I Am No One by Patrick Flanery, book review: Ever had the feeling you're being watched?

Flanery warns of the dangers of mass surveillance, and the frailty of individual identity

When O'Keefe's marriage broke down he sought to remove himself from the pain of separation by taking up a lecturing post at Oxford (Rex Features)

To be is to be observed. From the moment we are born we are watched – by attentive parents, teachers and peers. As the narrator of Patrick Flanery's new novel remarks: "One might go so far as to say that the human condition is one of observation. To be unobserved is to be neglected, certainly as far as children are concerned. The unobserved child becomes the abandoned child, the wild child."

Problems arise when that watchful scrutiny extends beyond childhood and educational development into the privacy of adult life. Now that so much of our lives are lived online, enormous powers of surveillance are available to those with the means to collect it. In the post Edward Snowden world of omnivorous data gathering, what does that mean for individuals going about their lives – ordinary people, far removed from politics and the levers of power?

Well, Flanery's narrator, Jeremy O'Keefe, isn't quite the "no one" he claims to be. He is an urbane and slightly dull professor of history, specialising in the story of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, while his daughter is a successful New York gallery owner married to a powerful media figure.

Nevertheless, O'Keefe, though well connected, is a person who mostly keeps himself to himself. When his marriage broke down he sought to remove himself from the pain of separation by taking up a lecturing post at Oxford. As the novel opens he is back in New York after ten years in the UK, readjusting to his old life and finding comfort in the familiarity of it rites and traditions. But it is an oddly brooding Manhattan he returns to, the novel's action mostly taking place in the cold spell between Thanksgiving and New Year, when daylight is scant and the temperature nears freezing. O'Keefe cuts a solitary figure, gazing out of windows and dining alone.

He returned to America because he could never feel fully at home in the UK (Britain doesn't assimilate its immigrants, he remarks several times), but does he really fit in back in his home city? At times the narrative evokes the existential gumshoeing of Paul Auster's City of Glass trilogy, though the sense of paranoia that fills the streets in Flanery's novel has a far more grounded point of origin.

At first he thinks he might be having memory problems, because he has no recollection of an email exchange in which a student cancelled a tutorial. This is enough to send him to a doctor, who finds nothing wrong with his brain. This is followed by the arrival of a series of anonymous parcels, containing printouts of all his online activity for the past ten years. Combined with the sinister figure he sees watching his apartment from the street, O'Keefe begins to feel that his life has come under the kind of scrutiny he is familiar with as a historian of the Stasi.

It baffles him why anyone should be so interested in his private online activity, but as he begins to dwell on his recent experiences in England, he wonders if he has unwittingly strayed into those areas that would make him of interest to the world's data gatherers.

Flanery is an American writer domiciled in London (and who also spent time in Oxford) and is the author of two other thoughtful, meticulously written and slow burning thrillers, most recently Fallen Land, a novel steeped in the soil and history of the American Midwest.

The present novel politicises what in Fallen Land was a more nebulous and personal sense of paranoia, producing a story that is a warning of the dangers of mass surveillance, but also a meditation on the frailty of individual identity when it is shaken by personal and social breakdown, and by the dislocation of expatriate life.

Gerard Woodward's new short story collection 'Legoland', is published by Picador

Atlantic, £14.99. Order at £10.99 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop