Mil Millington: Love and Other Near-Death Experiences

Millington's novel has the cleverest of opening chapters: "Hello. My name is Robert, and I haven't been dead for sixty-three days now." That's it.

Rob(ert) is your Nick-Hornby-type anti-hero: city-wise and emotionally ignorant; wary of commitment; media-savvy (he hosts a midnight-3am radio jazz show); a bit rootless, a bit wistful, a bit half-grown.

He shouldn't be alive. He was due to interview a rotten local muso in a pub, but arrived late — just after an out-of-control milk tanker smashed into the building and killed all occupants.

The shock has left Rob chronically unable to make up his mind. Deciding whether to have silver-embossed or gold-embossed wedding invitations is a major trauma. He stands in the bathroom for an hour and a quarter, trying to choose between bath and shower.

The love of a good woman could save him, and she is on hand in the form of bouncy, bossy Jo. (Jo calls him "babe", which should be a warning.) Millington tells it via pages and pages of hectic TV sitcom dialogue. He does it very wittily. He does it very often. If only he could learn to leave things out as well as he crams them in.

Anyway, Rob finally does make his mind up about one thing. He suddenly tells his "jazz trainspotter" radio listeners what happened to him. A surge of response begins, from others who should also be dead.

There's Linda, whose late husband took part of her bladder with him. Zach the ex-soldier, who spent hours in Bosnia standing on an unexploded mine, and who heard his mates die. Elizabeth, in whose apartment Rob nearly burns to death. Yes, they are moments that jolt you. They lead Rob on an awkward but accelerating return to the human race.

On the way, there is much pyrotechnic profanity, some smart narrative sidesteps, some entertaining relationship rearrangements, some bruisingly banal philosophising.

Every character is a bottomless bag of one-liners. Even the one who tried to top herself with pills cracks funnies after she's been pumped out. Every character analyses his/her angst at length, and it palls (though I did appreciate the existential conundrum: "Should Captain Cook have kept quiet about finding Australia because we've ended up with Russell Crowe?").

It is amusing and intermittently affecting. It's a case for less matter and less art. There's a really excellent 250-page novel here. Trouble is, Millington has written 350 pages.

Weidenfield and Nicolson/Allen and Unwin $35

* David Hill is a Taranaki reviewer.