All Coe's characters except the psychiatrist are distressingly sane in their inability to

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All Coe's characters, except the psychiatrist, are distressingly sane in their inability to achieve their desires. But behind this meticulously structured book lurks the potential of a darker, bolder and less tidy narrative. Perhaps Coe or someone else will give us this vision some day: the modern English soul according to Blake, rather than Blair. But, as I have become acutely aware, attempting any kind of verbal complexity is a literary sin south of the Borders..

This is a dazzling extension of Pauline Melville's territory. Her first book, Shapeshifter - a collection of stories which mine the strata of intercultural deposits linking Guyana and London - touched profundity through wit and precision. This first novel shows her confidently tunnelling under the ramparts of institutions and myths, to run out chuckling just before the charge goes off. Here, the empire writes back to Evelyn Waugh, to the anthropology of Levi-Strauss, to church, state and sexual mores, using a Guyanese, Amerindian culture to question western assumptions. Melville plays with conventions with all the grace and control of a cat with a bird.

At the start the parents of a small boy, Bla-Bla, discuss his future. Living on the savannah of up-country Guyana, following a mainly traditional way of life, they are present-day members of a family visited by Evelyn Waugh: the McKinnons, of Scottish and Wapisiana descent. Waugh's memoir of his journey to the South American interior mentions a Teddy Melville as his host; Pauline Melville's book thanks Chofoye Melville for lending his name to the novel's Chofoye McKinnon, Bla-Bla's father. This is a book about living tradition as a kind of echo-chamber, in which the intricacies of history reverberate. It reels time like an angler The story's narrator is a mythic figure. To people the world, like the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, he calls up the bones of the dead, who arrive "chattering". He sounded bitter and a little touchy, true, but he also sounded perfectly reasonable, chuckling at the notion that his downfall had been engineered by a conspiracy of vested interests (oil, automobile, electricity). Unfortunately, nobody else could reproduce their experimental results, and Fleischmann and Pons were swiftly discredited, denounced as incompetents or frauds.Fleischmann stuck to his guns, maintaining that the reasons nobody had confirmed his results were faulty equipment and flawed analysis of data.