Self Help by Edward Docx

Self Help by Edward Docx
Buy Self Help by Edward Docx at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Literary Fiction
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: A tale of a family of twins and father, after mother dies, plus third offspring, that covers Europe from London to St Petersburg. I loved the assured, intelligent style and you should too.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 520	Date: May 2008
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 978-0330447614
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Let's meet Gabriel. He's on the phone to his mother Maria, who's in Saint Petersburg, and he'll put the handset down worried enough to instantly queue for a visa to fly and visit her. He'll find her dead.

This, of course, will result in no end of fallout - not least when he has to ring his twin sister, Isabella, in New York. She's not having a good day anyway, rowing with her partner. There's Nicholas, the father of Gabriel and Isabella, who is currently acting the life of a rich, pretentious idiot (or more charitably, tortured soul) in Paris with his toyboy.

And, elsewhere in Saint Petersburg, there is Arkady, a budding young pianist, struggling to fund his Conservatory studies, and living with the drug addict Brit who taught him English. He will find out halfway through giving a life-changing jazz concert that the woman who has recently contacted him, with apologies for leaving him in a Soviet orphanage, and who he rebuffed - yes, the one and same Maria - has passed away.

This sounds terribly domestic and soapy, but you'll have to trust me this reads as anything but. The introduction of these and several other people is perfectly balanced, just as everything else in this excellent tome. I won't mention which character is juggling two women, I won't go too far into the underworld Arkady's friend scrapes along in, I'll just say that everything seems finely judged and appropriate for an intelligent family saga, where Edward Docx uses a large expanse of geography to open out to greater themes, while also superbly entering the heads of its protagonists.

The Russian scenes smack of reality - from the glory of Kazan cathedral (oh to be a character and have to walk past that every day!) to the counterfeit CD stalls outside the tube stations. And London, suffering an early winter beneath November skies of pond-sodden bread certainly bears an artistic verity. I assume Paris comes across realistically as well, however it is mostly seen through the pretentious and dislikeable eyes of Nicholas. If his presence was greater (not in influence, but in physical presence on the page-count) this book might be unbalanced by such an unenjoyable personality, but we can see him through the eyes of Gabriel, especially, and that unbalance never happens.

Indeed my favourite scene in this book full of good set pieces - whether suspense, revelation or internal monologue - is a very good example of the father/son relationship breaking down. A young Gabriel spends a lot of one bitter, frost-bitten night belligerently staying immobile in the family car where Nicholas is happy to leave him - until Maria returns from her late shift sub-editing a newspaper. The mental side of the scene is brilliantly told, while his inactivity hammers a nail into his parent's marriage in a very compelling but silent way.

So now an admission - I'm never keen on writing reviews of books I really like, where I find it hard to sound convincing to myself as to how good it is, let alone any potential reader. What can I add? That this book is perfectly written, and (until the word selachian at least) never needs to show off its skills? The characters are all fully rounded - OK they're perhaps too middlebrow for some tastes (I did laugh when Gabriel is told he's ignorant of TV soap families, and instantly feels proud) - and the whole caboodle just smacks of veracity.

Not veracity I can imagine myself turning to for a rereading very soon, so a smidgen of a mark lost. (Also for a smirk I had when the characters were just compelled to follow in Docx's Bob Dylan infatuation.) But I found myself speeding through this book eagerly, and lapping up the controlled, clinical and assured writing, and the cold, unhappy but enjoyable world it portrays. Which makes it all the more puzzling that the proof-reader must have stopped about page 350.

The 2007 Booker longlist contains nothing else I've heard of, bar the slight Ian McEwan tome I've yet to read, so it would be silly to say this is my favourite for it - especially as I've flagged another volume up on this site as worthy of literary awards only for it to be ignored. (Purely by chance, I assure you, it's also about the repercussions left siblings and father by an elderly woman's death.) So I won't put the mockers on Self Help at all, but say I very much admired this second novel, and recommend it highly.

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