Andrew Humphreys: The weight of the sun

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

For 120 pages, reading this book was like being engaged in conversation by a stranger in a bar, a boring, opinionated stranger with an inflated estimation of the worth of their wit.

James Bloomington is a junior editor at a small Sydney publishing house. He has a boss who would be played by John Cleese in the movie, except that Cleese is too tall. He shares a house with his landlady Mrs Sophia Salvestrin, supposedly an Italian widow, but known otherwise, and you suspect more accurately, as Miss Sophie Watkins. He is plagued by an overweight, over-boisterous acquaintance, Oliver McDonald-Stuart. He receives the amorous attention of Alison, whose second name he never bothers to find out. He has an obsessive-compulsive mother.

James is thoroughly objectionable and, as the prologue suggests, has always had a talent for rubbing others up the wrong way. He is uptight, self-absorbed and priggish.

The writing, the book's chief weakness, is overdone in patches and the tone seems trapped between mild, sardonic humour and out-and-out farce. You'd be forgiven for thinking, as I did for a third of it, that there's little to like about this book.

Just as it happens, though, from time to time, that a boring, opinionated stranger will say something interesting, or that you will begin despite yourself to find them funny, on page 121 The Weight of the Sun comes to life and you realise that the author is not going to go down conventional paths.

To describe The Weight of the Sun as offbeat is to imply that it exists in some definable relation to the beat. In fact, it sits all by itself, indifferent to whether you can make any conventional sense of it at all, but somehow - by its very indifference - provoking you to try.

Allen & Unwin

$24.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.