Anthony McCarten: Death of a superhero

Fade in ... Donald Delpe. Fourteen years old. A skinny kid, shoulders as meatless as coat-hangers. Queer-looking. No eyebrows, no hair. Face like a peeled potato."

Meet our hero, a bright teenager living in Wellington, with quite a lot going for him except ... Donald and an artillery of drugs are locked in a savage fight against cancer. Which sounds like a hopeless start to a narrative, but Donald is an engaging, credible character — and this is one of the funniest, saddest novels I have read for many months.

It is also written in a completely original format, which flows effortlessly. McCarten combines a straight novelistic format with a scripted text, and the action takes place in three acts. Like a play, when a character speaks, their name precedes the dialogue, which means McCarten can skip between the thoughts of each character with ease.

The scene-setting devices — example: "Int (interior). Oncology Ward/ Hospital. Day" makes the work highly visual.

There is an extra element. Because Donald is an imaginative teenager, and because he has to deal with cancer and potentially death, when the going gets tough he fades the people around him — family, doctors, nurses — into cartoon characters. Internally, Donald's alter ego is MiracleMan, a superhero who cannot die, and whose adventures are actually drawn by Donald as a mirror for the war within.

The cast also includes Donald's parents, Wellington yuppies Renata and Jim, whose marriage is under huge pressure because of Donald's illness. There is Adrian, the hospital psychiatrist, brought in to try to motivate Donald, who has given up fighting.

Adrian, a lonely middle-aged man, has his own marital catastrophe to sort out. Minor characters include a hooker and Shelly, the object of Donald's desire.

For Donald is, to his enormous regret, a virgin, and he reckons that to die in that state is not fair. So unfair in fact that Adrian perceives the task of helping Donald to correct the state of virginity as perhaps the only thing that can save him.

McCarten's observations of the process and treatment of people dying of cancer is unflinching, yet it has a particular tenderness and beauty. The ward, Donald notes, has a certain hierarchy. The closer your bed gets to the window, the closer you are to death.

So, when McCarten shows an empty bed near the window, it has worked. The arc of the hero's battle has curved, and the curtain falls. Also falling, for me, was a mist of moisture. There is nothing more to say than please try to get hold of copy of Death of a Superhero as fast as you can.

* Linda Herrick is the Herald arts and books editor.

* Vintage, $27.95