Eleven

Xavier Ireland, the quiet protagonist of British comedian Mark Watson's fourth book, would perhaps be better suited, metaphorically speaking, as a domino aficionado than a Scrabble tournament champion. The host of a late-night London radio show, the character grapples with long-repressed memories from a former life in Australia while becoming increasingly – and unknowingly – entangled in the lives of his listeners, neighbors, and friends through intersections not entirely expected. It's an intricate web of beautifully rendered characters (one overweight boy is gingerly described in terms of food, a "doughy" figure with his "blancmange of a body," and charming housekeeper Pippa has an accent that "rips the consonants off the ends of words, and sometimes kidnaps them from the middle"), and the pages are rich with abundant, though typically crisp, similes.

Unfortunately, the tale's debate with cause and effect suffocates much of the writing. It's enough that the chain reaction – eventually encompassing a barkeep; his lover; a journalist; a psychologist, her patient, and his co-worker; a cash-strapped boy; a restaurateur; a reviewer, her son, and the only witness to his bullying, Xavier – is drawn out explicitly at certain checkpoints as all-too-neat coincidences "domino mercilessly on." To hammer in the point, half a dozen characters spew hackneyed clichés of determinism over the course of the novel, and the sides of the debate are laid out plainly in an argument between Xavier and Pippa: He figures people "overestimate how much difference they can make"; she says "people underestimate it. You can change someone's life without even knowing it." (As Xavier regards a film, so too could the novel be described: "maybe a bit heavy-handed.") The predestination discourse, ham-fisted in its attempts to erect a false dichotomy and eschew the essential gray area, is mitigated in part by a moral vacillation by the novel's fence-sitting central voice, and a not-entirely-surprising twist in the final pages ultimately saves the book from itself.

Clunkiness aside, this is a thought-provoking effort – interspersed with welcome comic touches – that prompts readers to question their roles, their motivations, and their ideological stances, and in that spirit, it does not do the readers the disservice of a definitive end. "Life isn't so neat," indeed.