Neil Cross: Holloway Falls

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Holloway Falls is a book about the myriad ways a human being can fall.

Andrew Taylor, a school-teacher living the dream of the middle classes, is a chronic insomniac. When he does manage to sleep, for a few hours, he dreams of terrible things, "lurched ... into wakefulness like a braking truck". He dreams of the death of a female celebrity.

"The dreams diminished him. He became hunched, red-eyed, timorous. He hears screams of pain in laughter. He saw age slinking behind youth: death behind age."

This is what being able to see the future might mean. This is what a mysterious disease, temporal lobe epilepsy, suggested by the last in a series of doctors, might mean.

But what, asks Taylor, if the dreams are real?

Then he dreams that a 15-year-old girl, who has gone missing and is believed dead, is alive. Taylor dreamed that he was on fire. Kelly, the girl, was alive when she was found. She died a long 21 hours later. She had been doused in petrol and set on fire.

Taylor leaves his life behind like a man who has survived a fire and sees a chance to disappear before the smoke clears.

Then there is Holloway, the hollow man, a cop who has destroyed his marriage. He pays a prostitute to pretend to be his ex-wife. The prostitute is found dead; the name of Holloway's ex-wife written on her body.

This is a nightmare.

There is a collision of circumstance. Holloway is investigating the disappearance of Andrew Taylor. He visits the family home. "He was a discarnate longing that lurked over that deserted and fatherless family."

Most of the characters in this book are discarnate. They wander the pages looking for meaning in loss. Nobody is who they once were. People change their names because they can no longer live with themselves. Or because nobody can any longer live with them.

The characters are strange; the places stranger. Cross is a British writer now living in New Zealand. Here we are in a very odd place called Rotorua which Holloway mishears as "Road to Ruin", a place where there "remained something of the frontier about it, as if Rotorua stood on the hinterland between worlds".

That's good travel writing. This is great thriller writing. It is haunted by genuinely disturbed, very real characters. Cross' great gift is to place them at a slight remove from reality: the place you might easily inhabit if life became a little more dreamlike and dreams a little more real.

You can see his characters. There's Lenny, a bit mad, very intense, utterly loyal who "looked like a once-boyish pop star who, through unusual circumstances, had spent ten years as a prisoner of the Viet Cong".

So, funny, and sharp and brilliantly observed.

And, without giving anything away, Holloway Falls has one of the best closing lines ever: "And then he was happy."

Scribner, $29.95