A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better

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I didn’t have a lot of empathy for the characters, but the expectation of an inevitable shock waiting to pounce had me transfixed. The first two thirds of this are a powerful depiction of the devastation caused when someone ‘flips their lid’. His debut, THE BELLWETHER REVIVALS (2012), was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and won one of France's foremost literary awards, Le Prix du Roman Fnac.

I really enjoyed Benjamin Wood's previous two novels, The Bellwether Revivals and The Ecliptic, but I think this is his best so far. Meanwhile, the horror is heightened by the fact that we see all this through a child’s eyes: as if in some terrifying pantomime, we want to scream at Daniel to do something, anything – and then remember that he is only a boy. Rambling and dragged out with excrutiating padding; in particular, the interminable excerpts from the dreary children's sci-fi story that the young protagonist is obsessed with - thank you for putting these in italics so I knew when to start skimming.At the time, Daniel lived alone with his mother in a small village, Fran having been kicked out due to his lying and cheating. A heartbreaking and heart-stopping new novel; a dark Northern noir that moves at breakneck speed but never fails to be tender and vulnerable as well as visceral and terrifying. Much of the novel is a road trip, with its climax set in the Lake District, highly appropriate backdrops. Daniel is heading in the right direction away from his past, but he knows that his father could be within him. For the characters a nightmare, for the reader an exciting thriller, now slow, then accelerating, then again fading into a dreary hopeless irreversibility.

W]ith his third novel, A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better, Wood’s talent has burgeoned spectacularly. That child almost succumbs to an asthma attack until he is lifted into the air by a strange and exotic being from another world. No one is going to survive this story, and for a while I was sure Dan would be one of those who would perish at his father’s hands.

In the latter stages of the novel, Daniel is an adult, obsessively trying to reconstruct those dramatic events from memory, witness statements, and video evidence. Kath is very reluctant to let them him go as, shall we say, Francis has a bit of a dodgy track record reliability wise but eventually gives in.

How he went on a road trip with his father, Francis, a journey that had a really rather shocking end and one that has haunted him into his present. When we meet Fran it is 1995 and he has come to fetch his son, Daniel, for a planned excursion to the television studio near Leeds where the boy’s favourite sci-fi series is filmed.A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better came out two years ago and I’ve had his name on my ‘must read’ list since reading the review. Elegant and disturbing … accomplished beautifully … highly suspenseful … a novel of expertly woven tension and frightening glimpses into the mind of the deranged other; a worthy successor to Wood’s excellent second novel, The Ecliptic . His parents marriage is obviously broken and as a 12 year old, he is trying to reach out for the love of his father.

That is a weighty moral issue, and had Wood spent longer in that place, narratively, it would have made more sense. The prose is powerful and masterfully paced, the characters are real, and the author manages to bridge the gap between writing a harrowing thriller and a subtle inward-diving tale. She’s sure Albert is from her planet, because normally people can’t see or hear her, and Albert can do both. W]e soon find out in this chilling and haunting portrayal about violence and love, some emotional scars cannot be undone. They can be amusing, resourceful when the need arises, but they are painfully susceptible to perceived insult and injury and, when the pressure is too great, they turn.If we take the metaphor at face value, though, it pushes us towards the interpretation that Francis is deceiving himself as much as he deceives his son and everyone who comes into his orbit. His ex-wife, Kath, all too aware of Fran’s fecklessness, is wary about this trip, but Daniel, a lonely child who needs more in life than she can provide, is obsessed with the series and persuades her to let him go. Tenderly dissecting the limits of love between parent and child while wriggling with a rich, thrilling tension, this palpably atmospheric story found its way beneath my skin and now lives there. Because the reader lacks Daniel’s need for love and acceptance from Francis (and is also an adult, not a child), we’ve come to this realisation earlier, but watching Daniel get there is nail-biting. Daniel tells us on the third page, “ I loved him, and it shames me that I loved him, though everything he claimed to feel for me was just an affectation or a gesture of persuasion.