The News Where You Are

Author: Catherine O'Flynn
Publisher: Viking/Penguin
Price: $32.95 (paperback)

I never read Catherine O'Flynn's Costa-First-Novel-Award-winning and much-prize-nominated debut, What Was Lost, but I do remember that much was made at the time that this was great breakthrough for a woman who had once been a postwoman (although it was her work in a series of shopping centres that clearly influenced the subject of that novel). Her previous jobs are detailed once again in her author biog and amongst them is a brief stint in journalism which may have influenced this second novel.

We follow Frank Allcroft, a presenter on Heart Of England Reports, the local television news programme for the Midlands. Frank is something of a local legend, not because of any kind of journalistic scoop but because of the terrible jokes and puns he uses as links between items. These are something he has inherited from his predecessor, Phil Smethway, who died 6 months ago in a hit-and-run accident. The jokes are actually the work of a gag-writer, Cyril, who Frank has inherited, but where Phil was smooth and charming, Frank is clumsy and awkward, and whilst that might seem to be a problem it has actually helped to pull in more and more viewers - 'developing a cult status amongst students in the city... Eventually a website was dedicated to him - www.unfunniestmanongodsearth.com'

But Heart Of England Reports is a long way from the journalistic frontline. So many years of reporting the kind of fare that serves only as background noise have lead to the kind of generic news coverage with which we are all familiar.

The faces changed but the stories were the same. Another sick child hoping to get an operation abroad, another old couple swindled out of their life savings, another bare paddock of neglected horses. Sometimes he almost anticipated them. Like counting cards and knowing when to expect the next king. The different incidences became compacted in his mind to form generic news staples and the faces merged to form the composite face of a local news victim.

He hasn't, he hopes, become desensitized. In fact the opposite may even be true. Frank has become interested in the stories of those that die alone, seeming to leave no trace at the end. He becomes the lone mourner or flower bearer, determined to remember those that seem to have been forgotten or left behind by their friends and family, the kind of bodies that are only discovered after a neighbour reports a funny smell to the police and the front door is broken down -'It was always the gaps that drew Frank's attention. They seemed to matter more than the other pieces.' When a local man is found dead on a park bench Frank decides to dig a little deeper and finds that their may be a link between this man, Michael, and the previous incumbent in the Heart Of England Reports chair, Phil.

Frank also has his own family to think about. His grumpy mother is interred in an old-people's home, all doom and gloom when she's with him but concealing a hidden sparkle for some of the other residents, and O'Flynn has lots of fun with their exchanges His sparky daughter Mo is a constant source of youthful enquiry into the way the world works and there is a real charm to her conversations with her father. Frank wants her in particular to see some of the buildings in Birmingham designed by her grandfather. Frank's late father was an architect working at a time of concrete municipal buildings and tower blocks, the kind so out of favour with modern developers and in danger of destruction. Frank's need to protect his father's legacy taps into one of the book's major themes. Just as he feels the need to save this final building from demolition, he is desperate to find out what legacy, or trace may have been left behind by the man on the park bench. Whilst he lives everyday with Phil's comical legacy he also talks to his (much younger) widow about the lasting effects of his sudden death. For Frank personally this will mean a journey to confront his own father's passing and why it is that he doesn't see himself as perhaps the most important legacy his father left behind.

Fiction writers in the UK have been accused in the past of thinking small, of writing novels that feel far too domestic in comparison to the pursuit of the Great American Novel over the water and the grand generational epics elsewhere. Whatever one feels about that argument there's something of that here. Despite the big ideas, there is something about this book which makes it all feel a bit light. The comedy is there, but light; the bigger themes are there, but lightly sketched; the character development is there, but kind of obvious.

The biggest problem for me was one of credulity with the machinations of the plot. The vain figure of Phil is (perhaps understandably) the biggest absence in the book and I found the depths of his unhappiness hard to believe in with the denouement of the plot even harder to swallow. It all feels a bit sensational, something you'd be far more likely to come across in a soap rather than the local news, and it detracts in the end from the nicely realised character comedy that O'Flynn has created throughout the book.

To read more of William Rycroft's book reviews, check out his blog at Just William's Luck.