Alastair Bruce - Boy On The Wire

Rating: 3.5/5

Review: 
Well written but flawed

I thought Alastair Bruce's Wall Of Days was excellent and I was hoping for great things from this novel.  It's not bad, and has some excellent things about it, but overall I found it a bit of a disappointment, I'm afraid.

It's a difficult book to summarize.  It is narrated from various points of view at different times - sometimes in the third person, sometimes in the first – and concerns John Hyde who is now a successful London banker.   At the age of eight he witnessed the death of his older brother in a fall and has always held his other brother responsible.  The book concerns his shattered family and his relationship (or lack of relationship) with them, and how returning memories may bring trauma and possible healing.

It's a haunting book, almost nightmarish book at times, in which there is little plot to speak of.  Bruce is concerned with the nature of memory, of how memories both false and true can affect our lives and of how lives may be impacted by shattering events, even events of long ago.  Beginning quietly, he creates a strange, semi-hallucinatory world in which reality, memory and illusion become indistinguishable – and if you've read Wall Of days you will know what I mean.  He's brilliant at it, using short, direct sentences with few adverbs or adjectives and almost nothing in the way of simile or metaphor.  It's extremely effective, but this time I think Bruce overdoes it.  The book is only just over 200 pages long, but even so, the lengthy central section narrated by John in the first person feels too long.  The atmosphere of isolated, nightmarish haunting by lost memories, never being sure what is real and what is imagined is built slowly and devastatingly, but blimey – it does go on.  Even the climax felt a bit dragged out, not least because it seemed fairly clear from early in the book what was likely to be revealed.  (And don’t look for neatly tied-up endings, by the way.)

I rather felt that this was a less successful attempt to tread similar ground to Wall Of Days, and although I am glad to have read it and some bits will stay with me, I have only reluctantly rounded 3.5 stars up to four on the grounds that it's very well written and three stars seems churlish.  I can only recommend this with reservations.