Neil Cross: Always the sun

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Neil Cross' last novel, Holloway Falls, was a thriller, a harrowing and lucid sort of thriller, which also managed to be funny and cannily observed.

His new novel is about a father and son who have lost their wife and mother to a degenerative brain disorder, "fatal familial insomnia".

You could waste a lot of good sleeping time trying to work out what sort of book this is. You know you're in trouble when the press blurb announces that this one is "Nick Hornby with razor blades".

So, is it a heart-warming thriller about a father and son? That would be a strange mix, and it is.

It goes like this: mother dies, father Sam and son Jamie have to learn to make a life together. Sam sells up the old home, and they move to his home town.

All goes well, Sam learns some passable domestic skills, Jamie goes to new school, makes a friend. The new house takes on the familiar scents and schemes of two boys baching. This is both a sad reminder of their former family life, and a comfort.

Then Jamie begins to be bullied at school. The school, because the bully has special needs, won't do anything to help. So Sam takes on the bully and his family. Sam gets punched out by the bully's father in the pub. This makes his already withdrawn son regard his father with even more contempt.

Then Jamie gets attacked by the bully family's pit bull and Sam kills it, in a ghastly, graphically described act of rage.

And then it all gets really silly - a father's revenge for his son, run amok. Run amok is about right, certainly in terms of the plot.

We never really find out what the bullying consisted of. We never find out - nothing in the characterisation tells us - how Sam ended by becoming the ultimate bully.

Except: "By training, Sam was a psychiatric nurse. Sometimes he saw the symptoms of disorder wherever he looked."

Is that a warning that he is seriously unhinged? He becomes so, but not believably so.

And so the series of shocks - resulting in one last, terrible shock which is meant to dismay but does so only because it is so utterly manipulative - are also unbelievable.

The real shock is that Cross, who had written such a good book, has now written such an uneven one.

* Scribner, $29.99