William Nicholson: The Society of Others

Reviewed by SUSAN JACOBS

Use your power gently: this phrase precipitates our alienated, unnamed narrator out of his English middle-class home into a journey transporting banned books into the grim heart of an unknown eastern European country with a philosophy-spouting truck driver.

Events take a sinister turn. He hooks up with resistance fighters who plot to overturn a repressive state. Yet their methods are as brutal as those of the secret police, and our protagonist flees both, unsure of whom to trust.

He has a series of encounters reverberating around the writings of an exiled philosopher, Leon Vicino, events turn in on themselves and the narrator re-evaluates his society.

So far so Kafka. My expectations were high. Not only is William Nicholson author of the award-winning trilogy of children's novels The Wind on Fire, he also wrote the screenplay for the films Shadowlands and Gladiator.

Indeed, the book's stark, powerful prose and mix of menace and youthful angst initially made gripping, intelligent reading. But midway through, things became seriously unhinged.

It was not just that the plot was lost, characters seemed increasingly wooden and there were inexplicable, cloying lurches into English poetry. Worse, a dreary moralism of the "actions have consequences" type set in.

Our narrator throws himself into didactic speeches as enthusiastically as he earlier espoused existential ennui. He even starts to appreciate his mum, which I'm all for, but the point is laboured within a "West is best" context that wipes out the early edgy ambiguity.

The circular ending leaves many questions. Is it a dream? A morality play? A coming-of-age novel? A surreal political thriller? All of these? More irritated than curious, by this time I didn't care.

As for Kafka, if our cynical, self-pitying narrator had turned into a giant insect I, for one, would have cheered.

Susan Jacobs is the author of Fighting With the Enemy: New Zealand POWs and the Italian Resistance.

Random House, $39.95