opportunities, but Hage offers far more in searing words and original turns.