Tim Binding: Anthem

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

If you enjoy rich storytelling, skip this review and go straight to the book. The best way to read Tim Binding is with no preconceptions whatsoever. (So avoid the back cover's plot synopsis as well.)

Binding is an odd writer. This is his fourth novel, but from a reader's point of view it might just as well be his first. Nothing about his work is predictable, except his prose style, and for Binding prose is timber and nails, unexciting raw material for banging stories together. There are no pellucid images, no moments when the language catches fire in your mind. His style never calls attention to itself.

It doesn't have to. Binding wields his John Grisham prose to Dickensian effect. This is a hugely complex book, plotted to within an inch of its life, and in its pacing and use of powerful visual images, it has the feel of an epic movie.

Four households line a suburban cul-de-sac somewhere north of London. One couple lost a child under appalling circumstances — vividly depicted in the first of the book's many set-pieces — and all the others have their private pains and little dramas.

All so trivial, all so ordinary. But the year is 1982, and Margaret Thatcher is about to go to war in the Falklands. The lives of our four households will become part of the larger story of Britain's reinvention of itself as a jingoistic war power.

In setting his characters up as representatives of Falklands War Britain, Binding puts a lot of weight on them, and not all of them bear it well. The multiple cross-connections by which the individual plot-lines intertwine throw realism out the window: this is a book where everyone bumps into everyone else so continually, and in such odd ways, that the reader's choice is either to take pleasure in Binding's genius for contrivance, or to give up in disgust. My advice: take Binding as you find him.

The story has so much energy, so many moments of unexpected drama and, in the end, so much to say about its time and place. You'd be poorer for missing it.

* Picador, $37.95