The Society of Others by William Nicholson.

The biggest problem with this book is I don't know how it ended. I read it, but I didn't understand at all what was supposed to have happened at the end.

The other problem is that I somehow got the impression from the jacket blurb that the protagonist was psychotic. It never said he was psychotic, but for some reason I got that idea in my head. So I was reading through thinking "This author is very clever, making a psychotic seem so rational and sympathetic," until I finally realized that he isn't psychotic at all. So I probably should reread it without thinking the guy is psychotic.

So to the plot: a 22-ish-year-old British guy keeps being nagged by his family to do something grand and adventurous with his life, so he spontaneously decides to take a trip, which he does by hitchhiking on a truck, which takes him to some unnamed unknown Eastern European country.

Then things get Kafka-esque. This is some kind of totalitarian military state, and they're after him and he doesn't know why, and he's helping the resistance and he doesn't know why, and the plot mostly but not entirely makes sense until it reaches a grand, violent ending that I still don't understand while the protagonist reaches a heavy-handed, preachy revelation of what an ungrateful little brat he's been and all those other things elders tell youth when the youth aren't spending every single moment of their lives lavishly thanking the elders for giving them access to such obscene luxuries as indoor plumbing.

I'm rather disappointed, because this book could have been so much better. If we'd had an explanation of who and where and why and the revelation wasn't nearly so heavy-handed or something, then I would have enjoyed it. But as it is, it didn't work for me. It's possible that the whole book is intended to be a metaphor, but if so it's way over my head.