Too Far Afield Gunter Grass Faber & Faber, 672pp, £25 ISBN 0571190162

Born between the wars in Danzig, "the Belfast of the Baltic", Gunter Grass has seen Germany's borders redrawn three times, as the free city of his childhood became first German and then Polish. In his lifetime, the landscape of his pockmarked Heimat has constantly altered, and this compulsive book captures the disquiet of a bewildered people buffeted by history.

Too Far Afield scrutinises German reunification through the eyes of East Berliners, for whom that national reunion was more of a surrender than a triumph. His central character, Theo Wuttke, personifies the turmoil of Germany's horrible century. Born at the end of the First World War (and the end of the German empire), Wuttke serves in the Luftwaffe during the Third Reich, becoming a travelling literary lecturer under communism. But by his 17th birthday, celebrated at McDonald's, he is reduced to fetching files for his new employers, the Treuhand, a huge agency set up by the victorious West Germans to privatise the public assets of the East German state. These three phases of his life are heavy with historic symbolism, and in an inspired conceit, the new Treuhand now occupies Berlin's old Luftwaffe headquarters, where Wuttke once worked for a very different overlord, more than half a century before.

Wuttke's foil and constant shadow is Ludwig Hoftaller, a spy who applied the same amoral diligence to the Nazi and Warsaw Pact regimes. This Gestapo cum Stasi agent is a wonderfully ambiguous figure, part persecutor, part protector, not quite a friend, but never a simple foe. Hoftaller tags along on Wuttke's tireless treks through the battle-scarred cityscape of his reunited capital. In the quarrels and recollections they share en route, this journeyman snoop becomes his Boswell, and they seem more like kindred spirits than enemies.

Surveillance is all-pervasive, in a novel whose narrator is an anonymous Treuhand archivist; virtually every character is an informant, in one form or another. Here, the infidelity of ideals feels far more of a betrayal than mere adultery, yet these imperfect protagonists still rescue some dignity from the wreckage of their private and public lives. Too Far Afield is a deeply pessimistic book, but for all its deep sadness, it is far from being a hopeless one.

Wuttke is not only an archetype of the most turbulent period in his nation's history, he is also a reincarnation of the 19th-century journalist, historian and novelist Theodor Fontane, from whose novel Effi Briest (1895) this book takes its title. Even Wuttke's nickname, Fonty, is a diminutive of his hero's surname. Whether this reincarnation is literal or merely literary, it is for us to decide. In my view, it works both ways, but either interpretation gives Grass scope for comparison between a triumphant and triumphalist Prussia 100 years ago, and the quieter victory of the Federal Republic today.

In its range and in the unfettered confidence of its discursive style, this sprawling book often feels positively Victorian (or, should I say, Wilhelmian). Grass, unlike most British writers, is utterly unembarrassed by big ideas. Rather than confine himself to the modest, modernist minutiae of daily life, he triumphantly finds the political in the personal, and the epic in the mundane.

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